Diabetes in the Wild

We saw your device and couldn’t just mind our own business

photo credit: Bill Wetzel

When we spot you, you may be trying to finish your grocery shopping, crossing a busy street, or stepping into an elevator.

We drop everything. We also appear in the cheese section for no other reason than you are there. We sprint across the street in the final seconds like the timer is a mere suggestion. We wedge ourselves into the elevator when the doors have already begun to close and the socially acceptable thing would be to wait for the next one.

Except maybe we’d never planned on catching the elevator at all.

Not until we saw you inside.

I happened upon a video by Jason Christo, a diabetes influencer on Instagram, that captures this feeling better than words usually manage.

We are the Type 1 Diabetes fan club. The Diabbudies of the world. If you live life doing diabetes management and you spot an insulin pump or glucose monitor or injection in the wild, there is only one option: you have to say hi.

On a walk around town soon after my daughter’s diagnosis, we stopped by a local fair. In the sea of people, my daughter insisted she’d spotted a continuous glucose monitor. She pulled me by the hand, weaving through the crowd in a sprint until we tracked down a young woman in her mid-20s, who was to become a friend and occasional T1 babysitter.

My daughter was crying in the days before kindergarten at the prospect of carrying a cellphone in a fanny pack at school to transmit her glucose monitor readings. On a walk to the grocery store, she practiced wearing it. We wandered into the cheese section when a woman appeared beside us like a mirage. I blinked hard. On her arm was a glucose monitor, a pouch around her waist. She talked about her supply bag and always being prepared. She complimented my daughter’s fanny pack taste. I had questioned her insistence on camouflage, but she saw it as dog spots and told this stranger as much.

Not so long ago we spotted another device and bolted down the street to catch up. It led to a conversation where my daughter showed her own gadgets. This woman had developed Type 1 as an adult. She said that people her age often asked her about her devices but found the technology really amazing once they understood more about how they worked. My daughter replied that kids don’t react the same way. This stranger suggested they don’t understand it, yet, but that my daughter can help them to learn more with time.

The encounter, as these encounters always do, undid me a little.

When you spot diabetes devices in the wild, you sense that you have found one of your people.

And you abandon all restraint: you sniff them out and tap them on the shoulder and yell an “EXCUSE ME!” to get their attention.

You’ve found someone who knows what it’s like to make some 180 decisions in a day.

Someone who knows that putting something in your mouth requires thinking.

And in a world that can make you feel different, acceptance shows up in small, ordinary moments.

It might just look like someone saying hi.