I Do It MY Way

By Jan Chait First, a smile for the day. My 84-year-old mother was visiting and I arranged to have coffee with a local friend of mine who is 86. I got to the coffee shop first and was, with the help of one of the employees, carving out a space for us at the community table. "I'm meeting two octogenarian ladies," I told him. He then began wondering where their country was. I worry about today's youth and hope the little dude never gets diabetes. He might find the knowledge he'll need to duke it out with the big D a bit overwhelming: Perhaps even more difficult than trying to find Octogenaria on a map. How do you treat your diabetes? That is, do you blindly do what somebody else tells you to do (I call it fitting people into a box labeled "diabetes") or did you work with professionals and do a lot of reading and experimenting to figure out what lets you be "free" and still maintain control? Do you resent being put into a box or can you handle it, emotionally? Are you happy? Why? I can't imagine being happy in that circumstance. I would feel hot and sweaty and cramped and restrained. It wouldn't last long. In fact, it didn't. About two weeks. After that, I ignored the fact that I had Type 2 diabetes for about the next nine years. If I had to do all of "those" things to maintain control, it wasn't worth it to me. It wasn't worth the feeling of restraint; it wasn't worth the deep depression that set in. My HbA1c rose to 17.4%. When a friend recommended I see an endocrinology gro...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs