Tag: diabetes

I don’t get this a lot, thankfully, largely because I don’t end up eating around non-family much these days. My usual response when I do/have gotten it is, “I can eat anything in moderation.”

Because I can. If eating any sugar at all would kill me, I’d be way screwed because most foods have some amount of some kind of sugar in them. But diabetes Does Not Work That Way. It’s sad, the number of people in the world who are under the impression that it does. When I hadn’t been diagnosed for long, I had a classmate’s mom–who was not a medical professional or nutritionist–try to “educate” me and my mother about what veggies are or are not loaded with carbs (hint: tomatoes and carrots are not that loaded in carbs; potatoes, on the other hand, are).

So yes, people who ask this question: You may mean well, but it’s really, really annoying, and frankly none of you business.

You know what I hate

insertnicknamehere:

The general misconception that eating too much sugar gives you diabetes. It really annoys me when people find out that I have diabetes, a lot of times I have heard “oh, well, did you eat a lot of sugar?” or “Really, but you’re not overweight.” 

I mean, it’s all right that you don’t know what actually causes diabetes, but do you really think saying that someone shouldn’t have eaten so much sugar or doesn’t look like they are overweight is gonna make someone feel good? Didn’t think so. 

I wish the misconception could just go away. No, diabetes is not caused by eating to much sugar. Yes, people are more susceptible to type II diabetes if they are overweight, but even then, the disease is still linked to certain genes, so it is an inheritable factor. 

In addition, Type I diabetes isn’t even associated with your diet as well. It can also be inherited, and is caused by the body’s own immune system attacking the beta cells that produce insulin in the pancreas because it believes it is foreign. 

Diabetes is a disease, and spreading the misconceptions stated earlier isn’t going to help out people with diabetes. We deal with enough pricks a day already, we don’t need to deal with any more with these mindless comments. 

And I know some people state those comments because they actually believe they are true, which is okay, I just wish overall there could be more education about this disease, even for people who don’t have to deal with it. 

My sister [Linda Wallem, co-creator of Nurse Jackie] took me out to lunch before Season 2 and said, “We’re thinking about incorporating your struggles with diabetes into Thor’s character, specifically about losing your vision. How would you feel about that? We want to make it authentic, and we’re going to check with you every step of the way about how to portray this.”

Initially, the thought of reliving it all–thinking about having a scene where Jackie figures out I’m blind in my left eye, that I’ve been hiding it for everybody, and then another scene where I actually take out my eyepiece and show it to Jackie–the thought of doing that in front of 3 million strangers was horrifying. But it took half a second to realize, yes, of course I have to do this, because the challenge as an actor to do something so personal will be amazing. But also, in the bigger sense, I remembered all those years of not having a diabetic character on television to look up to or relate to, and I realized I’d just been given the chance to be that person. I never dreamed in a million years my acting career would lead to an opportunity like this.

actor Stephen Wallem in “Playing His Part,” an interview in the December 2011 issue of Diabetes Forecast