1. Diabetes is complicated
I used to call it “weird diabetes”. Now I just call it my diabetes. The chaos suggested by DiaTribe’s list of 42 factors is weird, or at least stranger than the traditional model taught in most clinics. And it gets even more complicated.
Everything I’ve heard and read suggests that stress raises blood sugar. But when I’m stressed, my sugar plumets. I don’t know if any T1Ds out there share this experience, and it makes diabetes feel especially weird when I seem to be the only one experiencing it in a certain way.
But what’s my “stress lowers my blood sugar” is another person’s “extreme heat keeps my blood sugar from going above 8.2 mmol/L” or “chocolate doesn’t raise my blood sugar, so it can’t be used to treat lows”. These anecdotal and highly individual experiences speak to the strangely varied and uniquely personal tapestry that is the collective T1D experience.
2. Community education is key
Conventional diabetes education has a few speedbumps. As a patient, it can feel like my health care team assumes that “someone must’ve already taught him this” when no one did. I remember once developing a pattern of dropping suddenly and drastically low. My diabetes educator asked about exercise, and I said I hadn’t been to the gym since yesterday. That’s when I learned – some 10+ years post-diagnosis – that physical activity can lower blood sugar up to 24 hours after exercise. No one knew I didn’t know this, not even me.
This is why resources like DiaTribe’s are so vital. It’s where I first learned about glucotoxicity – a sort of ‘feedback loop’ where high blood sugars beget high blood sugars. This makes intuitive sense, but I didn’t learn about it through my formal T1D education.
I’ve found it helpful to balance that formal education with peer-to-peer, community based learning. I’m better able to understand my own body and management by sharing stories, asking questions, and filling knowledge gaps with crowd-sourced wisdom and experience. Whether it’s sharing resources in an online space, asking and answering questions on Discord, or meeting other people living with and around T1D, I’m thankful for the grassroots community efforts and spaces I’ve found.
3. 42 Factors are a lot of factors
It’s fantastic to be able to contextualize our blood sugars and to wonder at the complexity of our bodies. But it can also be overwhelming. The trinity of food, exercise, and insulin persists because it’s simple. But – to quote DiaTribe – “what happens to my blood glucose after five hours of sleep, a low-carb breakfast, lots of exercise, high stress, and a big cup of coffee?”. It’s important to acknowledge the scope of factors at play, because ignoring them and focusing on a simpler equation only ever leads to disappointment and frustration. But it’s also daunting and can prime a person for burnout.
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