The Rest of Your Life

[title type="subtitle-h6"]Samuel Wagner[/title][vc_row][vc_column width="11/12"][vc_column_text]Sometimes, when I find myself in one of those introspective, big-picture type moods we all find ourselves in every once in a while, I think about the phrase, “For the rest of your life.” To be honest, those moods most often appear after I return home from a night of drinking at the bars with my friends, staying up late with my thoughts, my roommates all long asleep or perhaps sick in our bathroom. Don’t ask me why this is the opportune time to be having such grandiose thoughts. Now is not the time to answer that question.“For the rest of your life.” It seems a hard idea to pin down, really. It seems to me that it requires some time of event, some trauma, to make you realize what it actually means. Sure, you can just say “rest of your life” and people put together some half-formed idea of a quasi-future 50+ years from now, with flying cars and soylent green. Soylent cars? The point is, there are so many unknowns that it can be hard to make any sense of what to physically expect as a person. Where I will be, what my job will consist of, what I will enjoy, if I’ll be six feet underground or thousands of miles above Earth. I truly do not know which of my thoughts will turn out to be true, as does everyone. Although, I believe that for me specifically, I have pinned down one thing that will remain consistent “for the rest of my life.” That is, I will either be living with, or be affected by, type 1 diabetes.At the time, diabetes was something I hadn’t known much about. I knew my father had it. I didn’t know, but learned later, that my father’s uncle died from complications due to it at around age 35. As it turned out, my father had gotten it at around age 12, and knew the signs and symptoms easily enough, which led to him noticing the same symptoms in me. I can picture him asking me to check my blood sugar, seemingly at random, before eating lunch some weekend day. I poked my finger with a needle for the first time ever, and pressed it to the tiny machine and waited. The number came back 300-something. I had no idea what it meant. I pushed the machine back to my father, grabbed my food, and went back downstairs to my television.It didn’t take long for him to follow me down, mute the television, and sit next to me. At this point, it needs to be said that my father is a lot like me. Not in the obvious, same-disease way we are now, although that is true also, but in the way that we are both rather quiet and are more likely to solve a problem for ourselves than wait for someone else to finish it. Basically, my father wanting a quiet moment of just us two was something that I knew was important.“Sam, I need to talk to you about something. Now, I’m not sure, and we need to go to the hospital to check, but right now it looks like you may have diabetes.”“…Oh.”That’s actually what I said.“Get your shoes on, and let’s go to the doctor’s office right now.”It was a simple request, made a lot of sense, but I was 12, and it didn’t compute.“Can’t we wait until tomorrow?”“No, we need to go now.”Can’t we wait until tomorrow? Up until this point in my life, all 12 years of it, there had been little need for urgency. With everything I had experienced, I had been able to wait until tomorrow, as a general rule. Looking back, it was so incredibly foolish, but my “rest of my life” didn’t extend very far beyond the next day or maybe the next week. If I can get back to my big-picture thoughts, I notice quite a lot of people acting this way even as they grow older. Sure, high schoolers are looking towards college, and college students are looking towards jobs or grad school, but the scope is always so limited. We think of the next few weeks, months, or years, but our plans never go too much farther. Maybe it has to be like this, to keep our sanity.The ride, the hospital, and the doctor’s office are all mostly a blur. I remembered something about the doctor confirming the diagnosis that I had type 1 diabetes and stating my pancreatic function had already started to decrease, and would continue to do so until it became useless. That wasn’t important to me at the time. I didn’t understand it well enough.From there, I proceeded to spend one night in the hospital being monitored by a few nurses, along with whichever doctors that had a tenuous connection to my case. A flurry of white coats, friendly faces who smiled too much, and strangers telling me how I am going to have to live the rest of my life. Each one of them adjusted the lights of my room, moved the blankets of the bed I was in, and gave a glance to the television in the corner, turned on to some random station.Highlights of my day included my mother arguing with the doctor and convincing him to only make me stay one night in the hospital instead of the standard three, as well as my mother arguing with the doctor so that I wasn’t placed on an IV and only had to drink some kind of sports drink as part of my “treatment.” There was a pattern starting to emerge from where I was sitting. All this time, I stayed mostly silent and alternately watched the television and the setting sun slowly paint the walls and my family’s tired faces.As night fell, a routine set in. As part of monitoring me, nurses were required to check my blood sugar every hour, on the hour, throughout the night. They all said that they would try to be quiet and not wake me up. Of course, they always said this after waking me up each time.I didn’t sleep much that night. Not factoring in the hourly disruptions, my mind was starting to comprehend the implications of having to do this for the rest of my life, which is all I knew at the time. Keeping track of what I ate, avoiding certain things, monitoring myself, and seeing the looks on my family’s face, sympathy mixed with fear mixed with sadness.Above all, my mind wanted to get back to my life. Not even the rest of it, just the next day or so would be good enough. A day or two where I could pretend this was a dream. At least tell myself, this can wait until tomorrow.So, I guess you could say that my story has a happy ending. Of course, you could say a lot of things.As it turned out, I was able to get back to my life. You see, I went in to the hospital and was diagnosed with diabetes on the afternoon of October 30th, 2005. I spent the night wondering if I could get back to my life, and then left the hospital on Halloween and was able to join my friends and go trick-or-treating, even as a 12-year-old. 12-year-olds still go trick-or-treating, right? Well, I did. I ran around and laughed with friends that day, and got to wait, not until tomorrow, but at least a couple hours before having to deal with the events of the night prior.I didn’t tell my friends what had happened, of course. I still wasn’t fully aware of it myself. The only thing that mattered to me was that I was having fun today, never mind what happened the day before.This October 30th, 2015, is 10 years since I have been diagnosed. I try not to draw too much attention to my diabetes anymore. My mind is always thinking about it, of course, the way a song sticks in your brain, or a sliver gets under your skin and stays there. What I’ve learned in these last 10 year, though, is that the “rest of your life” can be hard to deal with. And that is okay. Whether you are completely unsure of where or what you will be, or if something is always going to be a part of you for the rest of your life, understand that worrying about it will not change the outcome. Instead, take each day and make it as positive as can be. Having diabetes put the rest of my life put in perspective, at least a small amount, and has made me realize that as long as I have the “rest of my life” in front of me, the least I can do is try to make today the best day possible.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]