Sweetblood (9781439108741) Read Online Free PDF Page A

numbness), but that’s only after many years of having the disease. But before insulin was discovered, things didn’t go so good for diabetics. Without insulin to turn glucose into energy, the body’s cells literally starved to death. The untreated diabetic would get hungry and thirsty, but the more they ate, the sicker they got. The sugars would build up in their blood until they were so sweet that their body would start burning up fat and muscle and eventually there would be nothing left. But it wouldn’t happen right away. An untreated diabetic might take weeks or months to die, and her body might go through some very peculiar changes on its journey from life to death.
    Untreated insulin-dependent diabetes is pretty much extinct today. When a person starts getting thirsty and ravenous and feeling sick and peeing all the time, they go to a doctor. The doctor gives them some insulin and a syringe and modern medicine triumphs again. So it’s hard for us to imagine what it was like before, when diabetes was as incurable and fatal as the electric chair. So I have made a list of some of the symptoms of advanced, untreated diabetes. This is what might have happened to a diabetic teenage girl in the Middle Ages.
    The first thing is, she starts getting very hungry and thirsty. She can’t get enough water. She devours bowlafter bowl of gruel (whatever that is). At first, her parents are angry at her because they are poor and gruel is not free. But she can’t stop herself from eating everything in sight. Soon, she starts losing weight. She is eating like a pig, but the food is going right through her. Her parents are afraid she might be possessed. They hide her from the neighbors because if word gets out, their daughter could be burned at the stake.
    Weeks go by. The girl has lost a quarter of her body weight. She is pale and she smells sweet, like honey. She sleeps most of the day, but it is a restless sleep, tossing and turning and whimpering. When she awakens she is hungry and thirsty.
    She wets the bed repeatedly, and after a week of that her mother stops bringing her fresh straw and simply lets the girl lie in her own filth. The girl doesn’t seem to care. She talks to herself in her sleep, crazy garbled conversations with imaginary people. Her skin becomes pale and beaded with sweat, her lips are ruby red, and she has a peculiar, acrid odor.
    One day the mother brings the girl a chicken leg. The girl sits up on her soiled straw pallet and snatches the chicken leg and tears into it with the ferocity of a starved wolf. The mother recoils from what she sees—the girl’s teeth have grown longer, and her mouth is bloody. She gobbles down the chicken leg, crunching the bone between her long, bloody teeth. Her breath reeks like a stew of rotten fruit and fetid meat; her eyes are so dilated that they look like black holes in reality. The mother, terrified, flees.
    The next day, the girl staggers out of the cottage, looking for food. As the midday sun strikes her she screams and covers her eyes and crumples to theground. Her parents are shocked to see her this way, in full sunlight. Her skin is white as a fish’s belly, her hair has fallen out in patches, her limbs are thin as broom handles. The father carries his wasted daughter back to her pallet and lays her down.
    The next morning the girl is still and unresponsive. Her forehead is icy cold. There is no sign of life. The mother tells the father that the girl is dead. They cover her with a sheet. They tell the neighbors that their daughter has died. Tomorrow they will bury her in the graveyard by the village church.
    But that night a strange thing happens. The girl awakens. She throws aside the sheet and climbs to her feet. She does not know where she is, but she is ravenous. She staggers through the cottage, confused and terrified. The mother sees her and screams in horror. The girl claps her hands to her ears. Too loud! The terrified