It's now or never

I think this is the right time for me to start blogging. In the past few days I have just  been getting more and more upset until yesterday my unhappiness was hardly bearable.  I guess it is not just diabetes, but it’s a mixture of being extremely tired, missing my dogs so badly, and of course, the diabetes.  

It's now or never -- I feel like I need to talk about my diabetic life, or I am going to explode. 

It’s a bit more than a  year now that I’ve been diagnosed with diabetes type 1, and I still struggle to cope with people at work. This used to be true before the diabetes, but now is getting more and more difficult. I am a PhD student in Computer Science, and at the moment I am writing up my dissertation. I have only two months left to finish, as in August I am starting a new job. This means that every single day -- Monday to Sunday-- I am in my office at least 9 to 6. For a year I have been sharing an open space with about 20 other students. After 4 years of PhD, I really believe that computer science tends to attract uncommon personalities -- me included, but that’s another story! 

Now, here’s the problem. There is one office mate that is very friendly but totally childlike,  as if he cannot distinguish between good and  bad. He doesn’t seem to be wanting to be mean, but he easily hurts people. 

In a way he hurts me as well, as he talks of my diabetes as a joke.  Not so long ago he used to bring back to the office  desserts from the refectory. Every single day he used to stop at my desk and  show me these desserts, and say how nice they were, and that I had to eat one as well. That was in a period of my diabetes where  I was managing without insulin -- I had a very early diagnosis, or maybe it's a LADA -- so I was following a very strict diet with no treats at all. My reaction was then to ignore him completely, even if we were sharing  a partition.  I started talking to him again when a new office mate joined our partition, but things haven't changed much. I cannot recall how many times I have explained him how things work and how my life has changed. Nothing, now that the weather is getting nicer, he keeps asking  me if I want to get ice cream. He still gets so excited when I measure my BG, and says it's unbelievable that I prick my fingers every day. He's even asked me to see how I do my injections (of course I did say no),  but what I can’t stand is the tone of  his voice.  

I know he means well, but how much does he hurts me, he doesn’t know.  It’s as if he is a living reminder of my diabetes.  But it's not what he says, it's how he says it that really hurts me. Everything is a joke, everything is not real, as if I'm doing what I do just to amuse him. I know this is so stupid from me and that I shouldn't care about what he says, but it's not that easy yet. Not everyday. Every step forward I make, I do a step backward.