The good thing about Type 1 is that only about 5% of diabetes cases are Type 1. The bad thing is that almost all of that 5% are diagnosed as children. In fact you might be more familiar with it as what it used to be called. Juvenile Diabetes. Personally, I'm grateful that they changed the name.
Both of my grandfathers had Type 2 Diabetes, but all I knew growing up is that they had Diabetes. I didn't even find out about Papa, my dad's dad, for a long time because he didn't seem Diabetic. I saw some pills he had to take and that's when I learned of his diagnosis. But for the most part, he controlled his Diabetes with diet. Not that eating right kept him from cutting a watermelon open in the field, cut fresh from the vine, and splitting it with his grandson. I'm sure that I am not the only of his around thirty grandchildren that the man ate watermelon with. Eating watermelon with your grandchildren is part of a healthy diet.
Pappa, on the other hand, was a totally different story. My mother's father is why I grew up knowing about diabetes. Two shots a day, almost every day. My Mamma would come in and look at this strip of paper that had color squares on it showing his sugar levels, fix a syringe full of insulin and stick Pappa in the arm. He always made funny faces. I guess that's one difference between me and him. I'd have much preferred to be the one sticking myself than have my wife or someone else do it. But that's another issue.
My Pappa was the most amazing, wonderful, caring and kind man. He was my hero, and I wanted to be just like him. He is the reason that when the Gulf War erupted in the summer of 1990, I immediately started talking to a recruiter. Seriously. The news broke into my TV show, and I talked to a recruiter before I talked to my wife about it, and we'd barely been married a year. Just one example out of thousands of my behavior that doomed that marriage from before it began. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, I had crushed the underside of my knee about four years before and couldn't pass the physical. No Army for me. My brother has served enough for both of us though, and he honors our Pappa's memory better than I ever could have. It's funny. We both basically did the same thing, talked to a recruiter when it seemed the country needed men. With me, it was the Gulf War, although it turned out the war was over before I would have made it to basic training. With my brother, it was 9-11. Pappa, on the other hand, was drafted and never volunteered his service in World War 2. An ironic aside. I need to quit chasing this rabbit and get back on track.
Pappa died young, relatively young that is. I didn't really think so at the time. He was an old man all my life. I'm sure my grandson, Baiden, will think I'm an ancient old man as he grows up. I get to be like Pappa, a youngish old man. Pappa could have lived longer, but he didn't want to. I don't mean that he wanted to die. He just wanted to live life on his terms. He was all those wonderful things I said earlier, but he was also very selfish in some ways. He wanted to live while he was alive, a philosophy I soaked up while missing the truth of how to do that. We both, Pappa and I, kind of equated enjoyment and pleasure with living. Doing what we liked, what felt good, and, in his case, eating what tasted good. Pappa loved his Coca-Cola. He ate like people who worry about their weight don't. He did not eat well or smart for a diabetic at all. He would have that piece of cake, that extra cookie and that Coke and simply take more insulin before bed. I loved him and still miss him. I wish Leah could have known him. He was my hero. He killed himself living for himself. He said he'd rather live to 60 eating what he enjoyed than live to 90 hating his food. We buried him a lot closer to 60 than 90. He did care for me and the rest of the family. He loved us very much. But his pleasure ruled his choices.
But neither of my grandfathers had Type 1 Diabetes. My first exposure to that was in little league. One of my friends on the team had Diabetes. I didn't know. One day during a game, he slid into third base and didn't get up. It was fast. He was running all out and then he was out. He seemed asleep. Or dead. It was scary. His mom ran down from the stands and onto the field and stuck him in the arm with a needle. A few minutes later he opened his eyes and sat out the rest of the game in the dugout. We lost.
Mom told me that my friend had Juvenile Diabetes. I'd never seen Pappa pass out like that, but then again, I'd never seen Pappa run either. I didn't realize it was a totally different disease. I knew juvenile meant child. I thought Juvenile Diabetes just meant a child with diabetes. So I'm glad that Type 1 is the term of the day. It makes it easier to understand that it's different than Type 2, although most people still don't know the differences between the two types.
Decades went by before I had more direct experience with Type 1. My niece nearly died as a child when her pancreas shut down. She's had more than one close call because Type 1 can be very hard to treat. She's a teenager now, and a lovely young lady, and she still wages war with her body and her food, because her pancreas has not magically or miraculously started working. Just recently my teen aged nephew, my other brother's oldest step son, passed out and couldn't be woken up for hours and hours after being rushed to a children's hospital. His pancreas had decided to quit working as well.
My brother and his wife and my poor niece have gone through so much dealing with this disease that has been trying to steal her life for a decade, give or take. And people who know a little something, or, more likely, think they know a little something about Type 2 constantly tried to tell my sister-in-law what she needed to do and how to make it better. Or they judged her, as though she'd been feeding her toddler nothing but sugar water until the poor girl's pancreas shut down in protest. My brother missed the brunt of this because he spent a lot of time in other countries during the adjustment period, but he has still had watch her unresponsive as people prayed her high blood sugar levels would come down without going down too far, to give many a shot, and prick his beautiful daughter's finger to test her sugar while she, tired of the pain and the needles and not understanding why her parents who professed to love her kept torturing her and wouldn't just let her be. I can't imagine the hell of having to hurt your child every day to keep her alive, especially when she was too young at first to really grasp and understand.
All of this is on my mind this morning because, like I mentioned in yesterday's UM, Healthy Heart Conscious, Diabetes is one of the many Awareness issues for November. What little I know and understand of my niece's, and also of course my brother and his wife's, experiences, and now my other brother's family, made me think of a couple of things.
The first is the man blind from birth that Jesus healed. Sometimes a pancreas doesn't work. Sometimes it's eye balls. What hell they poor kid must have had growing up. I say that not only because of the difficulty of growing up without ever being able to see, but rather because even as an adult people were still all up in his business trying to figure out who screwed up, who sinned. Was it his fault? His mom's? His dad's? Jesus essentially told them to stop being stupid, that it happened because of the curse and so that God's glory could be displayed.
Type 1 Diabetes is not caused by eating too much sugar. It's not caused by poor diet at all. The pancreas is a time bomb at birth, probably before, and when timer reaches zero, the stupid organ shuts down. It's not the kid's fault in any way, shape or form. Nor is it the parent's. It is caused by sin, like all sickness, but it was Adam's sin, not anyone else's. It doesn't in the slightest reflect poorly on the parenting. In fact, it takes very special and excellent parenting to get a child from toddlerish age to teen and self sufficiency (mostly) with Type 1 Diabetes.
My niece didn't cause or ask for this disease. But she'll have to deal with it for the rest of her, long, I pray, life. The same is true of my nephew. And none of the parents involved caused nor could have done anything to prevent what their children have experienced with their pancreases exploding. Blame it on Adam and the curse.
And thinking of Type 1 Diabetes, sin and Adam also made me wonder if Adam and Eve were created with a spiritual pancreas. That may sound silly, but it seems to me as though Scripture at least implies that they had a chance to do it right, to live in paradise in perfect relationship with their Creator without sinning. They blew the chance, but there was a chance.
We on the other hand, never had a chance. We were born in sin, slaves to sin. No one since Adam, except Jesus, ever was able to breath any serious length of time without the disease of sin effecting their life. So, I wonder if, metaphorically, Adam and Eve had a spiritual pancreas that enabled them to process the desire to sin without succumbing. But finally one day Adam sinned and their spiritual pancreases both exploded.
Since then, we've all been born without a working spiritual pancreas. We have Type 1 Spiritual Diabetes, which keeps us from being able to process and overcome the tendency to sin. I'm not making light of either issue here. I'm serious. We are born without the ability to not sin. It's not our fault. It's not our parents' fault, and there's nothing we can do on our own to change that. We can't control the disease of sin with discipline or diet or any other ritual or effort. It's not Type 2. It's Type 1. Whatever it is that would enable a person to process and resist the impulse, desire and tendency to sin, we don't have it. We were born without that spiritual organ working.
So, we need something. We need help. We need an injection of the Holy Spirit into our very life to give is the ability to do what we were born unable to do. We do have to watch what we take into our life and expose ourselves to. We do have to keep a constant awareness of our spiritual blood sugar, how much Spirit is working in our system verses how much self. When self levels start to go up, we need to add Spirit and correct the issue before sin starts to take over and do damage to our life. With the addition of Holy Spirit, we can live amazing lives worth living. Without it, we have no hope. There is only misery, pain and death, because we can not prevent or treat the disease of sin on our own.
Sin is pleasurable, for a while, because, like sugar, it is sweet, tastes good, invigorates and is addictive. But we can't have it in our lives. Even if we eliminate it from our diet completely, our own body will produce it because we have no spiritual pancreas. And we will slip into sleep and death. But we can be woken up; we can stay awake and alive. All that is required is to understand that we can't control our sin and can't manage our life.
You don't like the word sin? Fine. Character defects. Selfishness. Spiritual sugar. Call it whatever you want, just realize you can't stop or treat or control it. God can and wants to. He will if you will let Him, but it takes surrendering to Him. He can give us a life worth living, His Spirit in our lives is spiritual insulin giving us the ability to process the desire to sin without sinning.
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