LIVING WITH YOUR DIABETES

Doctors and other health care professionals talk about you as ‘a diabetic’ or ‘a person with diabetes’ and you may also talk about being a diabetic or having diabetes. But this is a very poor description of you. You are a unique individual with your own lifestyle, work, hobbies, family background, home, friends, ideas and dreams. No one else in the world is capable of offering your special gifts to society. The fact that you have, at some stage in your life, been diagnosed as having diabetes is a very small part of your whole person.

Your diabetes is also unique to you – no one else responds in precisely your way to changes in food, exercise, treatment and the passage of time. This is why it is very important that you learn all you can about your own diabetes. Armed with this knowledge and with the experience built up by health care professionals, scientists and others (including those with diabetes) you can take command of your diabetes and ensure that it remains well controlled and does not get in your way. Your diabetes is an inescapable part of you, but there is no need for it to intrude on your enjoyment of life.

This all sounds great in theory, but when you wake up in the middle of the night and start worrying and wish that it wasn’t you, that it was all a terrible mistake and you are going to wake up in the morning non-diabetic, then it is not so simple. Being diabetic is not easy all the time. The first, and maybe the hardest, step is to accept that you have diabetes and that for the foreseeable future you will remain so. This acceptance does not come overnight and some people with diabetes never fully accept it.

Jo has been diabetic for ten of her eighteen years. Nowadays she is in and out of hospital with ketoacidosis and mistakes in her insulin dose. I asked her how she felt about being diabetic and the answer was simple: ‘I don’t want to know.’

Being an ostrich is all very well, but if you try to bury your diabetes in the sand you find that the rest of you gets covered in grit too!

There is a tendency to see diabetes in terms of blood glucose levels and the mechanics of insulin injection or pill dose. When you go to your clinic you will be asked all about this and about symptoms of tissue damage. Sadly, in many clinics, there is too little time and too clinical an atmosphere to discuss how you feel emotionally. Many people with diabetes feel that the doctor’. . . doesn’t want to know about my private worries. He is much too busy thinking about my sugar levels.’ If you are worried, then we do want to know. It will help us to help you, and you may feel better sharing your anxieties. If something is worrying you, even if it seems to be nothing to do with your diabetes, the anxiety may upset your glucose balance.

Nellie is seventy-five years old and has been diabetic for twenty years. When she came to the clinic recently she looked tired and had lost weight. I asked her how she was sleeping.

‘I can hardly sleep at all. I’m so worried,’ she said and she started crying quietly.

She told me that because her husband had worked past the official retirement age his pension had been reduced. They were finding it very hard to pay the bills and she could not afford her proper diet.

‘But I’m keeping you from your work, doctor,’ she said. I pointed out that she was my work at the moment. Later, I arranged for her to discuss things with our welfare expert, who found that she was entitled to an additional allowance.

Feel free to discuss how you view your diabetes with your diabetes advisers, your family doctor, your relatives and with your close friends. It will help them to understand. You will be helping your doctor too. I am not diabetic and I do not know what it feels like to have diabetes. I need my patients to tell me how they feel. I learn more from my patients than I ever have from textbooks, and that helps me to look after future patients.

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DIABETES

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