It all began when I was almost 11 years old. I got sick and had to submit a urine sample to the doctor. In the urine sample, they discovered an unusually high amount of glucose. My parents then took me to another city to get more tests for diabetes. I was tested and sent home to wait for the results. All of the test results, except for one, had been told to my mom over the phone by a doctor from the other city. We were waiting for the final test result, but as far as I know, my mom never got the call. By this time, I had a glucose tester at home and was testing my glucose levels regularly and they looked alright if I didn't eat too much sugar. However, the possibility of me having type 1 diabetes still loomed.
My mom took me to visit a "witch". She "looked into me" and "saw" that I do have a high risk of becoming diabetic and told me to go on a special diet for a few months. Mainly, I couldn't eat meat, flour and sugar. I did my best to live by this diet but after a while, my glucose levels started getting worse. So we visited more people that took part in "alternative medicine". I should also mention, that my dad strongly despises all of this witchcraft and alternative medicine, so it all had to be kept secret from him, which wasn't all that difficult because he never seemed to really care about my health anyway.
The next "treatment" I got was these bioenergeticly charged tiny little placebo balls of sugar. They had to be kept wrapped up in tinfoil and as far away from all phones and the Wi-Fi router as possible or they would run out of charge. How would one check if they had ran out of charge? My mom would call the witch from before, hold the "medicine" in one hand and the witch would check. Never mind that this all sounds like a bunch of BS, the irony of holding these super-sensitive balls next to a phone (during an active phone call nonetheless!) was somehow lost on everyone involved. Sometimes they were out, and we needed to go get new ones (and pay for them of course) and sometimes, they'd be fine even though I didn't always follow the protocol and would often bring my phone into the room they were kept in. I had to take 3 or 4 different types of them each morning, afternoon, and evening. 5-7 balls of each type. Between each little ball, I had to take about a 5-minute break (or else they wouldn't work) so you can imagine how long this whole ritual would take. That is if I actually did everything the way I was supposed to. Why different types of balls? Well, they were all for different types of things: anxiety, positive mood, stress, and so on. Remembering this now, it seems strange that I don't remember any of them that would have anything to do with diabetes.
By the time I was around 14, my situation had gotten a lot worse. My glucose levels were rarely if ever normal, I just constantly lived with hyperglycemia, I would say I was weak, but I had been used to it, so it all just felt normal to me. I started skipping PE classes as much as I could, to the point where in the whole 8th grade I had been to two PE lessons in September, and for the rest of the year would just hide from the teacher. Obviously, the placebo balls weren't working, but why wasn't I taken to the hospital? By this time I've been fed this story: you go to the hospital, they purposely give you lots of food which is high in glucose, they check your blood and tell you that you are sick and cannot survive without insulin. So you start injecting insulin and your pancreas stops producing it at all because your body is being provided by it and you end up actually not being able to survive without injecting insulin for the rest of your life. And I believed this, all of it. I was scared, terrified. One time I told my mom, that I would rather kill myself than go to the hospital. I viewed doctors and traditional medicine as evil, as scammers, as people who wanted to hurt me. As the enemy.
I was on a strict diet of no sugar, no fast food, basically no carbs. By this time I started seeing this local bioenergetic who would take 20€ for an hour of doing something to me (the minimum wage was about 1.80€ per hour at the time). All I know is I would have to sit there with my eyes closed and she would wave her arms around me for an hour or so and that was supposed to somehow cure me. I actually liked some of the other people I met through this, even if all of them were weird in some way. But not her, I didn't like her from the first day we met. Something was just off about her. She "lived" in this run-down apartment where she would take all of her clients. She wouldn't take any breaks between them either, which I always thought would be absolutely draining if she was actually putting her heart and soul into her work. One time we had to visit her immediately, without any appointment for some reason. She agreed to see me, but she wasn't in her usual apartment at the time, so I had the opportunity to see where she truly lived. My mom drove me out of town, we drove through a little forest until we saw a huge mansion. It was truly gigantic and luxurious. Seeing it confirmed all my suspicions about her - she was doing all of this for the money.
I couldn't keep up with all of it. I was a teenager and all my friends were eating sweets, fast food and all other sorts of things which were forbidden to me. Living without carbs is not healthy for anyone, especially a growing teenager. My body couldn't properly absorb carbs anyway, so I always felt a massive craving for them. And I broke. I started eating everything and anything I wanted. Cookies, candy, ice cream, cereal, burgers, kebabs, french fries. It felt so good, I felt normal. That is until I had to come back home and check my glucose. I started keeping a stash of food hidden in my school bag and I kept a separate trash bag in a cupboard in my room. I started lying to my mom about my glucose levels - she started to check the tester. I hid it away. All the good feelings of normalness soon faded and I started feeling like a rat, munching on something while hiding away in a corner. Eventually, my mom checked my bag and found some cookies I had been hiding in there and took them without saying anything. I woke up, got ready for school, and left. On my way there, I opened the bag to have a cookie before school and found them missing. I immediately understood that my mom must have found them. I was scared of what she would say, but most of all I felt violated, I really didn't like anyone going through my stuff (this was probably because I had something to hide, but I felt horrible nonetheless). And then I remembered the little cupboard in my room, where I kept all the trash. I hadn't cleaned it in a while at the time, and I assumed my mom would have gone through it as well. I wasn't going home to check, so I just went to school, terrified of what would happen when I got home. While at school, I got a text from my mom about the cookies. We didn't talk much, but I could feel she was very angry and very disappointed in me. When I came back home, I was relieved to find the cupboard untouched. Stories like this happened many times. I was shouted at for eating food. Food which I had been starving for. I remember how during one of these conflicts my mom tried to explain to me, how she and my family were worried for me and how they were putting so much effort and money into helping me. At that point, I didn't care, and all I could say was "I never asked for your help".
Things went on like this for a while, and I was getting visibly worse. I was severely underweight, my skin was pale, I had huge black bags under my eyes, and I was constantly tired. One day, when I was 15 and had just started high school I got a stomach ache. It was horrible, and it wasn't going away. After a couple of days of me staying hunched up on my bed my mom came back home, saw me, and realized I was dying. She decided to take me to the hospital. Everyone there looked at me like I was a ghost. I remember everyone's expressions were that of shock and worry. I wasn't expecting this, to me, it all seemed normal. The way I felt, the way I looked, and even my glucose levels were just normal. Turns out, that one test which we didn't get the results for was there and almost five years ago anyone with a medical degree could have told me I had diabetes. Everyone looked angry at my mom, but to me they were still the enemy. I wanted to protect her and just get out of the hospital as soon as possible. Nothing bad ever happened to her though. I stayed there for a couple of weeks and was sent home.
In the end, I got the treatment I needed, started insulin therapy, and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.