Scare Tactics

I understand the natural questions that come about from some of my past decisions concerning my health. The post "Braying to a new God" begs the question, "How can you be so >censored< stupid to not have PP surgery after you were told that you would be blind in six months?!"
The answer may clue in a lot of people who often just shake their head at me with complete incomprehension.
I was an average sized child when the diabetes struck at age 4. Upon entering first grade at the age of 6, I was 45 pounds. Upon entering third grade at age 8, I was 45 pounds.
My mother would see me just glance in the direction of a stray Oreo, and she would warn me "If you eat that, the doctors will have to cut your toes off." Sometimes, it was "If you eat that you’ll go blind." The problem with that was that I had neither gone blind nor had toes cut off when I did secretly seize a stray Oreo. I already knew the scare tactics were untrue.
My parents were not well educated in diabetes care. The family pediatrician was an old stout German woman who wore too much perfume and had a remarkable inability to color in the lines when it came to her lipstick. She gave most kids lollipops to keep them from hating her. As I couldn’t have candy, every visit I got a crumpled brown bag filled with plastic "toys." These "toys" were the long caps of the plastic guards for the needles that she gleefully jabbed into terrified children, and I was expected to be appreciative that the old bat "got something special" for me. She did not want my parents ever taking us kids to the hospital local to us because she was not affiliated with them. My parents followed the lead of this woman who saw no reason to share control of her patients.
Throughout the first eight years or so of diabetic living, I was seen only by the old world pediatricianl whose management of diabetes remained simple: starve the child to keep the sugar low. Unintentionally, this created a context that needing more insulin was bad and special treatment for diabetes unnecessary.
I can only assume that she saw a patient who neither gained even one pound in two years nor died of starvation as a success.
Growing up diabetic for me was an existence of denial and limitations in an atmosphere that diabetes needed no care beyond that of a "healthy" child. Scare tactics saw favor over more complicated things like discussion. I’m not inclined to believe any authority "because they say so."
I’ve eaten Oreos and have lost no toes.