10:13am March 28, 2012

This BEYOND pisses me off. Don’t EVEN fucking dilute my Gatorade without asking.

So I found out that the reason my Gatorade started tasting like shit a few years ago is because a staff person decided without telling me, that I needed less sugar so she was going to dilute the stuff. She never spoke to me about it.

This would be offensive enough because I’m certain it was because I’m fat. It’s like the people who got me sugar-free jello when I was on a liquid diet, ensuring that I got no nutrition at all.

But the whole reasons I drink Gatorade are twofold. One, because I dehydrate easily and quickly and it’s the fastest way to make sure I keep my electrolytes balanced. (Diluting it makes me less likely to drink it and less likely to benefit when I do. Given how many times I’ve had to go to the ER to get IV fluids… I can’t even imagine.)

Two, because it has, even at my very worst, always had an extremely good effect on my overall weakness. Which we suspect to be caused by some glitch in the ATP cycle, so that makes sense. That stopped happening around the same time they started watering it down. Because cutting down on dextrose means cutting down on a very rapid source of muscular energy. But who cares because sugar is uniformly evil right?

But that doesn’t matter because I’m fat and therefore it’s apparently fine to cut my sugar intake without asking. And even if I wanted to do so, there would have been ways to do it with less overall effect on my health. Because Gatorade is only one way I get extra sugar, and the only way where it’s actually imperative that I keep it the way it is.

This by the way is what happens when you’re disabled in a way where other people do 100% of the food prep and meal planning. People make decisions on your behalf without asking you. And since most people who are full time powerchair users and don’t have an incredibly fast metabolism or a wasting disease or something will get fat, this is probably incredibly common. It’s impossible for me to monitor everything they do. And in the DD system they’re generally more paternalistic than the phys-dis system, so you get decisions like this more often.

This is what happens when people freak out over weight but don’t freak out over immediate health concerns. It’s also what happens when people make decisions for you and think that you aren’t doing certain things for an actual reason. (Another continual problem in the lives of any disabled person who gets services. I have a friend who puts everything at the front of cupboards to make it wheelchair accessible and no matter how many times she tells staff to leave it there they push it back to make it look tidy.)

Just fuck. I need all the energy I can get. Lacking muscular energy can mean life and death for me, as became very obvious this past week when I got too weak to get enough oxygen without using a breathing machine. So can dehydration, as evidenced by how many ER visits? Even if I wanted to cut sugar because I’m fat that would have to take priority. This is just… I can’t even… fuck.

7 notes