I had a Facebook conversation the other day at Diabetes Outside’s page about anger and diabetes.  I understand anger is a big emotion many feel toward the disease.

I rarely do.

Sure, I get frustrated at my numbers, I watch others eat food without thinking, I check my blood in line at the grocery store, I run 5 miles carrying 6 things in my hands.  I know these things make me different than most everyone around me.  I know my life has different challenges and that I need to work harder all the time than nearly everyone I see every day.

But I just am not angry about it.

This conversation the other day included a very solid question: “Amy, do you mean you aren’t angry at diabetes?!”

Well, shoot. 

No, I’m not really angry. 

And me being me, I immediately wanted to know WHY NOT?  I see many people online writing and commenting about their diabetes and I can’t say many of them aren’t angry.  So why aren’t I angrier at having diabetes than I am? 

Now, the simple answer is true and somewhat superficial: being angry takes a heck of a lot of energy.  I choose to spend that energy producing positive changes in my life and hopefully in the lives of others.

But, of course, I continued to think about it.  And I kept flashing back to a picture my therapist told me to draw when I was in high school.  She asked me to draw my diabetes.

Now, this is when I was about 15 or 16 and had had diabetes for 5 or 6 years.  I was still in a lot of denial.  A ton of it, in fact.  I remember drawing the picture, and I remember showing it to her and crying.

I'm the one in purple; my diabetes is black; circa 1993.

I’m kind of nervous to post my re-created picture, but I’m doing it to kind of show you who I am and why I think Diabetes Outside is so important.  I think it’s critical for everyone to acknowledge how frightening it is to learn about having this crazy disease, to learn we are in charge of it every day forever, and to know that despite our best efforts we’ll never get it “right”.  I think when we are diagnosed with diabetes it comes without warning and the disease has so many facets it is overwhelming.  For each and every one of us.  So for me, anger is only beneficial when we can use it to help us figure out a way to make our lives as great as they can be.  As I never was able to benefit from being angry, I have let go of much of the anger in favor of tools that I can use.

So you can probably see my answer to the question a little differently now:

No; I was never very angry about being diagnosed with diabetes. 

I was too busy being scared.

I feel a need to share portions of my doctor visit yesterday with you.  It’s a little bit bragging on my part because I felt like I handled the situation better than most of my visits.  If you read something you might be able to put to use in your life, please take it and try it out.  If not, it’s only 863 words.

So I have this new doctor.  I changed doctors this year because of some changes in my insurance plan and because I felt I needed a doctor who could be more aggressive with my management of my disease.

I kind of got what I asked for. 

This, of course, stressed me out.  (Hey, it’s how I roll.)  The first visit I felt like I was arguing with her and I felt like she was judging me and telling me that I was doing a bad job managing my diabetes. 

Not good.

I brought my husband to the second visit to hopefully defray some of the negative vibes I had at the first visit. 

It worked somewhat, but I was still uncomfortable having a doctor that I didn’t want to see alone.

I considered changing doctors again.

Yet they called to confirm my appointment and I confirmed.  So 9:30am yesterday I approached the desk with a new plan.

I was my typical nervous and chatty self, trying to make friends with the office staff.  I chatted with the guy who took my weight and blood pressure, even asking him how long it took him to commute to the office.  And I was in the clinic room posting on Facebook.  Maybe you saw me? 

Like I said, I was nervous.

So my doctor came in and asked me how I was.  Test time.  I tried a new strategy.  I told her how I was.  I told her that I felt like I should have a lower A1c and was somehow not doing something right because I’m always 7.1-7.4.  I asked for her help.

My new approach was rewarded almost immediately by her response: she looked at my printouts and said, almost meekly, “it looks like you’re doing really a pretty good job.”

We talked through a couple issues, and when she asked me if I had done midday basal testing I tried my other new strategy: I told her the truth bolstered only by a truthful reason, not an excuse.  I told her I haven’t been able to figure out how to fit in a midday basal test: I would do it on a weekend day, but I run 15+ miles on Saturday morning and that kind of negates any basal test results over the next two days. 

She took it in stride.

I felt like it was a good visit.  I was feeling so good I decided to ask her for what I initially sought her out to provide. 

I thought about how I would feel if a doctor came into my law office and told me that she had been dealing with a legal issue for 22.5 years and was only seeing me so that I would sign a form as her attorney.  I thought how that would feel if I had been practicing law for 25 years. 

I thought about how dumb that doctor would sound to me.  I’m trained as a lawyer to know the law and although I don’t share all of my knowledge with each of my clients, they come to me so that they have help with their legal problems and expect me to apply my knowledge to their situation. 

Why should I be any different in my doctor’s office?  She sees patients every day and knows so much more about type one diabetes than I do simply because she sees so many people, while I only truly know portions of my own disease. 

So I asked her for her gut response when she saw my printouts. 

And she gave it to me. 

And I asked her about portions of what she had said, and we changed my pump settings.  I asked her where she thought I should tweak if the first round of changes didn’t work out very well.  I asked her a number of questions assuming that she trusted me and my knowledge like I trust hers.

See, what I have known for months is that my issues with my doctor were coming from ME and not at all from HER.  She has no skin in this game; I’m the one to lose out if I don’t trust my doctor and benefit from her expertise.    

Yesterday when I tried out this theory, it felt like a successful visit.  I tried to be as honest with her as I could be, and I tried to really use her and her experience.  I tried to trust that she was bringing her experience and her training and knowledge to the visit and that she wasn’t telling me that I wasn’t doing something right or wrong or bad or good.  I tried to share my emotions and worries with her in a more analytical way so that we could get to a better place.

And I think it worked.

I see that the NovoPen is celebrating a birthday this year—it turns 25! 

I had no idea.  Should I have gotten a card?  Shoot.  I must have been distracted by the fact that TODAY IS MY MOM’S BIRTHDAY.  Happy Birthday Mom!  But I digress.

The pen was first introduced in 1985, which makes me feel really old because I remember 1985.  Dang.  But anyway, it makes me really wonder why I never used a pen to take my insulin.

Well, I guess one reason would be that I was taking way too much insulin when I was younger—more than three times what I take now.  Slightly frightening.  I saw a new doctor once who told me to simply cut my dosage in half.  Scary, but wouldn’t you know it; my blood sugars didn’t change.  Talk about a lot of extra insulin.

(Alright; now I’m afraid that someone is going to try this because I told you I did it.  DON’T CHANGE YOUR INSULIN BECAUSE I SAID SOMETHING.  Go ahead and ask your doctor, but don’t think I did anything smart back then when it came to diabetes—I didn’t.)

But back to the pen.  I used it two years ago when I tried going off my pump for a week or so.  It was okay but not what I’m used to—I’m used to the vial and knocking the air bubbles out as I flick my fingers against the syringe.  But the pen was nice and it was convenient!

I remember—when I was a new type one and desperate for anything that didn’t involve a needle—seeing an ad for a device that looked like the pen but was needleless.  It essentially blew the insulin through someone’s skin and misted into the body.  Geez I wanted that thing almost as much as I wanted a puppy.

I never got it, though; eventually after I saw it enough I figured there was NO WAY that thing worked like the picture said it would. 

But I never got the pen, either, and now I wonder why.  Was it not as prevalent then as it is now?  I mean, I took shots for years and no one ever asked me if I wanted to try the pen.  I would have used it, I think.  I took shots at school every day and could have really used something less bulky than my little bright blue cooler thing (which really was a pretty good gadget, insulated somehow with spaces for vials and spaces for syringes all in a checkbook-sized container). 

I bet there are thousands of type ones who never learned how to draw up a syringe.  They don’t need to know because there are pens everywhere.  Wacky!  And here it was, thinking everyone with type one had to know how to do.  I guess not—at least since 1985.

So better late than never: Happy birthday, insulin pen!