Creatively Expressing Himself Through a Later-in-Life Diagnosis: Ephraim Scott Sommers Talks ‘Diabetic Gumdrops’

"I've been a type 1 diabetic for about two years," he said. "I am a musician, an author, and a professor at Winthrop University. And I love teaching creative writing, and I love making art."

His third collection, "Diabetic Gumdrops," comes out from Main Street Rag Press in late September. It exists because of the diagnosis.

Early Warning Signs that Got Missed

Sommers didn't wake up one morning knowing he had diabetes. The clues arrived slowly, and a doctor missed one.

"I had had some moles removed, I would say six months before, and they weren't healing for some reason," he said. "It was really frustrating."

Before that, Sommers had already flagged another symptom.

"I had told him, my primary care physician, that, 'Hey, I noticed I was peeing a little bit frequently in the middle of the night,' but he never thought to check my sugar," Sommers said. "He just thought it was nothing."

Then came the dry mouth in the mornings, which became even more uncomfortable for Sommers during a trip to Tennessee with his wife.

"I got back to the hotel, and I remember having these really, really insane leg cramps, and I had to drink so much water. I was so thirsty," he said. "After that I was like, 'Okay, it's time to go to the doctor.'"

He suspected what it might be. Sommers was losing weight without trying, and his father has diabetes.

Common Warning Signs of Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) Include:

• Extreme thirst
• Frequent urination
• Unrelenting fatigue
• Rapid, unexplained weight loss

A Fast Diagnosis with a Slow Acceptance

This time, his primary care doctor ordered the appropriate tests and acted quickly.

"He did the sugar test, and he said, 'You probably have type 1, but let's go to an endocrinologist,'" Sommers said. His A1C was about 10.6.

• An A1C level below 5.7% is considered normal.
• A level of 5.7% to 6.4% indicates prediabetes.
• A level of 6.5 or higher indicates diabetes.

The same day, Sommers was given a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) and long-acting (basal) insulin, based on his doctor's reasoning that starting early "will give your beta cells a rest immediately and you can start to get the sugar down."

At the endocrinologist's office, antibody tests verified that Sommers had latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA), a slow-progressing form of T1D often mistaken for type 2 diabetes (T2D).

But getting the right answer quickly didn't mean he accepted it immediately.

"Then all the spiraling fears and everything else began. I didn't want to admit it to myself. I was in denial," he said. 

He remembers his doctor floating the possibility that it might be temporary, that his pancreas could come back online. 

"So I think there was a period of denial where if I just change my diet and I just change my lifestyle and exercise a little bit more, it'll go away,” he said.

"The mental part was the hardest part."

The physical management came before the emotional management did, and the gap was rough.

"The emotional and the mental part was the hardest part for me, because I am a really obsessive person," Sommers said. "I tend to spiral. And so seeing a certain number, thinking that I was to blame for it because of some dosing mistake that I made, was just really getting to me."

His first endocrinologist wouldn't prescribe fast-acting (bolus) insulin yet, because his pancreas was still producing some of its own and they didn't want him going low. So he improvised, and it went somewhere unhealthy.

"I was using exercise as a form of fast-acting insulin after every meal," he said. He spent months on a treadmill in his front room after meals, eating very little. "It just wasn't a great way to live."

Underneath it was fear.

"I still was ignorant about how to manage it, and that fear for me was really, really difficult to manage," he said. "I was so afraid. I didn’t know anything."

That mental load is the thing he most wants readers to understand.

"There are so many mental decisions happening daily in a diabetic's life that not many people see," he said. "Is the waiter going to give me the right thing? Is my order right? When should I dose? Should I wait until the food actually is in front of me? All those things that nobody even cares about or thinks about are exhausting for us."

Writing Through a New Chapter of Life

Sommers had already applied for a sabbatical before his diagnosis, planning to work on a book he hadn't defined yet. By the spring semester of 2025, he knew what it was going to be.

"I knew that it was going to be a book of odes. I wanted to force myself towards, what can you be grateful for?"

Boxed breathing and walking helped. So did a few sessions with a therapist, and one line in particular that stuck.

"She said that 97% of things that happen to us are totally neutral, and we get to decide how we want to respond to them," he said. "I thought that was really valuable information, that nobody's out to get me. This isn't because of something I've done, and I don't need to feel some kind of shame or guilt about it."

Then he did what he has always done with a project.

"I just sat down Monday through Friday in a coffee shop and just said, 'I'm going to write a poem of gratitude every single day for four or five hours,'" he said.

The shift showed up in the work before it showed up in his life.

"That really helped my mind switch towards this idea that the illness was just information for a creative work I was working on, as opposed to an impediment to my daily life," he said.

He can trace the change in his work.

"The metaphors at the beginning are very, 'It's a war. It's me against these bloodthirsty pirates. It's me against zombies,'" he said. "And then by the end, it's like a wrestling match with a UFC fighter, and then it's just like a tug of war. It becomes a game almost."

He is quick to say this wasn't a philosophy he held before.

"I am so not and so have not been a writing-as-therapy person before this," he said. "But then you're in that situation and writing saves your life in a way."

Why the Poems are Funny and Not Sour

"Diabetic Gumdrops" is not a book about suffering, and that's deliberate. Sommers teaches poetry, and he has watched what turns students off of it.

"I think the easy thing would be to write 50 melancholic poems," he said. "That would be the expected."

Instead, many of the poems start somewhere sour and travel.

"What I tried to do was maybe begin poems in moments of frustration at the pharmacist, or moments of anger, and then work my way in a maybe hopefully humorous way towards what might be a little more funny, or what might end in a moment of praise."

The humor is doing a job.

"I wanted the reader to be like, 'Hey, diabetic people can laugh. Diabetic people can have joy, they can fall in love, they can have great relationships,'" he said. "While that's one lens to view our lives through, the type 1 diabetic lens, there's also the human lens of a human being having an experience of being a human."

One frustration he learned to laugh at was the paperwork of being sick, right down to reciting his medication list to a new nurse every few weeks. He started carrying a sticky note with it written out. Now he borrows a phrase from playing music: “that's the gig!”

"There's no way that I'm not going to have to deal with pharmacies that don't have my medicine when I go, or fighting to get needles or fighting to get insulin or returning a Dexcom that broke. It's just part of the gig."

The Book is For His Father, Too

Sommers' father was diagnosed with diabetes in his 40s, around the age Sommers is now. As a kid, Sommers didn't see what it cost his father.

"I think about all the times when my dad was just so selflessly battling his diabetes and never said a word to me and was just a great parent," he said. "And knowing the mental load that I'm going through, it's so wild to know that he was able to do that."

He dedicated "Diabetic Gumdrops" to all people with diabetes (PWD) and those who love them.

"I just wish I had approached him with a little more empathy," he said. "I was just a kid, but I still wish I hadn't been a selfish kid and had asked, 'Hey, what's going on with your diabetes? How can I help?'"

"Most Things Can Become Routine."

Two years in, the surprise isn't how hard it is. It's how ordinary it became.

"When it first happened, I thought, 'There is no way I'm going to be able to live with this every day,'" he said. "And then you start looking at it day-to-day like, 'Okay, I'm just going to try to manage it today.'"

He and his wife were watching a show recently when his alarm went off.

"I took a beat, because I wasn't just like, 'Oh my God, this is going to ruin my whole evening.' I just was like, 'Oh, okay.' And I got up and just took some insulin and sat back down and kept watching the show."

He won't claim he's finished. "I'm still dealing with alarms, and I'm still mad in the midst of the night. But I'm trying, which I think is what most of us can say."

Sommers says his diagnosis reshaped how he eats, sleeps, and moves, and it sent him back to poetry after a stretch of not wanting to write it.

"It's given me more energy, more chutzpah, or whatever, more duende, or whatever you want to call that creative spirit that drives us to keep making art," he said. "When I sit and think about it with that mindset of gratitude, it has helped me in some way, and I try to lean on that."

"Diabetic Gumdrops" is available for presale from Main Street Rag Press and ships in late September. Sommers' music and previous books, "The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire" and "Someone You Love Is Still Alive," are available on his website.