It takes a village, or a team, or whatever you call it, to make it through your life.  Especially when you live with diabetes!  In addition to your regular team members including family and friends, you probably have at least one doctor, a certified diabetes educator, a dietitian or nutritionist, and then those I consider who are in the bullpen or on the bench: your eye doctor, podiatrist, dentist, pump trainer, etc. 

What a crew.

Whew.

Most importantly, does everyone on your team play well together?

When it comes to family members and in particular parents of kids and teens with diabetes, these family relationships are crucial in management of the disease.

That’s when it gets tricky; adolescence.  Adolescence is when the parent needs to begin taking a back seat—likely it will feel like the team manager has to become a regular player and the regular player must start to transition to team manager.  If you’ve ever had a job with a boss, think about changing places with that boss and all the tricky weird emotions that would come up between the two of you.

Yikes.

No wonder it’s difficult!

It is essential, though, for parents to help kids transition intelligently into self management.  A 2008 study looked at these family relationships and behaviors and how they translated into A1c results and DKA events of more than 2,000 teens. 

Again I caution parents that this needs to be a TRANSITION; any overnight change may result in your kid feeling abandoned with their disease.  You need to be the one who is understanding, compassionate, and yet you are the one who needs also to lead the transition. 

Your kid hasn’t done the teen years before—you have. 

In a result I’m sure may be perplexing to parents, the more overly involved adolescents reported their parents to be, the higher the adolescents’ A1c and the more episodes of DKA experienced.   This makes sense if you recall your own teen years: the more your parents wanted you to do something, the less you wanted to do it!  But it is crucial to understand that a teen’s job is to figure out how to separate from their parents so they can live on their own in the world.  If diabetes is in the mix, then it will be a tool used by both to exert control over the other.  A parent wants to exert control by dictating a blood glucose check; a teen wants to exert control by skipping that same check.

Another piece of data that came out was that 22% of the teens reported that their parents acted as though the diabetes was the parents’ disease rather than the teen’s. 

To be blunt here, the parent isn’t the one experiencing the physical manifestations of the disease.  The parent isn’t the one with the bruises from a shot.  The parent isn’t the one with the sometime confusion resulting from a low, or any of a myriad of other aspects of living with diabetes.  The diabetes belongs to the diabetic.

It is the parents’ job to play on your teen’s team.  Be as valuable a player as possible, but don’t go out there and play without permission from the team manager if you’re playing to win. 

If you need some help on this strategizing and what may work with you and your family, let me know.  That’s what I’m here for!

With a good team in place, and a good strategy in place for joint management and eventual total transition, you will all win, every time.

Go Team!!

Again I read a study abstract about diabetes.  You’d think I had better ways to spend my time!  I do, but it’s kind of interesting what people think about and what they care to study.

Anyway, this one looked at a number of adults with both type one and type two diabetes and how they saw their disease.  I’ll explain the study more in a few days after I’ve looked up all the words I didn’t understand.  (There were a lot, and it was only the abstract!)

But it is good stuff I think is worth thinking about for each of us.  Does it matter to you, internally, what you say to yourself and to others about your diabetes?

The psychologist I went to hear speak a few weeks ago wants to ban the term “diabetic”.  At camp we made a conscious shift from “having diabetes” to “living with diabetes”.  The study focused on whether you see yourself as “diseased” or if you see your diabetes as separate from yourself and your body.

If you’ve been reading, you probably know or suspect where I’m at.  If you haven’t, here’s the rundown: I have diabetes and live with it; it doesn’t much matter to me what you say in terms of me being diabetic or me having diabetes; my body is separate from my identity so I don’t see myself as diseased.  My pancreas doesn’t work right and when I was too young to know it, my body destroyed my beta cells.  Now I have to deal with it every day.  But my disease is mine.  All mine.  Just like my pancreas.

A lady asked me once if I ever realized that I have been ill for so many years.  I still don’t know what to do with that question.  I don’t think the expression on my face was very pretty.  Because “ill”??  Well, yes, a chronic disease.  Not chronic like a cough but chronic like, well, forever and always and inescapable. 

But ill?  Hardly.

I have to take my diabetes with me and factor it into each aspect of my life, every day.  And I do.  But if I had to describe myself to someone else, the term “diabetes” wouldn’t come up. 

It just isn’t me.  Just like my body isn’t what makes me me.  What makes me me is what I do with what I’ve got.

It’s why I say what I do: you have one body in this world.  Use it well. 

I see my body as a tool of my existence.  Mine is a little banged up at the edges and a little bit more on the inside due to my diabetes. 

So call it what you will; say I have diabetes, say I live with diabetes, say I am diabetic, say I’m “dee-a-be-tee-co” like a lady in one of my favorite movies Dave.   Call it a disease, call it chronic, call it whatever you want.

I’ll be busy, using what I’ve got to make a positive change in the world.

Wanna come?

I subscribe to several diabetes news feeds.  Sometimes, the headlines make me laugh. 

Using the term “diabetes” in mainstream media nearly always means “type two diabetes”.  A person with type one diabetes can feel wildly overlooked when it comes to the term “diabetes” meaning in fact “type two diabetes”— as type ones, we had no way to prevent our disease from developing and we have no way to help it get any “better” or regrow our pancreatic beta cells or help our bodies work more efficiently. 

Keeping that in mind, you may be able to hear my laughing at some of these headlines about “diabetes”.  Enjoy!

Bran May Reduce Risk of Death from Diabetes 

Women with Type 2 diabetes who eat a diet rich in bran may be less likely to die from heart problems, a new study suggests. Researchers at Harvard Medical School found that women who ate bran-rich diets were 35 percent less likely to die from heart disease, and 28 percent less likely to die from all causes. Bran is full of fiber, vitamins, and minerals, experts say.

(I’d also like to point out that I much prefer the more truthful “death from complications of diabetes” from the more sensationalized “death from diabetes”…)

Overeating Prompts More Weight Gain in Diabetes-Prone People

People who have a family predisposition to Type 2 diabetes may be more likely to gain weight after overeating than those without a family diabetes link.

So you mean if I overeat I’m likely to gain weight??  I’m sure the study itself wasn’t so badly presented, but the headline and abstract are too funny!

No Association between Arsenic Exposure from Drinking and Diabetes Mellitus

I don’t even know how they got to wondering on this one.  Apparently: there is a controversy over the long-term effects of arsenic (As) exposure from drinking water at levels <300 µg/L on the risk of diabetes mellitus.

Who knew.

Surgery ‘Should Be Last Resort for Obese Children’

Health experts report that weight-loss surgery should only be used for the most severely obese of children, and then only with extreme caution and as a last resort.

The terrifying thing about this headline is that even in the most black and white terms possible, some people and parents are missing this message.

One of my favorites:

Diabetes product packaging challenges consumers

This Mayo Clinic RN totally cracked me up with this one.  She’s talking about the insensitivity of manufacturers of glucose meters because the meters are packaged in that hard plastic you can’t open without hurting yourself (like a lot of Costco packages; you need a knife and a set of heavy duty pliers to open that stuff!).  Her concern is “for those people with diabetes who are faced with dexterity issues from aging, peripheral neuropathy or carpel tunnel syndrome, which can occur frequently in individuals with diabetes.”

I read that and thought “she has never been really low and tried to open a Starburst, or a roll of Lifesavers.” 

Now THAT is tricky.