The Skinny on Diabetes
She had a rectangular device with a digital display clipped to her hunter green bikini bottom. At first I thought it was some sort of portable music player, maybe the latest iPod, but then I noticed the wires disappeared just to the left of her navel into a clear piece of plastic buttoned into her skin. Later I would find out it was the latest tool for diabetes sufferers. The gadget paid close attention to the young woman’s blood glucose levels, and when they got too high, it brought them back down with a squirt of insulin.
This surprised me on a couple of levels and not because the technology was so neat. Technology is materializing advances so fast anyone who gapes in disbelief is just being dramatic, but that’s an entirely different column. The first thing I never expected to see was a diabetic playing beer-pong, which is a fraternal version of ping-pong where 10 plastic cups are arranged in the shape of a diamond at each end of just about any waist-high horizontal surface that can be found. The cups are then filled about half full with beer (there are several different camps with very different platforms about the exact amount of beer that should be used). Competitors stand at each end and the goal is to toss a ping-pong ball into each one of your opponent’s cups and every time the person succeeds their opponent must drink the contents of the cup. The first one to make all 10 wins. Through rapid consumption of alcohol, this game was transparently designed to quickly disable self-control and threaten consciousness, but typical beers contain high amounts of simple carbohydrates, which the liver transforms into glucose, and I imagined this presented a whole other set of problems for people with diabetes. And excessive alcohol consumption can have profound effects on diabetics, but this woman, armed with her high-tech device, was carefree.
The second thing was I never expected someone with diabetes to look so good in a bikini. We hear over and over how the increasing number of people with diabetes is congruent with the obesity epidemic and I realized I had fallen for the stereotype the media had created for diabetics. One well-known British newspaper actually had an editorial where diabetics were labeled with two of the seven deadly sins: sloth and gluttony. It is true obesity is a risk factor for diabetes, but so are genetics and it has been forgotten that a good percentage of diabetics are as rail thin as Olive Oyl and we shouldn’t blindly cast these people in the shadows of the drive-thru.
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