When I started this blog, I wanted a place to write about health and explain some of the things that we’ve gone through in the past two years. The more I flicked through old journals, the less I felt comfortable writing about in a blog. I think it’s just too complicated to put down in a blog. And you’d have to be incredibly interested to read someone’s medical woes on an ongoing basis!
In August 2011 I started copying old journal entires into a plan for a book. I don’t know much about publishing, but I have long had the feeling I need to write about what happened.
In some ways, the fact of the matter is that diabetes (of all types) is increasing on a global scale & I think I’m in a unique place to explain what it does to a person, how it alienates you from some people & activities, and of course to explain how Ben managed to improve his health towards getting rid of it. I don’t expect to write a diet book – I have a long blog post written on my passionate hatred of diets & people who blindly follow them – but I like to learn and educate by example, so all I can explain is what happened for Ben & I. If people find all or parts of that useful, then that’s great.
While we didn’t receive an official un-diagnosis this week like we’d expected, the end result is actually that diabetes has a near zero effect on Ben’s life anymore. I think that makes it time for me to start really writing this book.
I have officially started describing Ben as a post-diabetic. This is a term I’ve been using for ages, but it doesn’t exist in the medical sphere. I explained my reasoning of it to the specialist this week and he’d never thought of it that way. It’s pretty simple. You can be pre-diabetic, with test results worsening, or you can be post-diabetic, with test results improving (even though to an untrained, non-medical history set of eyes you’re in the same place as a pre-diabetic). I want this term to catch on. It is positive to have a term to strive for as a goal towards health.
Selfishly, I don’t know if I’m ready to relive the pain to write and edit the book. I know that even many close family and friends just don’t understand what it’s been like, but it’s hard. We’re fine and clearly we pulled through it, but there has been a lot of pain. Even writing this post, contemplating reliving the pain, I feel like I should go and cry. Maybe writing the book will force me to sort through the anger I hold towards parts of the past two years.
I also feel like the knowledge of what we’ve been through should be propelling me on a path to healthcare activism. Once again, to be completely honest, I don’t know if I have the capacity to continually care about entire health-system wide issues. I haven’t enjoyed a lot of the past few years, and in some ways I’d like to write the book to get it all out, then never have to think about it again. Perhaps I’ll feel differently after I’ve gone through writing it.
Would you write a book if it was hard, knowing that it may help others?
If the end point is to educate and help those cope or understand the difficulties they may face or are facing, then yes, write it and put all the emotion into it that you can. Plus, in the long run I believe it’ll be very therapeutic for you to get vent and talk about your hardships. Good Luck!