Someone else's complications...

My husband Fred just ran into a very old, dear friend of his...I'll call him "Joe." Joe is an extremely talented musician who sings and plays banjo and used to hang out at the club that my husband managed for eleven years. Fred and Joe had lost touch over the last few years, but ran into each other last weekend at the club's closing party. Joe moved from Philadelphia to St. Louis not too long ago, but came back to say good-bye to his old friends at the club.

Joe has Type 1 diabetes. When my husband and I first started dating, I had just started pump therapy. I remember how much Fred wanted to share what I was doing with his friend Joe. He talked about Joe's various health problems--besides diabetes--and thought the pump could be a great thing for him.

When I asked Fred, maybe a few months after we'd started dating, if he had talked to Joe about the pump, he told me that he had...but that Joe was not interested. He had his routine down with taking shots. That was that.

Over the next few years, whenever Fred and Joe talked, Joe was going through some kind of health crisis, not neccessarily diabetes related. I would ask Fred if Joe might want to talk about pump therapy or even borrow a copy of my book, but Joe never showed any interest.

When Fred saw Joe last weekend, he was sad to find out that Joe is losing the eyesight in one of his eyes to complications of diabetes. When he came home to tell me that, I wasn't shocked. In fact the first words out of my mouth were, "I'm not surprised."

I had trouble falling asleep after hearing my reaction to that news. I thought that I sounded like a heartless bitch. Shouldn't someone with diabetes be more sympathetic to someone going through something like that? But what Joe is experiencing, I realize, is a fear that lives just under the surface of my psyche. I do everything I can to keep that fear in place: testing frequently, learning about the latest technology in diabetes care, going to my endo frequently, keeping my A1Cs in the under 7 range. Hearing about someone else who wasn't able to keep diabetes complications at bay unnerves me...because it is just too close to my deepest vulnerability.

I am sorry for Joe and for what he is going through. And I have learned a lot but looking at my reaction and facing what it means to me.