If you had to pick one of your biggest struggles living with diabetes, but also one of your biggest strengths, what would they be?
For me, I struggle with remembering to do things in a timely manner such as bolusing during or right after I eat, but my biggest strength from having diabetes is just knowing that I can deal with difficult situations that arise in my life, I don't let them defeat me.
What about you?
Strength - dietary knowledge
Struggle - crippling fear of low bloodsugars
struggle for 50 years: blood glucose/insulin. Amazes and astonishes me daily.
strength: get up and go on everyday, no matter what. SO hard sometimes, but important to keep going, keep the job, keep the family on track and be a real human being. Don't always feel so real/regular as a diabetic.
It sucks.
Struggle is the "time sink" aspect of diabetes. I am a slacker and love having time to do NOTHING but diabetes gets in the way of a lot of that.
Strength is knowing myself more than I would if I wasn't.
Struggle: Feeling guilty if I do something "wrong."
Strength: setting D goals and constantly improving.
Strength - Taking it seriously. A lot of T2's don't.
Struggle - Diet
Strength - My ability to overcome :D Often I'll look at something that I may not even consider doing and think "Well I'll just PROVE that someone with type 1 can do this!"
Struggle - Fear of dying young. I'm a single parent to an awesome 7 year old. His mother has been out of the picture (for good reasons) for years and it's just me and him. I get crippling bouts of fear and depression worrying about what would happen to him if I passed away.
I'm a little late to the game, but I wanted to play :)
Strength - knowing everything there is to know about food
Struggle - not taking insulin like a should for fear of weight gain. :(
My biggest struggle is still grabbing that monitor out of my purse to check when I go out to eat. At home it's on the counter right in plain view so that whenever I get food I remember to check. But whenever I am out to eat I am so focused on how many carbs are going into my body that I forget the important part of checking my BG.
My biggest Strength is knowing my foods. I know how high I will go if I eat pasta or how long it will take for the juice to actually kick in while I am having a hypo.
My biggest struggle has been to convince my wholly medically oriented family that I am not going to keel over with a coronary tomorrow or any time soon. There are some beliefs among doctors and nurses trained in the past generations that we are subject to sudden finishes. No matter that I put on dinners for 16, all my physicals come out beautifully and ECGs are perfect specimens, they are trained question-askers with a purpose when we get together. I run stairs with a flourish, I treadmill avidly with a Playaway around my neck, I run to neighbors who ask for a professional viewpoint, I keep up over 3.5 mph in any store/mall I can, but it's still a struggle to help lower expectations of these family members. They are question-askers, continually trying to find something that will satisfy their belief that a quick finish is in the offing!
Struggle: My biggest struggle is controlling my after-dinner eating. I always think that I can have just one cookie or a small amount of ice cream, but a little bit leads to a lot.
Strength: A positve attitude. I have never had a hard time accepting Type 1 and I wake up every day trying to do a good job to stay healthy. I have lots of “failures”, but I always wake up the next day and try again.