Although I don’t generally like the “battle” nomenclature often used with diabetes, I can’t deny that last night diabetes came at me in full-on attack mode and the siege lasted all night. Three blouses, two injections, three site changes, two ketone tests, a cartridge change, and 12 hours later, I finally prevailed.
I usually would look at situations like this in a negative light and emphasize all the things I did wrong. This morning, however, I found myself feeling oddly empowered. Even though I had a period of awful control, I was eventually able to wrestle control back
You’ve adopted a better attitude now. You can’t control everything that diabetes throws at you but you can decide how to respond. A series of blood sugar events you endured could have pushed you out of range for days, yet you returned it to your preferred range within 1/2 day. Good work!
It’s not an exact parallel, but one of my life rules is, “Life is change and there’s nothing you can do about that. The only choice you get to make is whether you manage change . . . or it manages you.”
It’s awesome that you feel empowered! I feel like that about my D sometimes. Like, I just fixed a medical emergency (not really an emergency to us, but you know) all by myself. I just saved a life! Sometimes it feels like winning an epic battle. I find that being maybe a little dramatic at times like this brings some fun to a sucky situation. Jump up an down, scream and shout, feel good about what you accomplished instead of feeling bad about having a little rough patch.
By the way, when I first glanced at the title of your post, I read “bad” as “bed”. Teehee.
I think this depends a lot on which scale you’re used to. I’ve only ever used mmol/L, so to me the 20s is very high. I didn’t even realize that mg/dl existed until I was an adult and got connected to the DOC, about 15 years after I was diagnosed!
I think this is exactly it! I looked back and was like, “Wow, diabetes just tried to kill me, how dare it do that!” Haha. But really, who knows what would have happened had I done nothing—it wouldn’t be good!
Thanks. Things are totally back to normal now. This all came on so suddenly that I’m pretty sure it was a combination of over-treating a low and either a series of site issues or insulin that went bad.
