He had a large carb footprint
Oct 26, 2009 11:41 AM, Jeff Ryan
Having me — a diabetic guy — as their main product consultant probably wouldn't be all bad for the good people at Hostess Snack Cakes. Now before you fall into the massive chasm created by that leap in logic, sit back and try to follow along.
Thirty-eight years ago, I was diagnosed with Type I diabetes. I don't remember everything about it, because I was only three at the time, but I do remember quite a bit. My parents told me that I'd get to go to someplace called La Crosse for a few days. The how and why of it don't register with me today, but I do remember that I was deeply troubled by the idea. How was The Chairman going to get the cows milked and the corn combined if I wasn't around to pepper him with questions in the barn and the cab?
How those cows were going to be fed if I was stuck at someplace called "La Crosse" was beyond me, but my concerns didn't seem to matter to anyone. I made the trip anyway. It turned out to be a lot less fun than milking cows and combining corn.
The first thing I noticed at this hospital place was that they seemed to be big on needles. We had vaccinated pigs and calves at home, but everything I knew about needles was that they absolutely did not go IN ME! No one in La Crosse was familiar with that concept, it appeared. They'd jab me with needles a couple times a day. What seemed especially cruel was when they'd jab me just to watch me bleed. Then the maniacs would swipe it from me! How barbaric is THAT?
Turns out the needle fascination was contagious. When we got back home, now my folks were jabbing me all the time, too, but at least they weren't slapping an ear tag in me while they were at it like they did with the livestock. On the good side of the equation, it did seem like a new wrinkle had been thrown into my life. In the middle of the morning and the afternoon, I would get to have a snack of some kind. It was usually some pretty good stuff, too, like a cookie or a bar, or something I felt should form the base of the food pyramid.
After another year or two, there was school. I was forced to get on a bus and not stay at home to help The Chairman all day long like I had done for my whole life up to that point. Since food had become a major issue for me, and my intake of it seemed to be monitored a bit more stringently than in the old days before that whole La Crosse adventure, school just seemed to complicate the equation even more. I would be forced to carry a snack with me to school each day. Not one, but two snacks. One was to be eaten in the middle of the morning and the other one was to be eaten in the middle of the afternoon. I would later figure out that the long-acting insulin I took would usually cause my blood sugar to crater around 10:30 and 3:00 each day.
When you're in kindergarten, whatever your mother tells you is gospel. When she gives you directions, you would be wise to follow those directions to the letter. My mission was pretty clear to me: "Eat your snack every day at the appointed time. If you don't, you will get sick. Really sick."
Keep in mind, this was the early 1970s. We didn't have all of the technology we have today for quick, easy and accurate blood sugar testing. If I started to get shaky, that meant my blood sugar was low and I probably needed something to eat, preferably from the dessert class of food.
There was one particular day in the spring of my kindergarten year when the snow was melting and the playground was a mess. It was still decent enough that we got to go outside for recess, though. I went to school in nearby Ridgeway, a booming metropolis of about 300 people. We were basically all farm kids. Even the couple of city kids from town weren't nearly as urbanized as today's kids are. Farm kids are farm kids, though, and in the dairy part of the country like northeast Iowa, the majority of the parents of my classmates milked cows. Farm kids tended to show up in some pretty functional clothes worthy of a farm where livestock reside.
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