Marina Tena, creator of “Dulce”: “My parents were diabetic for ten years so I wouldn’t be”

He has always drawn to explain things to himself. So when the click came, when he began the journey through a grief that she did not understand because she was saying goodbye to something that he had never experienced, Marina Tena He left work at 9 p.m. and started drawing. For two years she was working on a project that is at the same time a comic, a diary, an ode and a denunciation. Sweet (in its original version Sucreedited by Inuk), tells a story that is that of many people: that of living with a chronic disease like diabetes since childhood.

«A person with diabetes makes 180 more decisions a day than someone without it. And that’s on a normal, ordinary day. This is how Marina Tena summarizes what it is like to live with a woman since childhood. chronic disease. A normalized disease but at the same time very unknown in society. And a disease that almost always remains hidden. «For anyone who is out of this head here [se señala la frente] “I have a very normal life,” explains the author of Sweet. It happens as with mental health: «It is very easy to see that the person with a wheelchair has limitations but it is not so easy to see how the person with depression has limitations. Because? Because it is something that I cannot see and I have also not been educated to understand mental health as such.

The same goes for diabetes. “It affects you a lot on an emotional level and many times you are just another number in a clinical history.” Or your glycosylated. «The glycosylated is the number that indicates if you have been well controlled during the last six months, but what about the fact that I don’t sleep at night, that I cry, that I get frustrated, that I can’t party with my friends and have a good time without go to the bathroom cry? This is not so important. That’s why Sweet It is also a manifesto, a denunciation. A “listen to us now, damn it,” because not all books published about diabetes have to be about recipes and exercise. “I know I have to take care of myself, I’ve done it all my life, but what about when I feel alone?”

The click, the process of grieving for the illness, came to him Marina Tena later than he would have liked. But she arrived. It arrived at the same time as the confinement, or rather, a consequence of it. For the first time, she heard that he couldn’t live a normal life. She was a risk patient. “That was the first impact.” And then came the sensors and the numbers. The margins in which she had to be to keep the disease under control. “I realized that I carry a heavier backpack than the rest and this has always happened.” And the things that had happened to her throughout her life began to make sense. Marina Tena had been going to therapy for ten years and the diabetes had never gone away. The last two years, the disease has been very present in her process. “Suddenly you have to understand your life again.” And make peace with yourself. “Then you stop hating that person who did what he could and you start making fun of him.”

One of the things that Marina Tena appreciates most is that her friends carry juice in their bags. Let there be juice in the houses she visits, because it makes her life a little easier. She takes weight off of her backpack. Fewer decisions to make that day. Another thing is her therapy, which has allowed her to sit down and watch the film of her life from another perspective, that of an adult, and understand. Understand that “my parents were diabetic for ten years so I wouldn’t be,” to ensure a normal childhood. That’s why Sweet It is also an ode to those who carry out the role of care: to their parents, to their partner, to their friends. “It often happens that when something happens we always go to the person who happened to it, but the other person is also supporting everything.” this and we are not asking him. The caregivers “are the tremendously forgotten ones, it is something pathological and never better said.”

Yes, she has had bad experiences with the medical team that treated her. Yes. She thought that she was alone, that no one fully understood what she was going through and that the doubts that assailed her were only hers. «Right now I am very happy because I have made peace. My hospital is now my second home and I didn’t think I could say this at any time, because for me it was going to the hospital and having an anxiety attack. The situation of health saturation and how her staff endure it weighs on her, but it is also true that “in the same way that we do not connect with friends or sometimes we do not connect with psychologists, we do not connect with doctors either.” Now I feel super protected, but now I am an adult and when a doctor tells me something I can understand where I have to take it and when he tells me something that I don’t like, I can put it back. And not only am I an adult, I am an adult who has done many years of therapy.

A teenager or a child “does not have all this baggage” and to that must be added the fact that they have to accept the reality of a chronic illness at that age. Marina Tena believes that it is important for children and young people with diabetes to see other people who have the same condition, “because the simple fact of seeing it like a mirror makes you experience it differently.” Let them tell her, that the first time she saw a drop in blood sugar “I was scared.” Therefore, “to anyone who feels lost, I would say maybe you are not with the right doctor. Maybe you are not in the right context. Maybe you are not communicating with your parents or your environment in the appropriate way and please go to therapy, because if life is already complicated, imagine yourself with a diabetes on”.