I’ve been keeping a secret from my endo, my wife, my parents, everyone: I’ve quietly given up.
I’m not completely lost. I check my blood glucose level before eating. I inject insulin before I eat (usually) or when it gets very high. But various important elements of managing diabetes have fallen to the wayside.
When my pump runs out, it may be a day or two before I replace it. If I’m very hungry, I won’t inject until much later. (And then it gets complicated - do I bolus for my higher blood glucose level or for the food I ate, which was a while ago?) I won’t recalibrate my Dexcom for days sometimes. (However, I always wear the Dexcom. I may not check it that often, but I feel safer knowing all I need to do is glance at the machine to find out how bad my blood glucose is.)
When I eat, I enter in my blood glucose level (from my Dexcom) and wildly guess the cards. Often, I just bolus for 90, planning to make up for missed carbs later with a correctional bolus. Unless I’m eating something from a package, I don’t even try to calculate the exact carbs I’m eating.
Do I feel ill? Yes, most of the time. Do I care? Yes, a little bit. Do I care enough to “find religion” and go back to being a good diabetic. No. I’m tired. I’m burned out.
And I’m angry. Very angry. Very, very, very, very angry and frustrated. I see people all around - “normal people” I call them - who eat whatever they want with nary a concern about the number of carbs and all the thousands of things I need to keep in mind and consider when I eat even a morsel. It’s truly hasad (envy), and may they all be cursed with the evil eye. (Not really. But that’s how I feel sometimes.) So, I also feel quite alone. (On that note, my wife is somewhat intuitive about this. I wear my emotions on my sleeve. If I see something I’d like but can’t have, she won’t eat it in front of me. Or she’ll let me have a little so I’ll feel better. She understands this, may God bless her.)
That’s why I haven’t seen my endo for a while. Why should I? There’s nothing he can tell me I don’t already know. And I already know he’s going to chew me out for my bad A1C, but I have no desire to do what’s necessary to fix it. And since my mom and dad see the same endo, chances are that they will also chew me out.
So…I don’t know.