I got up at 7am to get ready for my diabetes centre appointment, i booked a taxi the night before as the hospital is too far away to walk at that time in the morning. I wanted to make sure that i had time to wake myself up, shower, grab some breakfast to take with me. If i rush in the morning my levels end up dropping because i get so flustered. Got to the hospital… a nurse walks out “Laura? Did you get a letter?” “yeah i got a letter with my appointment time 9am” “no a letter saying that because of the strike your Dr has to cover another ward”

thinking to myself- well clearly i didn’t get that letter otherwise i wouldnt be sat here this early in the morning when i’m in my final semester at uni and have other stuff to be getting on with. MY HEALTH IS IMPORTANT AND NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE. In January of this year i had over 30 hypo’s, mainly in the morning’s and i requested a diabetic hospital appointment, 3 months later they give me one, and it’s cancelled. Never mind. I’m used to dealing with my own problems. Sometimes though it’s hard trying to juggle and adjust everything, i don’t want future complications, i need advice and just someone to keep me on track.

Talking of mornings, my solo performance is the first to kick off the run of our final degree showcases. at 9.30am. I found this quite ironic as mornings are the worst time of day for me. I could just stay in bed and skype in my performance, after all i did want videos and projections. I could just be laying in bed slowly getting up, eating my breakfast, nice and slowly. The slower and less stressful the better for my levels.

i rang up the Ipswich diabetes centre to ask for my folder of details, my charts and graphs etc… i then had to ring another number to ask fro permission, they then sent me a form to fill out and return… £10 to receive my own medical details. It is scary to think that someone else knows more about my body than i do.

Tomorrow i am going to Lincoln diabetes centre for the first time… i never wanted to swap centres as ive grown up in the hands of the same team since i was 6, 15 years seeing the same people who know that i do drama and that i like to have my target level above 4 which is supposedly the normal target range 4-8. My levels have always ran higher. maybe i have a fear of going hypo… the feeling of not being in control of my body is horrible.

Tomorrow i will probably get another realisation that my levels are too high and i need to control them better.This never ending cycle will continue, one minute i’m back on track and then the next minute something new is happening in my life and they spiral out of control. It’s a balancing act. As a third year university student, i struggle to cope sometimes. Mentally i am fine, as ive been reading a lot of diabetics suffer with depression due to the pressures of being diabetic. Others may also look at me and think there is nothing wrong with me and that i am fine. Deep down though i struggle everyday to deal with stress of uni, eating healthy to lose weight, carb counting, going to the gym then going hypo and having to eat carbs or sugar, then feeling guilty because ive eaten something unhealthy.  Then i eat too much sugar which sends my levels too high. I then become drained. My day is ruined, i cant concentrate on uni work, i feel yuck and want to just sleep and wake up feeling refreshed.

Tomorrow is a new day. I won’t know what it will bring but hopefully going to the hospital will enocurage me to get back on track to reduce my risk of future complications. The main things i can visually remember about the diabetes centre back home are all of the leaflets spread out across the tables, in the racks, stuck on notice boards. All the empty packets of food and drinks with details of carb counting all over the notice boards too. I want to play on this idea of the audience’s minds being over loaded with information as i always am. Therefore, i have gathered as many leaflets as i can with all the different things linked with being diabetic, from getting a tattoo, to sex, to travelling abroad, things that most people wouldn’t even think about as a problem for me.

Over the last week I have been recording my friends and asked them 6 questions about type 1 diabetes. a lot of the responses were similar, there was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of nervous laughter. All of the people i interviewed i see in my day to day life and have been a part of my university life of three years. The most interesting thing I got from doing these recordings is that everyone seemed to laugh at their answers. They were guessing. They were unsure of the correct answer. This is strange when thinking about it as that is in a sense what diabetes is metaphorically like. I know being diabetic is not a laughing matter but I don’t want my piece to be completely serious. If my friends are in the audience they need to be entertained somehow. I can’t just fire facts at them and lecture them, I need to engage with them and the public in ways they will find interesting, amusing yet serious. I am however going to have to pick the answers I think best sum up each question, from the complete wrong answers, (what is type 1 diabetes? it’s when you eat too much chocolate), to funny answers and also some which are very accurate such as the detailed descriptions from my biology student friend.

No one would know what to do if I collapsed on the floor it seems, so I may just cut out that question. I’m not here to give a first aid course in a performance, but I want the audience to know that there is a lot more that diabetes involves so they cant “just give me sugar” or “inject me” if I was to collapse.  “Call an ambulance” which is the correct answer is also an annoying answer, even my housemate of 2 years and best friend doesn’t really know how to look after me, not that I would expect her to be able to save my life because I almost walked away from a diabetic I saw collapsed in a shopping centre- thinking he was just a drunk man on the floor. It’s scary. No one really understands what goes on inside my body. Not even I do. I can only take my life experiences and facts and try to tie them all together to create a performance.

1- Dom- one of my closest friends and co performer.

2- Mary- another good friend who is also my co-worker at a b&b.

3- Rosie- another good friend who i used to exercise with once a week.

4- Lily- another type 1 diabetic friend.

5- Harry- a friend who i am not as close too but have been on nights out with.

6- Nick- performed alongside Nick in peter pan for a whole month in an intensive christmas show.

7- Joe- a third year Biology student and friend

8- China- Best friend and Housemate of 2 years.

9- Tom-  co performer and in my solo performance class.

What is Type One Diabetes?

That’s when your pancreas doesn’t do stuff. You don’t produce your own sugars or insulin or something like that so you have to inject it.

Urm omg, I know that there is 2 types, I think type 1 is the hereditary one but I don’t know in all honesty

Urm where you need a lot of sugar… wait no… I’m trying to think what you do… urm you have low blood sugar so you have to have a lot more sugar than normal people?

Type 1 diabetes is… I dont know how to describe it. Its er its er like a condition, its er a disease I suppose that like you can have for the rest of your life unless they find a cure… it’s a disease that affects our everyday life.

It’s something you can’t eat chocolate with but I’m not really sure

Urm Type 1 diabetes is a disease urm and it’s to do with sugar and it’s the type that is not super dangerous .

Type one diabetes is where the beta cells of the….in the pancreas are deficient in either recognising insulin or producing insulin there’s an inbuilt intolerance which is brought on its irrespective of diet or health or lifestyle and requires treatment such as insulin injections on a regular basis to maintain blood sugar levels.

Erm its when the pancreas stops creating insulin that’s all I know.

Where your pancreas doesn’t work properly and it doesn’t produce enough insulin so you have to have insulin artificially inserted in you

“…before the sun sets on her 16th birthday, she shall prick her finger – on the spindle of a spinning wheel – and DIE”! (Maleficent)

Studying Sleeping Beauty in my other module Staging the Supernatural makes me always think about pricking my own finger and bleeding. When Aurora pricks her finger she is put under a curse and sleeps for 100 years. when i prick my finger i do not sleep for 100 years, which would be nice and relaxing, however when i prick my finger it results in my every day curse- the curse of being diabetic. I can never rest. I have to prick my finger every day, whenever i eat carbs, or feel symptoms of being hypo or hyper, so at least 4 times a day i would say i prick my finger.

The use of the blood vessel type lights filling the room will also add a sense of a curse. I am under the control of a disease.

After going to the gym and eating lunch i decided to test my sugar levels again to check what they were. they were 18.3… it warned me that my levels were over my target range. I then input the amount of carbohydrates i had eaten, i guessed 20 carbs for an apple but who knows really the exact amount?

if my levels were perfect ie 8.0mml and i hadnt been to the gym and i ate an apple that was 20g of carbs i would inject 2 units of insulin as i believe my machine is set up as 1 unit to every 10 grams of carbs.

Due to me going to the gym in the morning i then told my machine that i had done exercise which has been set up to minus 10% of insulin, due to the risk of a delayed sugar level drop later in the day, which normally happens. Even the morning after i can have low sugar levels as an on set from exercise the day before. It then told me to give myself  2 units of insulin. It calculates this by my body’s sensitivity to how many units of insulin bring my sugar levels down by what, and how long it takes my body to react to the given insulin. I’m pretty sure its all just an estimate. my life is one big guessing game. In my performance i want the audience to understand not just how i test my sugar levels and control them but mainly why. what happens if i don’t test and don’t inject?