For Betsy, she had to start insulin injections and make lifestyle changes to keep her blood glucose (blood sugar) levels in a good range and avoid dangerous lows and highs. It was a big learning curve, she says.
“I remember thinking, ‘Okay, I have diabetes. I can still do what I do.’ I don’t think it really hit me until a month later because I was in denial about it for so long, just going through the motions of testing my sugar levels, manual injection, blah blah blah. But I didn’t realize how much of an emotional toll I was avoiding.”
She was watching a comedy movie with her boyfriend when she burst into tears.
“All of a sudden I realized, oh my God, having diabetes is so hard. And at that time there weren’t as many resources as there are now,” she says of the isolation she felt. There was no Instagram or online community she could turn to for support and advice, and she didn’t want to keep asking her care team.
Instead, she decided to hide her illness from others as a way to cope and not have to answer questions. She tried to make sense of her daily life with a chronic illness, realizing that she needed to change in some ways, such as dealing with the fact that everything she eats affects her sugar levels. “It’s a puzzle every day,” she says of the pressure. Dealing with mental unrest led to acceptance and renewed self-confidence.
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