When I sat down to write my first novel, a "novel" view of diabetes emerged, instead:

The Water Principle ©

The teacher, diabetes, imparted lessons she could not have learnt any other way.

For decades, she had depended upon what she’d always considered to be the “cooling” property of chocolate after lunch and dinner. Although she could not have enunciated it at the time, she’d had a “thirst” for the refreshment of chocolate as though it were a badly needed glass of water after the exhausting, internally “sweaty” labor of chewing and digesting a meal.

Indeed, the chocolate and other sugars seemed to have usurped the place of water in her life for over five decades, until water, itself, protested the reversal. In the woman’s fifty-second year, water rose up to demand an immediate accounting of all the water not ingested which needed to be in order to match the glut of sugars left over from chocolate and company. Water made its voice heard via a thirst of such sudden and crippling intensity, the woman could barely speak until delivered bottle upon bottle of water.

This raging thirst would repeat itself upon the woman’s every ingestion of sugar and gluten. Some sugars and some gluten products induced more thirst than others, but the new pattern was set: The woman now needed to imbibe as much water as she’d once “needed” to ingest chocolate. The lessons of diabetes had begun. Through her pancreas and kidneys, the woman’s diabetes seized command of her body to speak to it.

Diabetes taught her body the difference between slightly sweet and far too sweet. Chocolate candy bars and chocolate ice cream became distasteful to her, the chocolate sensation now overwhelming, sometimes even sickening. There were many hours and days when the water she’d gulped down to relieve the insane thirst seemed to leave her body by a half-gallon or more at a time.

Was diabetes all about low water intake, in the first place? Did the bodies of some people mistake thirst for a chocolate-and-other-sugar craving? Was it the usurpation of water by chocolate and other sugars which eventually dehydrated and deregulated the kidneys, upsetting, in turn, the fine balance of sugars and insulin otherwise maintained by the pancreas? Did diabetes manifest itself, therefore, first through the kidneys and, secondarily, through the pancreas?

Should the primary treatment of diabetes be switched from the pancreas and blood sugar to the kidneys, perhaps with periods of fasting and reduced food ingestion, overall, accompanied by remedial water intake?


December 2, 2018. © 2018 Carolyn Cucinotta-Marra. All rights reserved.