Antisocial Diabetes; or, The Perils of Pasta

This post is by Caroline!

I’m an alumna of Alpha Phi Omega, a service fraternity, and since graduating from college have joined the APO volunteer staff in NYC. So I had the pleasure of spending the weekend before last far from the concrete jungle, at a Boy Scout camp in Massachusetts, to hang out with my fellow brothers and take part in a staff retreat.

(Before you start questioning my sanity or my spellcheck: coed fraternities! They exist! And please, please don’t be like that creeper in college who looked me up and down when I told him I was pledging APO and said, “You? But you’re too pretty to be a brother.”)

I had a great time at the retreat. I saw old friends and made new ones, I learned more about the work I’d be doing with awesome college students, and just unplugged from normal life and its stressors. Well. Except for one.

Diabetes does not play nice with APO, I have realized. Witness the important executive board meetings I had to skip out on to go fix a kinked infusion set; the brotherhood retreat I drove back from early, in tears, because my BG was on an hellacious rollercoaster; the conference where I had to enlist no less than four other brothers to help me scout for insulin on the streets of Newark (there were a lot of drug dealing jokes for that one). Oh, and that service project on a farm when I was low and crawled into the backseat of someone’s car, only to inspire panic that I had gone shuffling, zombie-like, into the cornfields, never to return. Not to mention all those meetings with a tantalizing array of chips and donut holes, the formals with completely SWAG-worthy* dinners, the end-of-semester parties that would make even Dionysius envious…..you get the point.

Is it because Alpha Phi Omega was a pretty significant part of my life throughout college, and remains so after graduation– and so it’s more prominent? Is it because I find myself in a variety of situations in the name of the APO– and therefore more opportunities for havoc? Is it because founder Frank Reed Horton, from beyond the grave, has decided that my blood sugars go against his cardinal principles of leadership, friendship, and service– and is accordingly out to get me? I don’t know. But the typical tensions between social life and optimal diabetes management are always magnified when it comes to APO, and last weekend was no exception. When we were all sitting around the campfire in the dead of night, having heartfelt discussions about the future, was I going to fumble all the way back to the camp kitchen to test before s’mores and bedtime? No. Was I going to somehow cart along an entire weekend’s worth of my own food in a cooler, just because I didn’t know what was on the menu? No. Was I going to skip out on important workshops to go running, because my BG’s were creeping up? No.

I did okay, actually. The highs and lows were nothing that I wasn’t able to handle. I got a lot of concerned looks and questions on Saturday, when I was slumped over, chin in hands…..but that had more to do with getting five hours of sleep on a creaky cot than my blood sugar. But then came Sunday, and the suggestion that we stop at an Olive Garden in CT on the way home for lunch. Multiple bros jumped on board, including everyone in the car I was riding in. Olive Garden! I thought to myself. I heard that their food is really good! And I get to hang out with my brothers for a little while longer! It may not be optimal, but I can handle it.

Little did I realize that walking into that restaurant was like diving through flaming hoops into a military obstacle course.

Navigating the obstacle course started as soon as we sat down. Everyone started ordering sodas and cocktails—should I join in? It was pretty easy to resist and stick with water instead. But then the waitress brought out the basket of breadsticks. Oh goodness. It was almost 3 PM, and we had all eaten breakfast at 8:30 AM. And warm, buttery, cheesy breadsticks are alluring even if you haven’t forsaken food for hours. So I had one. But then we ordered dipping sauces. So I had another. Cranking up the pump, I checked out the entrees. Everyone was rhapsodizing about the never-ending pasta bowl. Maybe I should get something a little less carbtastic, I thought. Then I checked out the prices….too bad that anything less carbtastic was twice as expensive as the never-ending pasta. Eurgh.

I wanted to chow down at Olive Garden like everyone else. I wanted to hold on to the feeling of vacation just a little longer, to eat without care and to savor the volley of jokes and conversations between eleven friends from across New England, before we would bid farewell until December and return to the real world. So I got the never-ending pasta bowl. And the salad. And those damn breadsticks! More tempting than a cheap hooker to a sailor on shore leave! I gave myself plenty of insulin, but with all that food, it was more SWAG than anything.

And alas, did I pay for it. I passed out in the backseat less than five minutes after getting in the car. Almost two hours later, I awoke groggily with a wicked case of sewer mouth** and immediately thought several obscenities that should not be printed here. I tested and out came……375. Highest I’ve been in a long time. The number of obscenities doubled. Worst of all, I had nothing to cure the sewer mouth– no water, no gum, no nothing except…..a candy bar. Which I ate. Wise choice, I know, but you don’t know how nasty high-BG-breath feels until you try it. (Don’t.)

My sugar didn’t come down for many, many long hours, completely sapping any plans of productivity I had upon getting home. Like packing. (Did I mention that I moved two days after this weekend trip? Another wise choice there.)

I was pissed off at myself. I knew that, with a little more discipline, I could have avoided that spike. But that would have involved navigating that military obstacle course in a totally different way. Sure, I could have avoided being burned by the flaming hula hoops. But what about getting stuck in the mud pit? That would have been 10 bucks gone just to have chicken instead of pasta (likely drenched in some secretly carb-filled sauce, anyways). How about getting cut on the barbed wire at the top of the climbing wall– or, feeling the sting of sitting out and forlornly drinking lemon water as I watch my friends eat and have a great time? And it’s not like I could argued my entire car out of Olive Garden in favor of, oh, Burger King…..nor would I have wanted to.

How do we make the tradeoffs? When something as simple as lunch is fraught with complication, how do we strike the balance? When should I choose between friends and finances, carbs and control, post-prandial BG targets and pasta? Our endocrinologists constantly reassure us that we are entitled to normal lives and shouldn’t warp our entire lives around diabetes….and that’s that. We’re left to chart the middle ground between the extremes, the harmonious balance that is still often tricky and treacherous. When am I going to get it right? When will diabetes start cooperating with APO– not to mention the rest of my social life?

I really, really hope the answer is not, “When Olive Garden breadsticks stop being delicious.” Because then I just give up.

*SWAG: Scientific Wild-Ass Guess. As in, “Gee, this slab of bacon Nutella cake is delicious, I have NO idea how many grams of carbohydrate are in it but I’m going to give myself 5 units of insulin because, um, it’s……55 grams of carbohydrate! Totally!”
**I really hope you clicked that link. It actually contains a recipe for bacon Nutella cake.¬