Surgery is a huge deal. HUGE! I’d never been anesthetized before. I’d never spent the night in a hospital. The closest was when I went to the emergency room years ago for my tonsils. They are huge all the time, but if I have a bad cold in the winter, they swell up even more and rub up against each other. I waited patiently but uncomfortably in the middle of the night at Harlem Hospital Center as gunshot victim after gunshot victim kept coming in and trumping my petty little problem of not being able to breathe. I totally get it. (Harlem Hospital Center is great with gunshot wounds, by the way . . . in case you need to know that.) But I had a phone sex shift in the morning, and all of a sudden it was after 3 a.m. and I started to have a panic attack about missing work, which made my breathing worse, so I gestured for the closest nurse. She took a second to look in my mouth with a flashlight and a popsicle stick. “Oh, God! Your tonsils are touching!” “Das what I was tellin’ you befo!” I screamed, with the popsicle stick still on my tongue. She placed me in a room by myself, and the next thing I knew, I woke up with an IV in my arm. It was three hours later, but my tonsils had shrunk and I was free to go to work. You are thinking, Why didn’t she get her tonsils removed? Because I couldn’t get tonsil surgery and sit around eating popsicles and Jell-O all day in between phone sex calls! That’s crazy! YOU’RE crazy! Also, the idea of being put to sleep and ripped open while I slept seemed insane. Either way, that was the most dramatic hospital experience I’ve ever had.
I’ve read somewhere that the average adult American has no less than five medical conditions at any given time. I suppose I’m not different. I have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, low good cholesterol, anemia, and I’m constantly treading the line between diabetic and prediabetic. Diabetes isn’t necessarily a condition I am afraid of. I was a small child when Dad was diagnosed. I know it’s hereditary. I always knew I’d be a fat adult, so I saw diabetes in my future one way or the other. For a long time, I was too busy, too unfocused, too hungry, and too filled with excuses to do anything about it. The first time my doctor called me to let me know that I was straight-up diabetic, I wasn’t surprised, but I still felt really stupid. I could’ve been going to my trainer who was on standby, ready to work with me whenever I was available. I’d seen countless dieticians and knew exactly what foods to eat and what not to eat. Too bad that knowing better doesn’t always result in doing better. I didn’t tell Mom, I didn’t tell Dad, and I didn’t tell Ahmed. I didn’t tell my best friends. I didn’t tell my shitty boyfriend, either. I just wrote one cryptic Facebook status and moved on with my life. It’s not like anyone was going to find out. There weren’t any obvious signs.
A month after I was diagnosed as diabetic so was Ahmed. He stayed in the hospital for almost a week. I sat with my family in Ahmed’s hospital room and probably cried the entire time. (As I do.) It was hard to see my brother in the hospital, for one, but also I finally was devastated by diabetes. Just not my own. Ahmed was laid up in the hospital with tubes all over him, and I was sitting there in my cute little dress and purse getting away with not telling anyone. I felt horrible and guilty for being able to hide my diagnosis in a way that he, with diabetes on top of his weird blood disorder, couldn’t. I just kept crying.
I didn’t have to take insulin. I didn’t have to prick myself to check my blood. I had a friend in college who was born diabetic and would make a huge show every few hours of testing her blood. She’d do it in front of everyone and then announce that she had to have some of whatever candy or chips anyone nearby was eating. I was thankful I didn’t have to turn into her. My doctor was all like, “You can if you want, but you don’t really need to.” She was hella chill. She prescribed a drug to control my blood sugar. She told me that with diet and exercise, along with the medication, I could get my diabetes under control. She also wanted me to consider weight-loss surgery. She asked if I ever had. As if.