We all know that living with diabetes and trying to manage our blood glucose levels as they fluctuate throughout the day with food, stress, sleep, weather, exercise, wow sometimes it feels they change based on how clean our socks are, is simply a struggle.
It’s hard to micromanage our own bodies every moment of every day.
And because I like to keep things in perspective when I begin feeling overwhelmed with what daily life with diabetes really takes, I thought it would be good to see things in a slightly different light.
That little drop right there you might miss at first glance is a unit of insulin.
If I’m off by a unit every day, it will affect me. If I have that much more than I need, I’m in need of urgent food intervention and if I don’t get it I’ll need an EMT.
If I’m missing that one unit every day, I will suffer the more traditional long-term complications in the future we’ve all heard about because the glucose in my bloodstream will damage my micro- and macro- vascular systems.
And I take the units through my pump in increments of 0.05 units. (I didn’t even try to take a picture of that!)
It isn’t very much, is it?
The bigger drop here is 40 units, the average amount of insulin I take every day.
It’s amazing how much thought we each put into our lives with diabetes, isn’t it? Sometimes getting a little perspective and seeing what a massive task we have on our shoulders can help us see that it makes perfect sense we don’t “get it right” all the time.
We’re doing a pretty complex thing here on a fairly minute level. Most people don’t even realize how much work we are doing in our brains all day every day just to balance our blood sugars with this infinitesimally small tool that is keeping us alive.
I think we’re each kind of amazing just for that—not to even mention our regular lives!!
Yup, we rock.
