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Book Review: My Sweet Life: Successful men with diabetes

Words: Virtue Bajurny

A short while back we posted a review of the book My Sweet Life: Successful women with diabetes and I promised we’d follow up with a review of A Sweet Life: Successful men with diabetes. This is that review.

In starting A Sweet Life: Successful men with diabetes, I wondered how this volume of stories would differ from the previous. In a lot of ways my experience was similar: I was struck again by the way diabetes management has progressed over the years, and I found myself thinking about how I fit into this timeline. I also found myself comparing my own experiences to those of the various authors’. This last part sometimes made me reflect on what having diabetes has meant to me and how it has changed over the years.

Something that did differ: for whatever reason, I did find that I had either heard of or met quite a few of the authors in this volume. I found it interesting, however, that I learned much more about these people from their written accounts. For example, I’ve listened to Sean Busby’s diagnosis story (or mis-diagnosis story… he was originally told he was Type 2 and got very ill before being properly diagnosed as Type 1,) but in reading through I personally took away a greater sense of the frustration and exasperation that this period must have entailed. Similarly, I’ve read Scott Johnson’s posts off and on over the past few years, but blog posts are usually specific to one theme or topic. Stepping back and taking in the fuller narrative of Scott’s life with diabetes, from childhood to adulthood, was really interesting. I further found it thought provoking how he describes his wife’s experiences of his diabetes, particularly how hard it was for her during one particularly frightening low blood glucose episode.

In finishing both books I realized the biggest takeaway of this series that Dr. Bev Adler has put together is the sense of reflection that it prompts. As a person with Type 1 diabetes reading these stories I found that the narratives cause me to pause and think back on my own experiences with diabetes. Sometimes these ponderings are thoughts I’ve had before, but many times the readings prompted little ‘aha’ moments where I would realize something about myself because of something presented in the author’s story. The strongest example of this for me is Dr. Jason C. Baker’s narrative in this volume, My Sweet Life: Successful men with diabetes. It is the opening chapter of the book and describes his diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes while still in medical school. Dr. Baker talks about a lot of different things in his chapter, but his discussion food is what I kept replaying in my mind as I read the rest of the book. He talks briefly, but candidly about his struggles with bulimia for the two years after his diagnosis. He describes how this process started, stating: “I never actually had a sweet tooth prior to my diabetes diagnosis, passing up the most delectable-looking desserts without so much as a blink. The limitations of diabetes made me ‘want what I couldn’t have.’” There is something that shifts in your relationship with food when you get diabetes. It’s hard to describe, but those two sentences summed up a bizarre sense for a need to horde food that started for me only after diagnosis. It’s not something I like to dwell on, because I don’t fully understand it, but reading Dr. Baker’s story made me realize that I am really not the only person that has experienced such a shift with food.

This sense of reflection is why I like this series of books: pondering your own experiences with diabetes can be helpful in and of itself, but realizing that there are others out there like you in whatever struggles you’ve dealt with in living with this disease breaks down feelings of isolation and difference. In a way, they create a new ‘normal’- one within the context of life with diabetes.

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