High: 21st Diaversary Musings

21 years ago today, feeling exhausted and battered from all sides after an unprecedented week off work in my sick bed with real ‘flu, I made an emergency appointment with my GP, alarmed by what appeared to be a sudden recurrence of my first bout of “proper” illness since childhood.

It was a dark, wet and windy evening, and I was far from full of festive cheer on that last Friday before Christmas as I sat in a deserted waiting room at the end of the day. A urine sample test revealed sky high blood sugar and the startling revelation that I was displaying the classic symptoms of diabetes.

The full story has been told before, here.

So my diabetes is “21 today” 😊

My "diaversary" always gives me a cause for some reflection, and these days, with a little more time to spare in retirement, I hope that those who know me as part of the online diabetes community will forgive me for the indulgence of sharing them publicly.

Here I am, 21 years on, having lived a third of my life, or half of my adult life, with an incurable, 24/7 medical condition which requires constant treatment and monitoring combined with an awareness of the effects and risks of activities as basic as eating, drinking, sleeping, moving or not moving.

Sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it?

But I’m an incurable optimist, a believer in silver linings, and whilst I don’t seriously believe that “everything happens for a reason”, I do believe that we all have the power to turn negatives into positives.

So 21 years on, I can also reflect on the fact that I have in recent years acquired activities, contacts, acquaintances and friends from within the community of people with diabetes, their families, and the healthcare professionals and medical companies who help to care for them. My life has been greatly enriched by them and I find it very hard to imagine what my life would be like without the diabetes community.

And I recently came upon some proof of this: a recent printout from my GP of my HbA1c level over the past five years revealed that the two most striking improvements in my level had occurred as a result of my starting to use flash glucose monitoring in early 2015 (no surprise there) and my starting to interact with the world of diabetes online in 2013. 

My HbA1c, 2013 -2018

Coincidence? Possible, but unlikely.

I think it is highly credible that I became significantly “better” at walking the tightrope of life with diabetes once I started to associate with others who do so, or who help others to do so. The knowledge that there are others out there who “get it”, who understand the frustrations and the triumphs, is of immense benefit, and I very much hope that in receiving that benefit, I have also contributed to it in my own small way.

So thank you to all out there in the #GBDoc and well beyond it: I wish I’d known you were all out there back in December 1997, but then again, many of you didn’t even have diabetes then. Indeed one who has become one of my best friends from the community was celebrating her first birthday on that auspicious date, and was herself still eleven years from developing the condition. Such is the fickle nature of diabetes, yet it gives a strong and lasting bond, borne of a very difficult adversity which in a very strange way makes me feel blessed. Blessed, at least, to have acquired diabetes in the modern world, not that of less than 100 years ago, when it was, in effect, a death sentence. Thank you, Prof Banting!

Faces of GBDoc

Of course, all my posts require an appropriate song as their title, so for this one I've landed on a song that is exactly the age of my diabetes, and which for me evokes memories of some dark days in January 1998 as I adjusted to a life of injections, testing and clinic visits: High by the Lighthouse Family not only gives a nod to my blood sugar level in late 1997, but also has a wonderful sense of optimism, a sense that better days lie ahead. As they did for me on that dark Friday in 1997.

"When you're close to tears remember
Someday it'll all be over
One day we're gonna get so high

Though it's darker than December

What's ahead is a different colour

One day we're gonna get so high"

Listen to the whole song here:

My best wishes for Christmas, 2019 and well beyond, to all those whom I now know as an indirect result of that fateful GP visit back in 1997.

Little Saint Nick: how Christmas got its Santa

6^th December is the feast of St Nicholas - or Little Saint Nick as the Beach Boys referred to him in their 1973 festive offering. I wonder how many readers didn’t know that, or had forgotten. It's a festival that, like many, appeals to me as I love special days and seasons. Every month has its particular feel; I enjoy each of the four seasons for their own atmosphere, and above all for the contrast between them.

I take childlike pleasure in the big festivals - family birthdays, Christmas, Easter, Shrove Tuesday, Halloween - as well as many forgotten, neglected or less universally observed days like Epiphany and Candlemas. Follow the links from those words to read my previous posts about the latter two if you haven’t seen them. Moreover, in my long career as a schoolteacher, I enjoyed the traditional landmark events of the academic year like start of term, end of term, Sports Day, Speech Day, Leavers’ Day etc.

Much of our day-to-day home and working life is by necessity routine and repetitive, so days which feel a bit different help to punctuate the year and to give us something to anticipate with excitement then look back on with warmth and affection.

These days, the retail and hospitality industry tries hard to part us from our money by promoting special days like Valentine’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day as occasions for buying cards, gifts and enjoying some special food and drink. Some decry the over-commercialisation of festivals, but I have no problem with it: good luck to hard-pressed retailers or pubs trying to get us to mark an occasion with a card, a gift or a drink.

I also find it interesting that as a society, we seem to crave collective events and enjoy celebrating them: the unexpected and refreshing success of the England football team in the World Cup in Russia palpably raised the spirits of a divided nation for a few heady weeks in summer 2018, and the day of the Semi-Final, an ordinary Wednesday, felt like a public holiday, with beer and burger sales booming as millions with only a passing interest in football used the occasion to go on a night out or invite friends round for a party. Likewise, the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May of the same year proved to be a collective celebration in the early summer sunshine, with the kill-joy republicans suddenly going rather quiet as the nation rejoiced in the happiness of a personable couple with a happy knack of seeming connected to ordinary folk yet retaining the dignity and mystique of monarchy. Sadly, two years on, that story appears to have had a less than happy ending.

Yet we in the UK are not very well off for festivals. Despite attempts by some, we English still seem embarrassed by St George’s Day, tainted as it is by the impression that it somehow the province of the Brexiteer generation. I remain very uneasy about it and therefore indifferent to it, not least because the real St George (ethnically Greek by most accounts) had so little connection with our country. The Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the French, the Americans and many others have no such problem with their own national day.

And unlike our European neighbours, we don’t seem to have been very good at appropriating religious festivals, secularising them and enjoying them, even without any of the belief. The French enjoy public holidays on Catholic feast days like All Saints, Ascension and Pentecost, despite living in a country where religion is constitutionally excluded from public life. A case of not having your cake yet still eating it!

And what about Harvest Festival? Here, it’s marked in churches and primary schools, but nowhere else. But the Americans have combined the notion of giving thanks for food and drink with gratitude for the founding fathers of their nation to create Thanksgiving, a celebration of family life, and which helps keep Christmas where it belongs in December.

At the time of writing, we have reached the time of year when we are being told “it’s Christmas” by everyone from the BBC to Noddy Holder, in a manner which is quite fun but risks having us fed up with Christmas three weeks before the day. Which is where St Nicholas - aka Santa Claus - should be able to help! St Nicholas Day presents a golden opportunity, taken by people in many other countries, to enjoy a little celebration ahead of Christmas.

Having lived in Eastern France for a year in my early 20s, I have ever since celebrated St. Nicholas Day on December 6th. When our children were little, we told them to leave a pair of shoes by the chimney, and in the morning it was filled with a Lindt chocolate Santa or some such. Just a little treat, but a nice way of teaching them the origin of Santa, and a little landmark on the way to Christmas. This custom is widely observed in some cultures.

So who was St. Nicholas?  Many people just know him as Santa Claus. While the modern figure of Santa derives from St. Nick, the real man behind the fictitious Santa was St. Nicholas of Myra. Born in 280 A.D. in Asia Minor, he lost his parents at an early age, but leaving him great wealth when they died. He was known for giving anonymous gifts to help those in need and was eventually made a bishop. He died on December 6th; thus this day is now St. Nicholas Day. He was apparently a generous and kind man, so the association with gift-giving seems obvious. The history of leaving shoes or stockings out for St. Nicholas derives from the story of his leaving small bags of gold for a man and his three daughters. In those days, women had to bring a dowry to a marriage in order to find a good husband. St. Nick heard of a man who had three daughters but could not afford the dowry. Without it, the daughters would most likely enter a life of prostitution instead of being able to marry. According to legend, St. Nick threw three bags of gold through their window at night, saving them from a life at a brothel and creating his reputation as the patron of gift giving.

The feast of St. Nicholas is celebrated around the world in various cultures. In Greece (as well as Albania, Serbia, and Bulgaria), St. Nicholas is celebrated on the eve of his feast day, December 5th. This day is known as Shen’Kolli i Dimnit (Saint Nicholas of Winter). In these cultures, this day is one of fasting. Most people abstain from meat or fast completely or prepare a feast to eat just after midnight.

In Belgium, the Netherlands and parts of eastern France, children leave their shoes or boots in front of the fireplace for St. Nicholas on the evening of December 5^th. Often, they include a carrot or a treat for his horses, as legend has it that he arrived with his horses via sleigh or steamboat in these areas. (a tradition which has transferred into the “sherry and mince pie for Santa, carrot for Rudolph idea for Christmas Eve). 

St. Nicholas is said to arrive on December 6^th and give children small gifts and chocolates. In the weeks leading up to this day, parents and grandparents tell stories of the legend, including a disturbing but popular addition: the story goes that three children wandered away and got lost, and a butcher lured them into his shop where he killed them and salted them away in a large tub. According to legend, St. Nicholas revived the boys and brought them home to their families. This story earned him his reputation as protector of children in France. The butcher (known as “Père Fouettard,” meaning “Father Whipper”) is imagined to follow St. Nicholas in penance and leave lumps of coal or even whips misbehaving children. In France, statues and paintings often portray this event, showing the saint with children in a barrel.

In Germany and Austria (and some other countries in this region), children leave out a boot for St. Nicholas and receive small toys, coins, or sweets. In these areas, St. Nicholas is commonly depicted as a bishop and is often portrayed on a horse. Like in the French story, a sinister companion accompanies him, in this case the even more terrifying demon-like Krampus. This beast is thought to punish children who misbehave and to capture particularly naughty children in his sack and carry them away to his lair. The Krampus has roots in Germanic folklore and its influence has spread to Austria, southern Bavaria, South Tyrol, northern Friuli, Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, and Croatia.

So St Nicholas is a well-known legendary figure in many countries, and the connections to Santa Claus - gift giving, naughty or nice etc. – are clear, although the timing of his festival is coincidentally near Christmas, rather than because of the Santa connection.

However, the Christmas connections present us with a nice “extra” feast to help us get through the long, excited wait for Christmas. So put your shoes out and see what Little Saint Nick puts in them!