Is it a poem? Is it a video? Yes, and it may be just the thing to have you see your diabetes -- upside down.
You may have seen this video but if not you must. Granted when I said that to a diabetes educator she almost scolded me saying it may well depend on where patients are in their diagnosis and their care, but if you've had diabetes long enough to take a cold, hard look at it, watch this. And you must watch the entire video or you won't get it. A month or so ago this video, "It Turned Everything Upside Down" was posted on YouTube by two young medical students as a project assignment for their FCE requirement. What is FCE you ask? It's a course requirement (Family Centered Experience) of first and second year medical students at the University of Michigan Medical School. FCE engages students in understanding the personal side of medicine by having them make several visits to patients' homes and meet with them and their families over a two-year period.
The value of this course work is, of course, medical students realize illness is not just a breakdown of the body but it can also be a breakdown of our spirit, our families, our dreams and our values: our lives in their greatest sense.
The clever creators of this video, Nicholas Dewyer and Jane Lee, both have type 1 diabetes and visited with two patients who have diabetes during their FCE experience.
Dewyer and Lee also wrote this about their video, “Given the same illness (diabetes) … different patients view their illnesses through their individual lenses from diagnosis forward. These views may change constantly with time. Using a single poem to convey both devastation and hope, we hoped to reflect the spectrum of attitudes that our patients shared with us from fear of amputation and death to gratitude for the changes made due to their illness.”
How we view our diabetes and whether we think there is anything to be gained from it is central to how we live with it and how we manage it. Personally, I've "chosen," and I say that very deliberately to try and find what diabetes has given me and I have found: strength, diligence, confidence, pride, great friends and now this work.
I won't tell you why this video is so very clever, but I will tell you to take three minutes and find out for yourself. It will make you think about the condition you live with every day, and maybe change something about how you think about it.