Diabetes Blog – Happy-Medium.net

Edmund Burke once said, “People must be taken as they are, and we should never try to make them or ourselves better by quarreling with them“.

The same holds true for diabetes.

Regardless of what I’m involved in at the moment, good or bad, diabetes is there. Work, gym, party, driving, it doesn’t matter. Hey, I’m like everyone else… I like out of sight, out of mind thinking. But diabetes just won’t allow me to do that.

When my BGs were running low the other night, right at the end of work, I just wanted to power through it, finish up, walk to the train, and head home. But… as you can probably imagine, I wound up sucking back juice boxes, staying later, and getting home about an hour later than usual.

Part of the secret to managing diabetes, I think, is in realizing that the same diligence is required for those moments when we may not feel high or low. We might not always feel it, but we know it if we’re checking. And if we know it, and it seems like the numbers are consistently not what we need to live a healthy life, then we know we need to make changes.

And once we make the changes, then we have to deal with verifying that our changes are actually working. So that requires staying on top of the part of our diabetes management that wasn’t so perfect before the change. Maybe we need to make additional changes after the first one to get our BGs back where they need to be. That’s life, and that’s diabetes.

Burned out yet? I know, I know.

Listen, making changes is tough for me. Dealing with stress because my changes don’t seem to be working right away can make me very cranky. If there’s ever a time when I want to curse diabetes, this is it.

But… somehow, diabetes is diabetes. It doesn’t care if you’ve made changes, and it doesn’t account for how hard you’re trying. It’s really not doing anything at all. It’s requiring you to do everything. We can quarrel with this disease all we want, and then we wind up right where we were before the argument began.

Although he wasn’t speaking specifically about diabetes, Edmund Burke also said “Our patience will achieve more than our force“. I think that applies pretty well to diabetes too. It’s with us for the rest of our lives, probably. If we can make meaningful changes to our overall lives, and give it a little patience, we just might be okay after all. Doing what we can to work with our diabetes, rather than rage at our diabetes, makes us healthier. And it might just give us a chance to live longer too.

I’ll settle for that.