#DBlogWeek ’13 – Day 5 – Living on a prayer

We’re in the home-stretch of Diabetes Blog Week! Karen saved the hardest for last (it seemed much easier last year), so I’m probably going to struggle a bit with my posts for the next three days. Today I get to trade my diabetes for a different chronic disease — but which one? It’s not as easy a choice as it may seem.

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I’ve been thinking about this one for days, and honestly, I’m stumped. I had a few passing ideas, though…

1. Bad Medicine. Jon Bon Jovi sang about it — “You’re love is like bad medicine … there ain’t no doctor that can cure my disease.” It sounded pretty good — Jon seemed happy. If I understand the words correctly, the girl is the treatment and his lust for the girl is the “disease”, but it took a lot of lyrical analysis to reach that conclusion (and I’m not sure I’ve got it right). But I’m happily married, and there are so many ways that this could be mis-interpreted. So I think I’ll pass on that unnamed disease.
2. Hashimoto’s. I don’t know what it is, but I know it has something to do with the thyroid. I remember after being terrified of adding yet another ailment to my Medic-Alert bracelet, my pediatric endo tried to console me with “If I had to choose to have any disease in the world, it would be Hashimoto’s. Generally you don’t have to do anything, but if you do, you just take one tiny pill a day and that’s it”. It sounds like a pretty good deal to me, but since I’ve apparently already got it, I suppose I can’t quite trade for it.
3. Diaphragm Spasms. I took to Google and looked up “harmless diseases”… and the first answer that popped up was hiccups. Hiccups! At first I thought I’d found a winner — but then I tried to imagine life with hiccups every minute of every hour of every day, and it wasn’t pretty. I’d get no sleep, people would constantly laugh at me, and I’d constantly be drinking water (though I can already relate to the last one). It might even be worse than diabetes. Plus, I’m not so sure it fits the criteria of “incurable”.

This prompt sure is intimidating. It’s like going on to Priceline, telling them what you’re willing to pay, but leaving it up to the Internet gods to figure out what you get. Or maybe it’s like dumping your rack of seven Scrabble tiles back into the bag, hoping to get something better (but possibly getting something worse, or maybe the same).

Seriously — trading chronic diseases? It just doesn’t seem right. Do I really want to inflict my diabetes on someone else? I probably know how to deal with this better than the pour soul who knows nothing about the balancing acts, the IOB curves, or the carbohydrate SWAGs; but ends up drawing my D-tile from the Scrabble pouch (for two whole points!).

And besides, since the mechanics of this whole idea is a trade, the worldwide count of PWDs will still remain at 347 million. So who am I helping here? Me and only me. My gain is someone else’s loss. It sounds a bit selfish, doesn’t it.

So I think, for the sake of humankind overall, there’s no point in trading diseases. I’ll stick with what I know. I’ll keep it. To conjure up another Bon Jovi lyric, “We’ve gotta hold on, to what we’ve got.”

Besides, without diabetes, what would I blog about?

The store on 14th Street in NYC where diabetes hustlers try to wheel and deal their disease.