Diabetes is a medical condition that should come with its own dictionary.
I’m not exaggerating. A diabetes diagnosis means having to learn what feels like a whole new vernacular in order to thrive with it. Words and terms like bolus, basal, CGM, A1c, among many others, can be straight-up confusing – especially if you didn’t grow up with diabetes like I did. It only recently occurred to me that I avoided a tough learning curve by receiving my diabetes diagnosis early in life. I knew the meaning of “hypoglycemia” and “endocrinologist” at an age when most kids were just trying to figure out how to say simpler phrases like “the cat sits on the mat”. I grew up speaking diabetes, a second language that I don’t always give myself credit for knowing as well as I do.\
I know it so well, in fact, that I’m often sprinkling in diabetes words and phrases into my regular daily conversations. I expect my close relatives and friends to know what the difference between my “pod” and my “PDM” are, but I sometimes forget that colleagues or acquaintances might find my diabetes terms confusing. That’s one reason why I added a “diabetes dictionary” section to this website. It’s definitely not complete, but it’s a solid starting point for anyone who’s trying to understand the many acronyms and fancy-sounding medical terms that make up the language of diabetes. And a second reason, that goes hand-in-hand with that explanation, is to hopefully make it a little easier for newer readers and visitors to this website to pick up on the diabetes-related words that I use throughout most of my blog posts.
So feel free to peruse my incomplete diabetes dictionary here – I promise it’s a much shorter read compared to a traditional dictionary. And let me know in the comments if there’s anything you think I should add there, as it’s been a minute since I revisited it.
Over the years, I’ve seen many online debates (and participated in a few in-person) about the language of diabetes: the power of it, the meaning behind pairing certain words and phrases together, the connotations that can be unintentional or intentional…or even both at the same time.
As someone who writes as part of my full-time job (and, obviously, as a side hobby on this blog), I try to be very deliberate about my word choice. I may not always be 100% correct in my spelling or grammar – I am human, after all – but I’d like to think that I’m thoughtful in both my writing and my speaking. Specifically, when it comes to talking about diabetes, I’m careful to phrase things in a way that doesn’t discriminate or dehumanize people who live with diabetes, and generally avoid pessimistic undertones. I wrote about this before in a blog post from August 2018 – here’s an excerpt from that post that features some clear examples:
Read the following five sentences. Can you tell what’s wrong with them?
She’s a diabetic.
He’s testing his blood sugar right now.
Her diabetes is out of control!
Isn’t that a really bad blood sugar?
He suffers from diabetes.
Have you figured it out?
The language in those five sentences is extremely negative. “Bad,” “out of control,” and “suffers” are obviously gloomy and cynical words to use when referring to diabetes – you don’t need to be a wordsmith make that connection immediately. But what’s wrong with “diabetic” or “testing”? It’s the connotations around those words. Calling someone with diabetes a “diabetic” is labeling them with the disease and removing the actual person from the equation. Saying that a person with diabetes is “testing” their blood sugar makes it sound so…clinical. It also implies that the person could pass or fail the so-called test, adding pressure and guilt to the situation.
So those are just a few sample sentences in which the language of diabetes is definitively negative, in turn, making it more difficult to have conversations about it that are productive. But what about the case of this blog post’s title?
Diabetes is tough.
Or is it…diabetes can be tough?
I think both are true.
I’ve read through a few different social media threads recently in which the phrase “diabetes can be tough” is ripped to shreds. The argument is that people living with it know for a fact that it IS tough, period, bottom line, end of story. There isn’t a gray area where that “can be” belongs, so it simply shouldn’t be the way that folks characterize life with diabetes.
I’m not saying that I disagree with people who are pro-diabetes-is-tough: I absolutely have my days where it’s virtually impossible to live with and I think that nothing in my life is more difficult than my diabetes. Fortunately for me, though, those days are outnumbered by the days in which diabetes and I coexist – not always peacefully, but at least side-by-side with little fanfare. Those are the days that I can say with confidence that I’m fully aware that diabetes can be seriously sucky, but it’s not like that’s always the case for me.
So to me, both phrases – diabetes CAN BE tough and diabetes IS tough – can be true at the same time because it just depends on how easy or challenging it is for me on a given day to manage it. That’s just my truth. Plus, as someone who tends to avoid negative words when it comes to describing my life with diabetes, I like the power that I can find from the “diabetes can be tough” phrasing. In my mind, it perfectly captures and acknowledges that diabetes isn’t easy, but that it isn’t the worst thing in the world, nor does it stop me from living a full life. That’s just my take on the debate. I know folks will both agree and disagree with me, and that’s totally acceptable.
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, at least, it’s that the language of diabetes is a complex matter filled with many nuances.
What would you say if someone asked you to identify diabetes as one of the following: 1) a chronic illness, 2) a disease, or 3) a condition?
My response would be…it’s not so clear-cut for me. It’d change depending on how I felt about my diabetes at a given moment in time.
What word(s) would you use to identify diabetes?
So for example, on the days when diabetes dominates all of my thoughts and emotions with its unrelenting nature, I’d be more inclined to call it a chronic illness. On those occasions, my diabetes seems determined to remind me that it’s not going anywhere, and that I’d better just accept that it’s here to stay.
But when diabetes is straight-up pissing me off – say because of a medical device failure or a stubborn high blood sugar that won’t come down – I’d call it a disease. It seems to be a fitting title for something that’s acting in a disordered nature, and goodness knows it infuriates me to no end when the elements of diabetes that I can more usually control act out unpredictably.
And then it’s when diabetes and I are just mutually co-existing. I’m aware of it, and it’s aware of me, but it doesn’t have the ability to impact my emotions like it does when it’s behaving more like a chronic illness or a disease. When diabetes is my condition, I have it – it doesn’t have me.
I could be reaching a bit here with my musings on associating diabetes with different words, but truly, language is powerful in diabetes (and really, in all aspects of life). Words and phrases have connotations and significance depending on the contexts in which they’re used, making their endless combinations utterly fascinating. Because of this, I believe that examining the specific language around diabetes is extremely interesting as I think about the ways I describe my own diabetes experience and how that involves my emotions.
And what’s really cool is that there’s no right or wrong way about the words I choose to use regularly around my diabetes because it’s my story to tell. Here’s a friendly reminder that the same applies to you, too.
Hugging the Cactus 