Featured Blogger of the Week: June 31 - July 6, Post #3

Featured Blogger of the Week: June 31 - July 6

Rachel Baumgartel, Tales of my 30's & Diabetes Daily

Post # 3

A few random thoughts to conclude the week…

Now that it has been four years since my T2 diagnosis, things come a little easier. I know what I should eat and how much I should exercise. I don’t need to test as much as long as trends look promising on my meter. I suppose you could call it a maintenance phase. No signs of complications, A1C levels under 6.0%, and otherwise healthy.

I know that I’ve created positive change in our household. Without my insistence on healthier eating and exercising, my husband might not have become as vigilant as he has been with his own T1 routine since his hypoglycemic seizure in November 2004.

Watching my husband manage his T1 reminds me that I still need to be active in my own diabetes care. It’s not that I’m scared of possible progression of my type 2 in the future, it’s that I want to be in control of my diabetes destiny. If things start to get out of control, I want to nip that in the bud, whether that means medication again or if that means insulin.

I do hope that I can stay in this so-called maintenance phase for quite some time, though.

I feel terribly when I see someone who doesn’t manage his or her diabetes well. I wish I could walk up to them and shake some sense into them. But I don’t. We’ve all had experiences with unsolicited advice and this is one of the worst offenses of the sort.

I can’t change people; I can only help myself (and in some sense, my husband). Of course, if someone reaches out for my help, I would be more than willing to assist. That’s why I blog, that’s why I advocate for people with diabetes.

We talk about cures for our respective conditions, though not very often. While hope is a good thing, we both tend to be more realistic and perhaps more pessimistic. He’s generally at peace with his diabetes, which encourages and allows me to be the same with mine.

Besides, who’s to say that the diseases haven’t already managed to play havoc in our bodies that can’t be reversed in spite of a cure? If there is a cure, who decides who gets it first? These are the questions we ask each other when the discussion turns to the idea of cures. Why, yes, we do wax philosophically…

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