In order to indirectly get in touch with my boyfriend diabetes situation, I decided to focus on of my art project on the subject of diabetes, to kinda raise awareness for diabetes (I’m going to be shaving my head & donating the money to JDRF before Grad 2012) and also to learn more about myself. It would help a lot if everyone could comment on this blog how diabetes makes them feel in 10 words or more. It would help me SO much, so please, contribute?
Ten words or more… thought you said “ten words or less”… in which I’d direct you to the photos from the “Word in Your Hand” contest we’ve just finished.
Keeping one’s blood sugars in control can be a constant balancing act. There are the mental gymnastics of seeing food not as something pleasurable, but as a combination of calories, carbohydrate grams, protein grams, and fat grams, and calculating one’s meals and insulin doses (if appropriate) accordingly. In addition, each food will affect one differently, so there is a long learning curve to come to a relationship with food that is not completely obsessive-compulsive… and just when you think you have it figured out, it changes. Or something else changes.
Because complications of diabetes (foot ulcers and amputations, blindness, kidney failure, and early death are among the best-known and most serious) are related to the degree to which one’s blood glucose levels are controlled, any reading that is too high can cause a feeling of frustration or failure, or an image of impending doom.
Then there are other issues: illness can affect us more severely and in more ways than someone without diabetes. So can physical activity, emotional stress, and irregular schedules.
All and told, I find it somewhat difficult to determine whether we are made clinically obsessive-compulsive because of the diabetes, or whether we totter along the spectrum somewhere, hopes raised because of a new preliminary research finding (only to be dashed a few weeks, months, or years later), and trying to manage our best to see the next day with our limbs and health (relatively) intact.