What Happens to Diabetics in the Apocalypse?

In the fall of 2019, I almost died. Dramatic, I know. I have no way of knowing how close I actually came, the possibility was definitely higher than it had ever been before. I started to notice something was wrong in August. I noticed that my hair had gotten a lot thinner, I also lost weight, a lot of weight with no significant changes to how I was living my life. I was tired all the time and waking up in the night to go to the bathroom multiple times. I found out in December that I am Diabetic. Unmanaged diabetes can cause your blood sugars to go so high that you enter a coma and some people do die. Three months later I am managing well and am feeling much better.

Being diagnosed forced a lot of changes on to me. It has changed me outwardly, the way I live my life, It has also changed the way I think. Prior to my diagnosis, I like to think that I was sympathetic to people living with chronic illness but, to be honest, I didn’t “get it” now I get it. Being diagnosed with a chronic illness is terrifying; it feels like you have been transported to the top of a black diamond slope from where you were standing at the top of the bunny slope. You know that the way down just got a lot harder but you still have to get down the hill. When you are reevaluating your future plans if you are a nerd like me that also includes reevaluating your zombie apocalypse plan.

    Prior to diagnosis, my plan was heavily based around the novel World War Z. I was going to get as much non-perishable food and camping gear as I could into my car and head north until I ran out of gas, at that point it was going to be time to pack up what I could and keep going north. Was this a good zombie apocalypse plan? Absolutely not, but it was my plan. 

What is my plan now? Stay exactly where I am and hope I die quickly (just kidding?). The reality is that I could maybe live without my medications for a long time, but if I was without my meds and without good sources of fresh foods my chapter in the zombie apocalypse novel would probably be extremely short.

I am something of a survival novel aficionado some of my favourites include, The Hatchet, Island of the Blue Dolphins,  My Side of the Mountain, along with more adult fare like The Martian and the already mentioned World War Z. I have yet to find any of these stories that go into detail on what would happen to those who are ill or disabled in an end of the world scenario. What happens if you are dependent on medications or the assistance of others when sh*t turns into an everyone for themselves scenario. World War Z features the perspectives of two characters with physical disabilities and dips its toes into the mental health sphere. One of the explicitly disabled characters, a man in a wheelchair’s narrative, is focused on how he is able to contribute to the new post-apocalyptic society exactly like anyone who doesn’t use a wheelchair. This is not a bad thing but it glosses over some of the real difficulties that come with using a mobility aid. What happens if sidewalks and ramps aren’t well maintained. What if someone uses a motorized wheelchair and they can’t recharge a battery or their chair breaks. The reality is that the world on a good day isn’t set up well for people with mobility aids if the zombie apocalypse comes? 

The other explicitly disabled character is a blind man who’s blindness gives him an almost supernatural ability to fight zombies with his great hearing and smell. This is what this article by Katie Rose Guest Pryal would call magically disabled. This is an especially common trope when it comes to blindness. Daredevil comes to mind right away but there are other examples. In her article Overcompensating: Magical Erasure of Blindness in SFF Elsa Sjunneson-Henry talks about several examples of the erasure of blindness in genre fiction. She relates it back to non-disabled authors discomfort with disability. This discomfort is evident in World War Z. One disabled character experiences no inconvenience or fear for the future because of his disability. For the character who is blind, the book does acknowledge his difficulty living in a world that does not value him because of it and does not make itself accessible. However, once the zombies arrive his difficulty is swept away. This is the heart of the problem disability and illness can’t be wished away or ignored as Sci-Fi novels so often do. 

So what would it look like to write a character with a chronic illness living through and surviving a zombie apocalypse? The priorities would have to be a little different. For most people in the apocalypse, the priority is getting food, water, gas, and getting away. If you need meds that moves up the list pretty quickly. The economy is going to change pretty quickly and medication will be very valuable. What if you needed something harder to find like oxygen? What I am getting at here is that chronic illness and disability often make things more complicated. To be clear when I say complicated I don’t mean worse or even harder, I just mean more complicated. Reality is complicated, and I want to see more sci-fi authors deal with the messy complicated reality that comes with illness and disability.