Tooth Sweaters and Empathy.

Yesterday, my friend George put something up on Twitter that caught my attention.

@ninjabeticGeorge Simmons

Hate this disease.

And he shared this photo:

And it just broke my heart.

A graph like that represents the cruelest form of math. You just can't eliminate x and y from the quadratic equation of diabetes every time. There will inevitably be times where you "do everything right", and your blood glucose will still refuse to get off of that trampoline.

Those three words, and that picture, really got to me. There I was, sitting at work in my Business Lady Attire and trying to be professional, and I could feel tears starting to form. (Decidedly not professional.)

It's hard to explain to someone outside of our diabetes community why I'd react that way. (Other than the whole, "Hi, I'm Kim, and I will cry at everything - including but not limited to Visa commercials, the kind acts of strangers, Pixar movies, and stubbing my toe on the foot of the bed" thing.) I mean, it was a tweet. And a picture. Posted by someone I've actually never met in person. Yet.

I get that.

But here's the thing - people with diabetes deal with a lot of the same stuff, really. And we don't need to have met face-to-face, or know each other's life stories, to be able to relate in a real, raw, emotional and deep way.

Seeing that graph got to me, because I know - exactly - what that's like. Because I've walked that zig-zaggy line, too. I know how it makes your body feel like it's been thrown around - and it has, in a way. I know the headache. I know the impossible thirst that leaves you feeling like you're wearing tooth sweaters.

Not what tooth sweaters actually look like.

I know how it drains all of your energy and patience. How helpless it leaves you feeling; how hopeless. How every attempt to "correct" seems futile, because apparently diabetes is just going to do whatever it darn well pleases anyway.

At those times, it seems like diabetes has you on a marionette string, and all you can do is try to figure out which way that puppet master will decide to pull you next.

And because I know the totality of how much that sucks, I tend to feel a bit protective. It makes me want to make diabetes pay for causing my friends to feel that way. It makes me want to run diabetes down and beat the crap out of it.

No one deserves to feel like that - or to feel that way about feeling like that.