Diabetes Is Like That One Middle School Geometry Test

Can you please go back to your seat?

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It would take an autoimmune condition to make me realize that preparation and control are not the same thing.

In school, preparing was never enough. For me, it looked like over-preparing. It meant doing everything possible to ensure that a plus always sat beside the A.

My high school French teacher took to telling me “you could have done less.” Tu aurais pu faire moins. I was never quite sure whether it was an invitation to chill the heck out or a plea for me to stop giving him quite so much to read.

“Just do your best,” my mom would chime in an effort to calm my raging anxieties.

I heard it as something else entirely: Do the very best possible. Always.

It’s a mindset that served me well from a strictly academic perspective. Putting in enough hours and working hard enough got me where I wanted to go. Effort was rewarded. Preparation paid off. The formula was comforting in its predictability.

But there was that one middle school geometry test.

As the test got underway, I had an unsettling sensation that absolutely everything I’d studied had been completely wiped from my brain.

I found myself standing up, not once but repeatedly, to approach my math teacher’s desk for clarification:

Does this sentence really mean what I think?

Is this drawing accurate?

Should we assume this to be the case?

As I rose yet again and scurried back and forth between our desks, I could feel my face becoming hotter and hotter.

“OH MY GOSH. CAN YOU JUST. SIT. DOWN?!” came a voice from the row behind.

On the inside, I was asking myself the same thing. I was suddenly so unsure of everything. Still, I kept getting up because I was terrified of getting it all wrong.

Years later, Type 1 diabetes gave me that same feeling. Only the stakes were much different, even if they felt big to my 6th-grade mind.

When well-intentioned family, friends, and strangers learn of your child’s diagnosis, you will not uncommonly hear: “At least there’s insulin. At least it’s something manageable.”

They aren’t wrong. Had she been born just 100 years ago, my daughter’s diagnosis would have likely been a death sentence. Now it is survivable–and even thriveable.

But “manageable” hits very differently on the outside than the inside.

It’s manageable, yes, but it’s also freaking relentless.

As someone managing Type 1, your brain starts to refine a kind of running algorithm that doesn’t power down.

How much insulin does your child need at a given moment? Well… is she exercising? Or has she been? Or will she be after she eats? When was the last snack or meal? Does she happen to be fighting a virus? Could she be coming down with something? Is she going through a growth spurt? Has she slept enough? Did her left or right foot hit the ground first as she got up this morning? Is the sky a light blue or cloudy? Did you check today’s horoscope? When is the next full moon? At a certain point, the variables start to feel almost equally predictive.

Just when you think you’ve solved the day’s dosing equation, someone decides to secretly change the formula without telling you.

When the anxious middle schooler asks the teacher if they can answer a clarification question, the answer is no. If you ask Diabetes, it doesn’t even offer up the smile of encouragement. You’re left with a paragraph word problem to untangle yourself. You might slide a piece of pizza onto a scale, study its angles, shift it in your hand to assess how much the cheese glistens in the sunlight, measure the crust depth with your eyes, and perform a dosage with trembling hands under the intense watch of the Pancreas Gods as you, mere mortal, attempt to rise to the level of an organ.

The geometry test ended when the bell rang. Diabetes never does.

The questions keep coming, the formula keeps changing, and somewhere inside, that sixth grader is still standing beside the teacher’s desk, hoping for a clarification question and wishing she could finally sit down.