Thank you, Barb, for sharing your story. It so touched me at so many levels. Your journey amidst your old diabetes log books did not “spark joy” for me either. Indeed, it sparked a sense of sadness for all your very hard work, for the memory of logging everything I ate, all the shots of insulin I took, all the insulin reactions and high blood sugar episodes … and it just made me joyful (that you took such good care of yourself so that I would be able to know you many years later) and fatigued (just remembering my journey and all those frustrations).
Please read Barb’s journey … and let us know what you think.
But the most interesting discovery of the day was when I came to box of old Diabetes notebooks where, before my CGM and pump days, I wrote down every meal and blood sugar from 2002 to 2012. Ten years of my life in numbers! I had been hanging on to
these as a record. But when it came time to discard them, I burst into tears. It was like thinking about throwing away my life! And yes, I could see certain bits of my history in this paper trail – dates and meals eaten on certain vacations, and certain meals at special restaurants (who could forget eating at The French Laundry!). But mostly, it was a reminder of a lot of really hard work – the overhead of being a “D” person.
My friend asked me, “Do these “spark joy” for you? And that’s when I started to cry. They did not. They were mostly a reminder of my failures, not my triumphs. After recovering my senses, I decided to keep the first two notebooks – the ones that showed the start of this long journey. The rest went into the trash.
