Diabetes Blog – Happy-Medium.net

Don’t worry… I have nothing weird to share today. I’m just going to riff for a bit about something that’s been on my mind, but I don’t like sharing.

As the months and the years go by, I’m worried that insulin resistance is becoming a larger part of my life.

I’ve alluded to this before, but the basics are this: I eat less today, including less carbs, than I’ve ever eaten as an adult. Yet my insulin needs are higher than ever before.

I’ll bet almost every Person With Diabetes feels like they take too much insulin to stay alive. I certainly do. How can you not?

Well, for about six months now, my insulin needs have increased by about 20 percent, on an nearly daily basis.

When I say I’m requiring more insulin, I mean I’m adding more insulin in terms of meal boluses and correction boluses to continue to keep my glucose in a safe range. It’s just… a lot of extra insulin, nearly every day.

My A1c is still very good. But to keep my A1c where it is, I need the extra insulin, and that bothers me more than I can tell you.

It bothers me because extra insulin gives me the feeling that I’m not taking care of my diabetes well enough. If I really think about it, I am taking care of my diabetes. However, when you come to the realization that this is really happening, you start to ask why, and at that point, it’s a short walk to blaming yourself.

I’m also bothered because extra insulin indicates the possibility of extra weight gain. Hell, let’s be honest… at my age, with my ever-slowing metabolism and the fact that I can’t work out as hard as I used to, extra insulin almost certainly means weight gain. Dammit.

So, what do I do? I have to face this like I face everything else.

First, I’ve got to realize that I’m lucky: I have access to insulin and a good insurance plan through work that makes getting insulin expensive, but still possible. Next, I have to rule out any outside reasons why I might need more insulin right now.

Once I do that, I’ve got to do the best I can, so I can mitigate the effects of the extra insulin I’m using. To the extent I can anyway…

There are a lot of things we’ve got to deal with, a lot of things we have to swallow as we go through our lives with diabetes. None of them are things we look at and say, well, that’s not too bad. They all suck.

But to the extent we can make them suck as little as possible, even if they suck a lot, we can still claim the power over how these things make us feel. Especially when we feel powerless to stop them.