Today’s guest post is from Sarah Jane who lives in southern Missouri with her parents and two younger brothers, two dogs, and one cat. She is currently studying dietetics at Missouri State University. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1998 at 11 years old.
Blog address: http://sajabla.wordpress.com
Serendipitous
Sarahndipity. That’s the name of the site where I blog. It’s a play on my name and the word serendipity. Sometimes when I tell people about my blog, they ask me what the title has to do with being a type 1 diabetic. I guess at first glance, it doesn’t seem to make sense.
This is the definition of the word serendipity:
n. The faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.
I certainly didn’t seek diabetes. If I had to pick a disease to live with for the rest of my life, diabetes wouldn’t be on the top of my list simply because of the time and the energy it takes up. But diabetes has brought me some valuable and agreeable things.
Somehow diabetes manages to put life into perspective. You hear of people just going through the motions of life, never really being happy until they are diagnosed with some horrible cancer or disease and then they begin living life to the fullest. At some point in your life you discover that life is finite, that it will someday end. I discovered that at 11 years old when my doctor told me that I could die from kidney failure if I didn’t take care of myself.
Not that I encourage fear as an effective way to get a person with diabetes to manage their blood sugars. It didn’t work too well for me because it took me ten years to really understand what it takes to manage diabetes. I probably didn’t understand that this disease could kill me until I was in college. But now I know that life does in fact end, and while I can’t place a number on when this disease or some other disease or an accident or simple old age will take me, I know that I have to life for today because at some point it will all end. It makes my life feel more meaningful. I watch sunsets and take pictures of flowers and try to spend quality time with the people I love.
So if you’re reading this and you have diabetes, you probably know what I’m talking about and I hope you do the same. If you are reading this and you are lucky enough to be perfectly healthy, I would encourage you to embrace your life and find what makes you happy. It may be as simple as smelling roses, but, although it sounds cliché, let me tell you, it’s worth it.