In response to a pledge...

It’s been a while since I posted on here. But in the past few weeks a number of things have happened to make me decide to post again. I have written and re-written this particular post a number of times as I’m not sure how honest I should be. However, I have realised that I can’t separate my diabetes from what I am about to write about and, if I want to write candidly about my diabetes as I set out to do, I need to acknowledge the things that run alongside it, things that I really don’t think I can separate enough to write about one and not the other. When I began writing, a close friend of mine warned me about the perils of being too honest. I hope I am not crossing that line.

The first thing that happened as a reminder to write was, as always, an appointment with my diabetes doctor at Haeundae Paik hospital. I say ‘my’; terminology I wouldn’t have used often at home where, at the beginning of my diabetic career at least, I was shunted from doctor to locum to doctor and never managed to forge relationships, let alone trust, with any of my doctors. Here, I have seen the same doctor every 3 months. While the language is still stilted my confidence in him is growing. My HbA1c this time round was 7.8%. Not perfect by any means but heading in the right direction!

The other thing is related, and is the reason both for my posting and the fact it’s taken so long. A month or so ago, I saw a link on a friend’s Facebook page. It resonated with me and I made a pledge, alongside Stephen Fry and Ruby Wax amongst other celebs, to be more open.

People deal with diabetes in very different way. I have met people for whom it was merely a blip, and a small one at that. For whom having to go through the daily rigmarole of injections and blood tests was nothing, just part of their routine. For me, and many others, it’s never been like that. In fact, according to NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in the UK ), people with chronic conditions are three times more likely to suffer from depression. And I have slowly realised that I am one of those people. I can honestly say that, although I barely acknowledged it at the time, that day in March 1995 turn my life upside down. It was more significant to me than any other event in my life. I will never know whether the diabetes is actually to blame, or whether I am just one of those people born with a natural propensity towards depression. But for years, I have struggled to find peace with my condition. I have resented it, rebelled against it, tried to pretend it didn’t exist. And now, after 16 years, three months and five days, I am finally coming to terms with it. I wouldn’t say I am happy sharing my life with it, but we are finding ways to co-exist.

I say this with great tentativeness. I have thought this before only to find things crashed down around me. This year has been one of great turbulence. I never deal very well with change anyway, and the extent of the changes I have inflicted upon myself this year have been the catalyst for a whole other change.

For years I have dealt with feelings of inadequacy; never feeling quite good enough and always waiting to be caught out. As a teenager I, and I guess those around me, wrote it off as teenage angst and it was only until recently, at 28, I realised it wasn’t shifting: teenage angst had become adult angst and I had to deal with it. Honestly, I don’t know how I kept up the pretence of keeping it all together for so long. On and off for years I have seen counsellors. First an NHS counsellor at sixteen who wanted an easy fix, so I gave her one: my parents’ divorce, something that I’m sure did affect me but is definitely not the root of my problems. Next, at 23 or so, realising that the majority of my negative feelings towards myself stemmed from my inability to deal with my diabetes,  I paid to go Private and that only served to make me even more anxious as I couldn’t really afford it and was tied into fixed terms, which I later realised is pretty unethical. Then, in the year leading up to leaving for Korea, I burst into tears during an appointment with the doctor at my diabetic clinic – not for the first, or last time. She was amazing and referred me to a psychological department attached to the clinic. After a few weeks (I was surprised at just how quickly it all came around) I started seeing a psychologist who had an understanding of diabetes. It was brilliant. He understood, without me needing to tell him, what a hypo was, what I meant when my blood sugars were high. Truly amazing. And I couldn’t help feeling a little frustrated that something similar wasn’t done sooner. Looking back now, I realise that there were a number of times my depression could have been picked up by a healthcare professional, yet it wasn’t; maybe I was just too good at hiding it, or maybe the resources just weren’t there.

On leaving for Korea, I made the mistake I have made so many times before: change everything and I will change too. Unfortunately not to be: moving to another city, albeit on the other side of the world, doesn’t change a thing. It was still me going. At first, I floated as high as ever before. I was happy. But soon enough, those feelings began to creep back in. And before I knew it I was crying constantly; barely making it through a day without something setting me off. My workload buried me, I couldn’t make head nor tail of my to-do lists because everything on them seemed to be needed to be done NOW.  My head was a constant blur of shoulds; it was too messy and busy to make sense of any of it. At home I was horrible: moody, snappy, tearful, needy, all the things I have been off and on all my life. But it got worse and worse. Until I realised that if I didn’t do something, and quickly, it was all going to fall down around me. So I did.

First, I downloaded some Apps (yes, more). I honestly think there is an App for everything you could possibly ever need. What did we do before iPhones and iPads and the App store?! One, MoodMaster, was brilliant. It described how I was feeling exactly (Mood Master describes the symptoms of depression as, amongst others: doing very little, finding everything an effort, not getting enjoyment from anything, not laughing or finding things funny, sleeping badly, always feeling tired, feeling like everything is pointless, avoiding people, being irritable, arguing with people). While sometimes, these may just describe a bad day, for me it was more than that. These were the things I was dealing with on a daily basis, constantly, and had been off and on for years, even before I could really articulate them as feelings that were not a normal part of life.  I would sit at social gatherings wondering how people could laugh. The App went on to tell me it wasn’t my fault, that depression can be caused by a number of different things, some of which were: having problems we can’t fix (diabetes), not looking after yourself physically (I hadn’t exercised properly for years), going through a traumatic experience and being inclined to see things in a depressing way (unfortunately for me, I think this may just be the case! I’m not your average glass-half-full lady…) But then it went on to give me a whole list of practical ways to move forward, and so many of them made sense! No-one’s ever done that before.

Next, I emailed a friend from home. She’d been bugging me for weeks for an update but I’d been feeling so bad – and had convinced myself that I couldn’t tell the truth because wasn’t I living the dream?! How could I tell people back home just how hard I was finding getting through a day? So I emailed her. And told her everything. It wasn’t new, we’d talked before, but what a relief it was. Next I spoke to a couple of colleagues who, very quickly became friends. Although I was petrified about doing this, it was wonderful to share my burden, and surprising how supportive people are, even people I’d only known for 6 months.

Then, I had a problem. I was in Korea. At home, I would have gone straight to my doctor, who spoke English, and who would’ve taken the next steps. Here, I had no idea who to turn to. So I bit the bullet and spoke to someone I knew who spoke Korean. Within a week I had an appointment with an English-speaking psychologist who diagnosed me with severe depression. Since then, I have been taking each day at a time. I am, and always need to be aware of this side of myself. I am trying to do the things that I need to do in order to feel better: exercise, socialise and eat healthily, all three are things I enjoy to a point, but which easily slip out of my reach when I begin to feel down.

I am not writing this for sympathy. I am writing this because people don’t write about things like this enough, and then they assume they are alone in what they feel but more often than not they are not. The pledge I made was to be more honest about depression. So here I am, being (probably more honest than I should be) about my own, very personal experiences which are linked, inextricably, to my diabetes demon.