How many times have we heard the phrase, “Well at least they’re healthy”? Does the answer just roll out of your mouth or does it stick to the roof of your mouth before the words pour out?
To be completely honest with you, I have NEVER been able to answer this statement without it rolling around in my brain for some time after I hear it, and worse when I say it regarding my kids. I mean, outside the diabetes? With diabetes? Are they ‘healthy’?
What is healthy? How can one say, “….. well outside my kids’ diabetes, yeah they’re healthy” is as awkward as it sounds. Should we acknowledge the inclusion; or the exclusion of a disease that so many count as horrendous? So many more move on as if it doesn’t even exist. Remember the old sick joke, “Outside of that Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the show?”
I’m not trying to be flip, t’s just that I do not know how to separate my children’s attachment to this disease answering a question that for the most part is asked as a rhetoric, ‘How are you?”
How do the people who actually live with diabetes feel about this question. When people ask you, “How are you?’ Do you just say, “Fine”. But more than what you say out loud, how do you feel inside when asked that question? I would love to know.
I’ve had asthma for years. I cannot go anywhere without my inhaler. But when someone asks my, I never give it a second thought; “I feel fine”. There is not a ‘but’ or ‘if’; if I feel fine I say I never giving asthma the time of day—-not even a thought.
Is diabetes thought of in the same way?
It makes the education of diabetes tough when most look so good living with it and I have written about his before. As I stated, I do not have an answer for this, on this, or about this? If you have diabetes………………….are/can you be considered; healthy?
Thoughts?
I am a diabetes dad.
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