THE DAY I STOPPED APOLOGIZING FOR BEING TIRED | Mark E. Paull
I was eleven, six weeks into summer camp, when I started wetting the bed—something I hadn't done since I was a toddler. Kids laughed. Counselors shrugged. I was just the sick kid.
But I wasn't just tired. I was in diabetic ketoacidosis. My breath smelled like rotting fruit. My arms were skin and bones. I collapsed into my mother's arms at pickup, barely able to stand. One blood test later: Type 1 Diabetes.
There were no pumps then. No meters. Just a glass syringe I boiled nightly and tablets that changed color in a tiny tube. I'd wait, fingers trembling, praying for blue. Orange could mean coma.
Two years later, playing hockey, I went from skating to slumped on the bench, half-conscious. Someone handed me orange juice. Try explaining hypoglycemia to kids in 1969. Some thought I was faking. Others thought it was contagious.
Most boys diagnosed in the 1960s didn't make it to thirty. I remember the phone call about Kevin—my mother's voice breaking as she told me he was gone at nineteen. Danny at twenty-four. Tom at twenty-eight. By thirty-five, I was mostly alone.
And I learned to apologize for being tired.
In college, I left Sarah's birthday party early. She was spinning in her purple dress, drunk and laughing, while I stood gray-faced by the door. "You always do this," she said. I drove home with the radio off, tasting metal in my mouth, my hands trembling on the wheel.
Years later, married, my wife would find me collapsed on the couch after dinner. "Should I call someone?" she'd whisper. I'd apologize for scaring her, for not helping with dishes, for looking fine when I felt like drowning. She started setting my coffee cup closer to where I sat, small kindnesses that said she understood without words.
In the early 1980s, I worked as a diabetes educator. Margaret called crying because she couldn't see syringe markings. James threw his meter and screamed he wanted to die. And even when I helped save their lives, I apologized every time I had to cancel, every day I was too tired to drive to see them.
Until one afternoon, someone asked me to carry boxes to a car. I opened my mouth to explain. Instead:
"I'm too tired today."
A pause. Then:
"Okay."
Just that. No sigh. No question. My chest swelled with something I'd forgotten existed—permission. I'd been waiting my whole life for someone to let me tell the truth. The person I'd been waiting for was me.
Now I say what I need. "My blood sugar's unpredictable." "I need to sit down." Most people understand. I've found others like me—people who lived through the color-coded years, who survived what killed our friends.
I'm not tired because I'm lazy. I'm tired because I outlived the boys who shared my diagnosis. I'm tired because I've weathered thousands of blood sugar swings, kept going when my body begged me to stop.
That doesn't deserve an apology. That deserves respect.
Mark E. Paull was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1967 at age eleven. He has lived through nearly six decades of diabetes care evolution, from boiled glass syringes to modern technology. In the early 1980s, he worked as a diabetes educator, helping patients and families navigate chronic illness management. Paull has completed CME-accredited training in Type 1 Diabetes care and reviews manuscripts for Diabetes Care, and works as an educator and coach. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Folklife, CHADD's Attention Magazine, The Good Men Project, Breakthrough T1D Canada, and The Times of Israel.