A cartoonist in interesting times
Author, illustrator, and cartoonist Sarah Laing has type 1 diabetes. During Level 4 in 2020, she posted regular comic strips online about her experience.
“I think it gave me structure,” says Sarah of her Covid-19 cartoon series. “A sense that I was making order out of chaos. Also I wanted to remember this experience. I wanted to get it down. This is historic, monumental. We are living in interesting times.”
Sarah’s comic strips often explore her life as a solo mum and a freelancer living with type 1. She was diagnosed in 1982. “I was staying at my grandparents’ house during school holidays, and I was just about to turn 9.” She noticed something was different. “Watching TV, I’d have to run to the loo during every ad break, and after washing my hands I’d drink copiously from the tap and yet I was still thirsty.
“When my mother came to pick me up, my grandmother, who’d been a nurse, said she should take me to the doctor.”
Sarah’s mother took her as soon as possible – on the morning of Sarah’s 9th birthday. “The doctor suggested it was probably type 1 diabetes and said I’d have to return for tests later in the day.
“I had a party planned, so my mother asked him if I could eat any of the treats. He said yes, but that it was the last time, and I’d probably have to go to hospital that night.
“I was then sent to sit in the car while the doctor talked to my mother alone. I remember crying without really knowing what I was crying about – I just knew that it was serious.”
Her birthday party felt gloomy and pointless. ”I ate the cake like it was like the last supper, then went to hospital that night. I was in a room with a girl having her tonsils out, another girl in an oxygen tent with cystic fibrosis, and a boy in traction.
“I quite liked being in hospital. I’d been caught early so I wasn’t very ill, unlike another girl who was rushed in unconscious while I was there. My blood sugars quickly stabilised, and I was taught how to test my urine, how to inject insulin into an orange, and how to count my carbs.
“I got to ride around the ward in a wheelchair, practicing doughnuts and wheelies, and go to the hospital school and draw an owl. I remember the experience as fun, although I think it was scary too.
“The biggest adjustment was once I came out of hospital and realised I’d have to deal with this for the rest of my life, even though in the 80s they promised that a cure was just around the corner.”
Type 1 in the 80s and 90s
Sarah says, “I was diagnosed in the strict days when diabetics weren’t allowed jam or cake, and we were to have four portions for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with snacks in between. Lots of snacks!”
These were also the days of using syringes, rather than pens or pumps for insulin injection. “I didn’t use to tell teachers that I was diabetic. It was on my school info form, I’m sure, but I tried to keep it a secret as I was embarrassed about being different.
“One day in science class, I accidentally dropped a syringe on the floor. A few hours later, someone came to my form class door and asked that I come to the office. I found myself in the deputy principal’s office with five other girls. The deputy principal was wearing gloves and had some tweezers. She said, Girls, something very serious has come to our attention and the consequences are going to be grave. We take drug use very seriously here. She lifted up an object with the tweezer – my insulin syringe. Who does this belong to? she asked.
“Um, it’s mine, I said. I’m diabetic.
“Oh! Oh dear. Did we know this? Had you told the school?
“I think it’s on my enrolment form.”
Well, in that case ... come through!”
“I was taken to the principal’s office where she was sitting with two other people – counsellors from the local drug and alcohol centre. The deputy principal explained that I was, in fact, diabetic. There was laughter, and there were apologies. The drug counsellors looked a little deflated.”
Sarah says she’s always tried to stay on top of her diabetes, but with varying degrees of success. “I think I went through a bad patch in the 90s, in my 20s, after I left home and had to feed myself. Everything went a bit skew-wiff.
“That was when humalog was introduced too, but, when I was first put onto it, I wasn’t given a basal long-acting insulin so my levels were constantly roller- coastering. I returned to Actrapid, which didn’t really act rapidly at all.
Finding balance
“I learnt how to keep tight control of my diabetes when I fell pregnant at 29.” Sarah was working overseas at the time. “I was taken under the wing of a New York City diabetes nurse educator. She gave me a rigorous education and put me on a pump. From then on, I became a little OCD about it.”
These days, however, Sarah has given up the pump. “Too many breakdowns, and too much feeling tethered to a device. But I still try to keep tight control with frequent injections, and I now have the wonderful but expensive Libre.”
Hypos remain a challenge. In the first week of lockdown, “I was doing the family shopping in the supermarket, and I could feel my levels dropping.”
She was trying her hardest to stick to hygiene rules. “I couldn’t take off my gloves or have any sugar until I’d finished shopping. Lucky for me, I don’t slip into unconsciousness very easily. I held it together as best I could until I’d packed my groceries into the boot and removed my gloves, and then I scoffed some gold bears.”
Day to day, Sarah tries not to eat a lot of sugar or refined carbohydrate, but lockdown has been testing her. “It’s hard! I’m doing lots of baking with my daughter and trying not to eat the baking as I know it will make me go high.
“Cheese is my favourite treat food. I can indulge and not worry about blood sugars. I like making a little low-carb antipasto platter with olives, almonds, cheese, carrots, and hummus and fancy crackers that are also not too high carb.
“But during lockdown, I guess my thing has been to go easy on myself. It’s a stressful situation and it’s easy to beat yourself up for not having perfect control. Obviously, we have to concentrate on our health and try our best to maintain good control, as that’s a way of protecting ourselves from the virus, but we also have to consider the effect that stress has on our blood sugars.
“My blood sugars were really high for the first couple of days of lockdown. So I guess my focus has been on maintaining an equilibrium – trying to relax, not forcing myself to work too hard, trying to adjust to this weird new normal.”
For Sarah’s cartoons on living in lockdown, go here.
This story first appeared in the winter edition of Diabetes Wellness magazine. To receive a copy of the magazine delivered to your door, subscribe here.