For my twenty-first birthday, I received a hip flask, a vibrator, and Type 1 diabetes. One present I used often, one I hardly touched, and the third, of course, used me.
No. No, no—no, I can’t have this on me all the time! No one has ever even seen me naked! Now they’ll be turned off when they do.
If. If they do.
What a waste of pristine skin, to have an adhesive circle slapped on my stomach 24/7. What a defect in my silhouette, to look like I keep a cell phone in each of my pants pockets.
But it is indeed far more convenient. The alternative to an insulin pump—the choice of insulin delivery for most insured Type 1’s, who are diagnosed at ages young enough still to care about what their peers think of them—is self-injection with a shot four times a day. This was how I lived the first few months, April to August, college kid to camp counselor: slipping into bathroom stalls before every meal, fearing someone would notice the slender needles I discarded upon my exit and call me out for shooting up in the ladies’. At least I didn’t have to carry a vial; pre-filled syringes were far more discreet, looking for all the world like EpiPens and without fear of breakage, the startling crash of glass, the unsettling smell of liquified Band-Aids. With syringes I could remain relatively inconspicuous to the world at large, if not to myself—when I mis-aimed and poked muscle instead of fat, a bruise would bloom like an ink stain, a tattoo I never asked for and that no laser could erase.
But despite the changes (admittedly minor) that it necessitated in my outward appearance, I was glad to go on the pump—the way one “goes on” the pill, knowing it will bring regulation, convenience, some measure of membership in an unfairly exclusive club you’re still glad to have the option of joining. And there my secrets collided, a slap in my twenty-first-century face: diagnosed with a defunct pancreas at nearly-twenty-one, and still an unkissed virgin.
That was the hardest betrayal. My body gave up before I had properly used it.
I was a healthy child, an adolescent rarely sick. Sick at heart always, of course, as most quiet, bookish, jealous girls make themselves to be, but I suffered no broken bones, no blood clots, nary a cavity. I was not impulsive or reckless, but neither was I garrulous or inviting. Plagued by the sort of self-esteem issues that send middle-schoolers to counseling, I bemoaned my lack of a boyfriend’s affection while hating myself all the more for doing so. Wasn’t I intelligent, independent, a Jo March for the modern age? I didn’t need a Laurie to provide the warmth and thrill I longed for! Besides, loneliness was the fate of writers, practically a prerequisite. And yet instead of adventuring on my own, I buried my head in the sand and in books, spending each high-school study hall and most collegiate weekends in the library, reading every sentence of others’ writing and perfecting every word of my own.
My father said I intimidated boys with the brain I couldn’t and wouldn’t shut off, though at times I thought my plain face should have made me approachable. A portrait of the artist as a young woman: if I couldn’t be captivating, I would be clever, contemplative, patiently awaiting the partner in search of someone with whom to match wits. Hermione Granger, Ella Enchanted. Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood. Cassandra capturing the castle, the Bard’s indomitable Beatrice. These were women always, unflinchingly, themselves. Perhaps not pretty enough for the modern romcoms I watched with my friends, they nevertheless found companions, arms to hold them, whispers to make them blush—and gave up no part of themselves save the walls that had kept them solitary. At thirteen I read their stories as my classmates coupled up; at sixteen I shied away from infrequent advances as I studied long and hard. At nineteen boys paid me no mind, so my mind stayed with books. I curled into myself instead of into the forearms I coveted from across the classroom.
Perhaps it was prophetic that I had never feared childhood vaccinations and enjoyed giving blood; instead of screaming, I giggled whenever a nurse stuck a needle in my arm. Now I have one in me at all times, the size of the lead in a mechanical pencil, held in place by medical tape, obtrusive only when I bend over at the wrong angle or am tickled, hugged, caressed in the wrong spot. My pump is my partner now, microchip plus reservoir, the size of a pager and always in my pocket. It is my date to every meal, helps me make decisions, nudges gently when it needs tending to, brings constancy and ease to my day, watches over me at night.
But it is hard plastic, not soft skin. Its brain does not intrigue me, its touch hardly comforts me.
This is what you must do to stabilize your life. You’ll only feel a pinch.
And it’s true: it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t even look overtly medical, but for the tubing reminiscent of an IV drip that winds from hip to torso. In the first months of diagnosis, spring semester of my junior year, as I floundered ten hours from my family in the depths of why me? why now?, I both folded my fear into the tangle of Ulysses and returned again and again to the gym with a fervor I never had before. Around eight o’clock each night I left behind my work and my books and my frustrated weeping and let the misery of sweat overcome the misery of sudden complication. My head shut up as my feet pounded and my heart beat fast. In the fall, as I begrudingly came to terms with this new lifestyle, I wore the pump clipped to the elastic of my shorts like a sheriff’s badge. This is what I have earned. This is a sign of my strength.
But it was also a sign of yet another failing. Without a functioning pancreas, I was, I assumed, even less appealing. Can’t eat that, have to carry my meter, can’t keep drinking, gotta test my blood, hold on while I ride out this low, nope, not “high” as in stoned, sorry that I shouldn’t come along tonight—you know, just in case. I figured I was an annoyance to friends and strangers alike, as if this small new fact about me, discovered at such an age of identity crises to begin with, turned me into someone even less normal. College is full of carbs and booze and irregular eating schedules and spontaneous adventuring—and I was taught they were toxic to me now, that I had to be ever vigilant, that I wasn’t allowed to surrender my rationality to rashness. I returned as a senior—my last chance at debauchery—with an insulin-dispensing box tied to my stomach and the certainty that this wasn’t going away. All the minutes at the gym, all the tomes on my shelves, all the nights I chose to stay in rather than go out couldn’t change the fact that I had an incurable chronic illness, that it would get worse, that it brought frustrations every day, that part of me was already dead.
The semester I was diagnosed, though I didn’t know it then, was the semester I met a companion of real flesh and blood. At first I was blind to his attentions, was focused on schoolwork and at last creating a social life, had already bitterly given up on romance in the melodramatic way of girls with glasses who have read too much Plath. But eleven months after I sat in my rural college’s ill-equipped health clinic disbelievingly being asked what I had eaten for breakfast—Your thyroid is fine, but your blood sugar…—I was back there again, asking for an oral contraceptive prescription with confidence my second-grade self would have marveled at, with assurance my lonely freshman self would have loved. The nurses had grown fond and proud of me; no student they knew had ever been slammed with such a disease without warning signs, and they thought I handled it bravely. If they had seen the tears in the pharmacy, the punching of pillows, the craters of pinpricks in my fingertips, the hurtling of test strips across a bathroom, the detritus of infusion sets ripped from my torso, the way I finally, an experience long saved, uttered fuck, they might have thought otherwise.
But by then it was no matter. A boy—a good boy, a smart boy, a funny boy—liked me—had told me so!—and that made everything lighter.
Yes I said yes. Once I gave into my own reciprocated yearning and found the guts to tell him so, I felt more Molly Bloom than Stephen Dedalus. I could be myself completely—intelligence and insulin and all. My stomach, bereft a neighboring organ though it was, was colonized by butterflies instead of envy and anger. The literary words of love that inhabited my brain poured out at last, flirtatious and fond; they only made him want me stronger, hold me tighter. I allowed my fingers to stop typing and start touching. I read less and learned more.
He didn’t care about the circles of tape and plastic around my navel, the faded bruises, the extra fat, the drops of blood tested before every meal. The maze of my mind attracted him and the bounty of my heart surprised me.
And so in time my pump gained its own companion, for excited five-minute walks across campus. A miniature robot and a latex condom nestled together in the seams of my jeans, the sort of cartoon love story a forward-thinking sex educator might show a sleepy class. Hesitant at first, my hunger heated up. I found cravings long buried beneath my pin-cushioned skin and I let my body yield. I inhabited it without apprehension and, for the first time, thought to give it thanks.
Twenty-one is strangely old for a Type 1 diagnosis, just as it is for first coupling. When I was pantsless, pocketless, my pump clip became a hip holster and suddenly I was Lara Croft, Bedroom Raider. When on my twenty-second birthday the boy told me he loved me, tears of a different sort sprang forth. My imperfection became the most minor of inconveniences.
