Patient Frustrations with Diabetes Type 1

I try very hard to be positive about my disease but the thing that is the most frustrating
is the confusion between type-1 and type-2. I know that there are many things that are
similar and many things that you would say both people or both individuals whether
they are type-1 or type-2 would encounter but the frustrating thing for me is that
people will make remarks to me that really have nothing to do with my disease.
They don’t understand that when I have insulin on board and when I take insulin for
food the thing that I was told in Australia was this gives you the freedom, you eat
whatever you want to eat.
I know what carbohydrate levels are in many of the manufactured foods. For example,
here is a classic example – when I was teaching school the birthday treat would be a
doughnut from a very famous doughnut company that makes their doughnuts fresh
and you could even watch them come down the assembly line as they were being
made. And the children would come in with a dozen of those doughnuts and beautiful
thing was I could flip over the box and see how many carbohydrates were in that
doughnut.
All I have to do, and again, it’s this wonderful pump that I like so much, I tell it how
much carbohydrate I am going to have, so for example I am going to do a bolus, so I
tell this bolus wizard that this doughnut by the famous doughnut maker where you can
watch them come through, I am going to plug in 22 doughnuts because that’s what
their original doughnut is – 22 grams of carbohydrate. I hit activate. It says you are
going to take for this doughnut 1.4 units of insulin. It’s flashing here.
So it’s telling me how much insulin to take to eat that doughnut. Now I am not going
to hit activate because if I hit this blue button that insulin is going to go into my
system and that’s not a good idea because I don’t have any food on board right now.
So I am going to just escape and it’s gone, but that’s how I would do it. And I am
back to my blank screen, my main menu.
When people tell me that I can’t eat that because I am a diabetic, “You can eat that.
You can’t eat that, you are diabetic,” It frustrates me. I know what my body is like
and every single person, you know it better than anyone. You even know it better than
a lot of the medical professionals.
People read in print, they study and they are very knowledgeable and I don’t want to
take anything away from our medical care people but the person who knows best is
yourself. You know. You know what it’s like. You know what it feels like when your
blood sugar is high. You know what it feels like when your blood sugar is low. You
test to make sure you are in the right range. Stress can change things. It’s always a
different day for a diabetic, at least it is for me. So when people tell me what I can and
cannot do based on what they have heard or because grandma is a diabetic therefore I
need to follow grandma’s routine, that frustrates me.
And I try to be very patient. I sometimes do the ‘show and tell’ thing with the pump
because rather than me being frustrated with them I think I am doing them a much
bigger favor to educate them.
So I try very hard to be gracious, not to let it bug me, and I do sometimes get bugged,
but try to look at it as an opportunity for them to learn something a little bit new and
perhaps a little different from their viewpoint that they had when they made the
statement the first time.