Haidee S. Merritt is a talent unlike any other. Her cartoons are little bursts and fits of humored and discomfit living with diabetes. She sticks a childlike tongue out at diabetes – for all of us. And why not? Haidee got type 1 at the age of 2. And I will tell you, living with retinopathy, Haidee’s dedication to this work is all the more spectacular.

About  her new book, Fingerpricks, she told me, “Before putting this book together I’d never noticed two of the re-occurring themes in my FingerPricks™ series. I would call these themes the undertow. One is the presence of fear in a diabetic’s life (historically, this diabetic). The other is the importance of numbers. Believe me, no ones more surprised than me; it certainly wasn’t intentional. Overall I see the book as a scramble of comedy, sadness, honesty, sarcasm and truth. A lot like my life.”

I asked Haidee to tell me which of her cartoons in Fingerprints is her favorite. This one:

Of which she said, “This still brings a smile to my face. It touches on the self-awareness—and self-absorption—that comes with a diabetes diagnosis. One character questions our small role in the universe while the other focuses solely on himself, as if the universe revolves around him. For most of us, it’s easy to pick the diabetic: the one complaining about high blood sugar. Personally, diabetes keeps me so focused on myself and my needs that it’s shamefully easy to lose perspective.

As for me, I picked two of my favorites:

For me this says it all. Diabetes is something you truly can’t understand unless you also have it. We are living in two different worlds, and that truth is also unseen. This one below was just so true for the recent experiment my husband and I have conducted sharing my blood sugar numbers from my CGM.  I wrote about it here:

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