Hungry Years

Home testing the blood sugar is probably the most direct way of knowing the numerical value of your immediate blood sugar level. I refuse to do it for many reasons.
(The repeated warning: don’t try this at home kids, at least not until you intimately know your own body, how it reacts to different things. I am telling about the how’s and why’s of my own circumstance, but I encourage no one to follow this path.)
I take the diabetes seriously and pay attention to it. I simply place higher value on how my body feels and functions than I do what number a chemical test gives.
I was out on my own at a young age, too young. I tested my diabetes via urine testing methods up until the point supplies ran out and the choice was taking limited funds that were usually trying to catch up on rent arrearage and buy either food or testing supplies. I was renowned by friends in those hungry years at age 19 and 20 for having no food in the apartment, not even saltine crackers and peanut butter. I survived largely by working foodservice jobs, which provided at least one solid meal a day on break. The night’s leftover bake potatoes were a feast for home consumption. I became adept at opportunistic feeding, a mouthful of tuna salad seized while retrieving something from the walk-in refrigerator or a swallowed-whole slice of cheese or lunch meat. F I was as truly as smart as I claimed, I would have committed the more typical forms of restaurant theft, with sides of beef tenderloin or cases of burgers or chicken patties out the back door during trash runs. I think I was just too afraid to get caught, that visiting coworkers would see "hot" food in my apartment and "know" I was a thief.
I learned to not talk about needs or being broke in those years. If people know that about you, their eyes fall to you first when someone’s wallet is stolen from their jacket. A waitress’ tip-filled apron had been stolen at one place I worked. Another employee had accused me outright, without privacy or tact. I remember how I felt that day. I remember that same coworker bringing in return slips from her department store job so her restaurant coworkers could fill the slips out. This allowed my accuser to steal cash from her other job. Ne of the other "prime" suspects was caught a few days later with "marked" tips in his pocket. You could trust me with your money, but not with a plate of French fries.
These hungry years shaped diabetes management. Testing was a luxury I could not afford. I had to alter insulin doses when I could not afford to eat enough to maintain the insulin dose, or afford to eat at the times the insulin dictated I must. I developed a habit of eating for the sugar. Gone were the luxury days of oatmeal for breakfast. Instead, I carried plastic bags of Tang and often mixed it in my mouth from a bubbler (which is Rhode Island for "water fountain".)
This era is probably where the old damage from diabetes occurred within my body. For a while in the early to mid 1990’s, I had a job that included insurance and tried being a good, doctor-visiting diabetic. It lasted just long enough for me to know problems existed. All the problems were put to me by doctors as crucial things, but before long I was without means to follow up on anything. The same things came up in the interim, and pretty much all the problems were still there at the same level when I started indulging myself with doctor exams from 2005.
I say that precisely: "still there at the same level." In the intervening years I had learned to walk the balancing act that the diabetes requires. Without sugar testing that had become the vogue and accepted standard, I had managed to manage the diabetes without doing damage to myself.
I had a stable system that I managed by feel.