![]() ![]() ![]() Pregnant at 17, she underwent an extremely dangerous abortion. ![]() During her own teen years, Dominick would ""diet"" by not taking her insulin shots, becoming near-comatose from the resulting high sugar levels. ![]() Always her ""hero,"" Denise died at the age of 33 from diabetic complications and heavy cocaine use. Eschewing the doctor's ""rotation"" method, she finds the triceps on her left arm hardening until it ""looks like an overdeveloped muscle."" She recounts how Denise, as a teenager, would inject peroxide into her pimples. Dominick spares the reader no gritty detail: she graphically describes everything from urine tests to her daily injection in a ""painless"" area of her arm. Once she's afflicted, though, she has to learn to cope with her schoolmates' teasing and the embarrassment of the occasional insulin reaction or sugar shock. She and her brother would use them for water fights and often took syringes to school to show off for the other kids. As a child, Dominick would fish Denise's used needles out of the trash and use then to inject her stuffed animals. She was already familiar with the disease, having observed her college-age sister, Denise, go through her daily regimen of insulin injections and blood-sugar testing. Dominick learned that she had diabetes at the age of nine. Iowa essayist Dominick's powerful first book is a harrowingly detailed, compulsively readable memoir of her life as a diabetic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |