Borrowing Time: Growing Up With Juvenile Diabetes

by Pat Covelli

Stricken with juvenile diabetes at the age of ten, Covelli, now in his thirties, describes how he eventually came to terms with his condition and learned to push the limitations it imposed to their farthest bounds

160 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1979

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this quick and enjoyable read (he was a writer), Covelli brings us back to an earlier era in type 1 diabetes management, when injected insulin itself was thought to cause the (usually inevitable) complications of type 1 diabetes, everyone with diabetes was considered a "carrier" of the genes that caused the disease, a grand total of six researchers around the world were researching complications, the only available insulin was animal-derived, and it was an open question whether or not tighter control of blood sugar resulted in better long-term outcomes.

Some of his experiences--including gruesome encounters with infected wisdom teeth and a plantar wart--are much, much less likely these days, but he also spends a lot of time reflecting on the experience of living with type 1 diabetes, and some of his thoughts are as true today as they were then: "Diabetes is more than a physical disease. It is a long journey to the conquest of fear." (p. 22) "I have dreamed of seeing a few simple words printed on a medicine label: Specifically formulated for diabetics. Abandon caution for once in your life and relax." (p. 105) "I was learning to forget myself, but the diabetic mind does not stray for long." (p. 121) Throughout the book, he wrestles with both his physical symptoms and the psychological experience of having diabetes. During a time when the experience of having diabetes wasn't discussed (much less online), even among family members who shared the diagnosis (as he found out), publishing this book was bold.

Covelli died in 1998 at age 44. This is longer than he was "supposed" to live, according to statistics of the time. Surely his periods of self-neglect and poor medical care contributed to this--but knowledge about and technology for diabetes at this time were primitive, so the odds were not in his favor to begin with. I imagine that, in the 1980s, this book showed a lot of people with diabetes that they were not alone, and for that, we should be grateful that Covelli devoted some of his limited time on earth to writing it.
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Read as part of the Diabetes Memoir Project, in which I am reading my way through 8 commercially published (i.e., not self-published) biographies/memoirs of people with type 1 diabetes (i.e., not parents of children with type 1 diabetes) treated with injections/insulin pump (i.e., not a transplant), in chronological order by the person’s date of diagnosis. The titles are:
- Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle by Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg (Elizabeth was diagnosed in 1918 at age 11)
- Borrowing Time: Growing Up with Juvenile Diabetes by Pat Covelli (diagnosed in 1964 at age 10)
- Growing Up Again: Life, Loves, and Oh Yeah, Diabetes by Mary Tyler Moore (diagnosed in 1969 at age 33)
- Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on a Life with Diabetes by Lisa Roney (diagnosed in 1972 at age 11)
- Needles: A Memoir of Growing Up with Diabetes by Andie Dominick (diagnosed in 1980 at age 9)
- Not Dead Yet: My Race Against Disease: From Diagnosis to Dominance by Phil Southerland (diagnosed in 1982 at age 7 months)
- The Sugarless Plum: A Ballerina’s Triumph Over Diabetes by Zippora Karz (diagnosed in 1987 at age 21)
- The Insulin Express: One Backpack, Five Continents, and the Diabetes Diagnosis that Changed Everything by Oren Liebermann (diagnosed in 2014 at age 31)