Today I learned that someone very young and close to me has Celiac Disease. It made me sad. This young’un will have to live within some very strict guidelines for the rest of their life or risk serious damage to their body, anything from malnutrition to an increased risk of certain kinds of cancer. No kid should be so constrained at the outset of their life. They should be able to grow and explore the world around them—including food! – however they like.

I have never really been a joiner. Support groups and alumni associations never did anything for me. I didn’t feel like sharing with anyone except people I already knew pretty well. That worked for me for about 38 years.

Over the last couple of years, I have been fighting the weight gain that accompanies out of control Type 1 diabetes when you get it back under control. In the past two years, I have gained nearly 50 pounds due to some pretty big circumstantial and psychological stressors. I have often felt desperate and helpless against the onslaught of this kind of weight gain, and there have been times where I have had to make a conscious choice not to do things that would be overtly harmful to my body, like allowing my blood sugars to stay high so I don’t gain weight. (The weight gain happens when your body goes from high blood sugars that don’t allow you to absorb all the food you are eating to good blood sugars, where your body absorbs every calorie. Ten pounds every time.)

If you’ve ever seen that word before it was probably at the beginning of a cast listing for a play, which only makes sense since it’s the plural of persona, “a role or character adopted by an author or actor.” But it has also come to mean the face we show the world. Without a public persona, there would be no privacy. Everyone we know would know everything about us. My colleagues see a version of me that is completely different from the one the friends I grew up with see. And, of course there is little or no persona with family. Hard to hide anything from the people who were there to witness you develop all your flaws.

I was all set to write my article this week when something threw me for such a loop that it needed to be aired. I am used to my fair share of difficulty within my healthcare universe – insurance reimbursements gone missing, fellows that argue over test results, etc. – but I am not used to my medical life bleeding into areas completely unrelated. Let me explain.

Last week, I encouraged you not to sacrifice the things you love to accommodate your condition. Now I am going to play my own Devil’s Advocate. I have cataracts. Large central cataracts, a gift left over from my treatment for meningitis. (It happens sometimes when you take high doses of steroids.) Back then, it was just something in my medical file. My doctor once told me that they develop about as slowly as sand moves. Slow as that is, eventually the sand does move.