he did. And, at the time, he had a very strict diet because of the type of insulin he was taking,” Miller said.
“I also made them prick their fingers when he had to test his blood sugar. Obviously, they couldn’t do insulin injections, but living like him for the day taught them what he had to deal with,” she said. “It helped them understand.”
Like Miller’s daughters, many people struggle to understand what life is really like for someone living with diabetes — whether it’s a diagnosis of type 1 or type 2 diabetes.
William Polonsky, president of the Behavioral Diabetes Institute, said, “So many adults have said to me, ‘The day I was diagnosed with diabetes, people started acting like I lost IQ points. They started speaking slower and louder, and were telling me what to do.'”
Polonsky said that people may assume that you have diabetes because of something you did. “There’s a subtle form of blame and shame associated with diabetes. As if the fact that you