The Curve, "D" Zone & Generations

Easier does not mean easy.  How many times have you experienced the well-meaning person that comes up to you & says, “I see you have an insulin pump so that takes care of your diabetes luckily.”  Is that a pain in the neck or another part of your anatomy?  Having lived with the literal pains in the neck for the past several months I choose another reference point when calling anything a pain in whatever.  Some days there is not enough time or patience available to explain that just because someone has a hammer and a saw and they are a carpenter, the hammer and the saw do not build a home all by themselves & the same can be said for diabetes related tools.  Does a hammer and a saw make it easier or even possible to start building a home?  Of course!  Simply having the hammer and saw means nothing otherwise.  That is pretty much in my experience the parallel universe to diabetes & tools used to manage it.  Those of us living with diabetes remain the brains and more behind the management of this disease.  Sometimes our “homes” feel like the leaning tower of Pica and other times the universes are aligned somehow & we have a nice straight in between the lines kind of day.  This disease shifts out of nowhere for an exhaustive list of reasons why.

Lately I have been having success and big time failure with type 1 management.  Previously, I shared with you that I added the Freestyle Libre to my toolbox of diabetes management tools.   It was an instant love match for quite an extended period of time.  I loved having the graphs for the first time & a clue into where my blood sugars were shifting to with foods, exercise, stress, illness and other factors.  I began to trust the numbers on my graph & feel like I was making serious headway with my previous frustrations reaching my A1C goals.  And I went off to the lab with a spring to my step because the math that resulted from my Libre readings indicated that I was about to see a beautiful score of 6.7%!  The next day I went on line to see that result & was met with a 7.5% which was basically the same as the score I had with the multiple finger pricks providing an over simplified 12 readings over a 24 hour period of time.  That result infuriated & baffled me.  I had micromanaged & worked my guts out for 4 months to be met with the same result as if I had changed nothing.  That just sucked.  (insert swear words!) 

Don’t you find that you need to be tenacious & have an attitude of steadfastness with type 1?  Once I realized that I had over trusted the graphs from my Libre readings I reset the timeline I had initially set. That date reset however did not make the goal any less desirable. 

  Have you noticed an increase in various generations bashing one another?  That is unfortunate.  For sure that is divisive.  Some people state that today’s generation have it so much easier than other generations did.  Physical work on the land (farming, etc) for sure is to be respected.  Each type of work needs to be respected including the physical, and cerebral type jobs & talents.  To be humorous, although my generation did not have to walk home from school uphill both ways, we did meet other challenges.  Every generation has a set of challenges as well as benefits.  I am in the sandwich generation of thankfully having parents as well as being a parent myself.  I respect all 3 generations.  Lately, there has been excessive chatter about the millennial generation.  That is the one that my kids are a part of.  For sure their young lives have been & continue to be vastly different from my generation & generations in the past.    Different is not bad though.  Just because someone is from either a generation before or after us does not make them better or worse than ours.  It is great when we can find something to admire about one another.  Recently, I found a great example of how the millennial generation have a skill set that I truly admire and value.  In trying to figure out some solutions to my A1C and gadget woes & seek solutions I went online to see what others are doing to have better luck with diabetes management.  I was wonderfully surprised with the abundance of excellent information available from others having success.  The postings and Youtube videos were all posted in this case by the millennial generation.  They have some terrific & innovative ideas & think outside the box & are so willing to try so many tools in my opinion.  I was delighted with the information.  As always, my motto is to treat information from different sources as a buffet…take what I like & implement it & the stuff that does not make sense for me I simply leave.  I just loved having different ideas that I could consider.  And many of them are looking like they are going to be terrific game changers in my diabetes management.  I will know for sure when I go for lab work next time yet I am again optimistic.

One of the most vital tools in my diabetes management remains a sense of humor.  Diabetes is freakishly tough.  Last week I had the most frightening episode of hypoglycemia that I have had in 10 years & it happened at night when I was totally alone.  I managed to pull myself up into range again but then I got the behemoth hyperglycemic event afterwards because I had to treat with 5 fast acting sugar portions.  That was one of several sleepless nights that I spent trying to nudge my blood sugars off the roller coaster ride from hell.  Afterwards, I made sure that my husband & I watched a stand up comedian that we enjoy because a laugh was definitely needed.  Diabetes is scary as hell.  Humor is the antidote for me at least.  I take nothing for granted and I don’t take the value of a good belly laugh for granted either.  With the help of the millennials that I will never meet I had managed to get  high & low blood sugar alarms for the first time ever & that is priceless.  At first I did not really believe the accuracy of the projected low blood sugars that appeared on my graph however they have been spot on.  I have a great respect for the brain power of our next generation.  I cannot imagine what changes will be in all our futures however I am sure all of us will be wowed.  So for sure I was taught to respect my elders & I do yet I add on that our younger (as well as our own) generations deserve respect as well.

As an aside or segment of “living with engineers”, my husband gave me the ultimate compliment recently.  I had been explaining to him that since my Libre measures interstitial fluid and not blood that I have been moving my treatment of predicted low sugars up by 10 to 15 minutes.  My Libre has to play catch up in other words to a finger prick test by about 10-15 minutes in my case.  My husband told me that was excellent use of process engineering.  He went on to say that what I was describing is called “dead time” in process engineering.  I thought the term was pretty ironic but that is my silly sense of humor.  Living with engineers is just plain amusing I will admit.  I am loving the alarms & predictions & graphs & hope.  It is not easy but is easier when you have adequate, quality information to let your brain work with.  This diabetes is not going to manage itself with or without a pump & sensor & graphs and whatever else is available.  I am open to learning from whatever generation has ideas.  I know that I don’t know what I don’t know.  I am a life long learner.  Sometimes learning new things means a better quality of life.  That is the case with diabetes in my experience.  Diabetes remains a pain in the ass.  Okay, I will have the best damned life despite diabetes.  How about you?

My heart’s hope is that you can find support in a myriad of ways in the form of a banquet of information that best serves you too.  May we all remember that regardless of generation, every generation has something valuable to bring to the banquet.

Have a beautiful summer.  The next story posting will be at the end of September.

Smiles,

Saundie