DT e-Paper Saturday 09 September 2017

12
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2017
DT
Opinion
Tribulations of a diabetic
For people who don’t have diabetes, it’s not easy to understand the struggle
Diabetes can make it hard to fit in
LARGER
THAN LIFE
• Ekram Kabir
When I was diagnosed
with having
excessive blood
sugar nine years ago,
I was heartbroken.
My family does have a genetic
history of diabetes, yet I hadn’t
expected to cross that threshold at
the age of 43.
I was extremely scared,
and went to a diabetician who
prescribed medicine and exercise.
I started brisk-walking, cut down
on my rice intake, gave up sweets,
and thought that I was doing fine.
Five and a half years passed by
since then. I thought I was doing
great.
One day, on a Friday morning at
around 11, I went to see my father
at his place.
Chatting as we always did, he,
a diabetic for more than 35 years,
asked me about my sugar level. I
said I was fine.
He then volunteered to run a
test on me. He said: “I have a spare
testing kit that I want to give you;
At a wedding party, everyone around me would feast on the food while
I would be an onlooker, because the party organisers hadn’t thought of
keeping some food items that were suitable for a diabetic patient
let me test your sugar level.”
He tested my sugar level and
my sugar test came at 16. He sort
of rebuked me for having such
a high level of sugar at that time
of the day. I felt let-down and
promised to take better care of
myself.
Then on, for 10 days, I studied
all about diabetes. That was three
BIGSTOCK
and a half years ago.
I came to know a few
amazing facts that no physician
in Bangladesh had told me in
those years when I thought I was
controlling my blood sugar level
quite well.
According to some Chinese,
Japanese, and American doctors,
diabetes is a dietary disease and
it has to be dealt with in a dietary
way. That was news for me.
One Chinese doctor said that
the root cause of diabetes owes
20% to the human pancreas and
80% to the human liver.
If you could, he said, unfatten
you liver, your chances of
acquiring diabetes lowers, or when
you do acquire it, maintaining
the disease becomes a whole lot
easier.
With further research on the
diet of a diabetic, I discovered a
daylong diet that suited my body
and that could provide me the
energy for the entire day. I brought
my carbohydrate intake almost to
zero.
My aim was to live on
vegetables. Of course, I did keep
protein in my diet.
At the same time, I changed the
style of my exercise. In addition
to just walking, I added free-hand
exercises to my daily routine. In a
week’s time, my sugar level came
to normal.
Initially, it was very difficult.
A lifestyle without carbohydrates
and lots of daily exercise would
require extreme dedication and
determination.
This lifestyle made me a social
loner. Adjusting myself to the
lifestyles of people around me, or
for that matter, society, became a
Herculean task for me. I tried to
maintain my lifestyle, a diabetic’s
lifestyle, which was completely
alien to society.
I discovered that society didn’t
have any idea about what diabetes
was, and how it can affect the
human body.
At the same time, society
wasn’t even ready to accept the
lifestyle of a diabetic. I started
facing extreme difficulty during
social gatherings and feasts.
At a wedding party, everyone
around me would feast on the
food while I would be an onlooker,
because the party organisers
hadn’t thought of keeping some
food items that were suitable for a
diabetic patient.
In fact, nobody in our social
environment thinks of making
arrangements for people with
blood sugar issues. The people
around me in those social and
official gatherings started teasing
me for not being able to be a part
of the majority.
For a long time, being a misfit
and receiving all that teasing, I
felt depressed. I had to explain my
lifestyle about a hundred times to
the people around me.
However, with my own
determination and amazing help
from my wife, I could go on with
my way of living.
I’m still continuing with the
same style of living. I thank her
for being sensitive towards my
condition.
If you just keep the problems of
diabetes aside, and think of living
with a healthy diet and exercise,
you can’t make a non-diabetic
understand how important these
things are for a human being.
And if you consider the number
of diabetics in Bangladesh, I see
them living in absolute darkness as
far as the disease is concerned. A
simple change in people’s lifestyle
could make a big difference to
their well-being. It’s a pity that no
one realises it until he or she picks
up the disease.
I was also like them when I
didn’t have diabetes. •
Ekram Kabir is a fiction writer.