Exhausted – Diabetes 365, Year 2 – Day 76

Diabetes mentally, physically and emotionally exhausts me. It really just has the capacity to take everything out of me.

In some ways, it’s just the nature of the disease. The highs and the lows that send me crawling across the floor without the energy to get up and walk to the bed. The same highs and lows that leave me without the energy to climb into bed and thus I’ll pull down a pillow and blanket and curl into the fetal position on the floor. The highs and lows that will get treated but then put me into a sometimes deep several hour sleep and other times a restless several hour sleep. The highs and lows that sometimes have me lying on the floor at work because I just don’t have the energy to sit upright.

And sometimes, I contribute to it. I’ve not accepted diabetes as a part of my life, I spend a lot of time fighting it and fighting everything that I have to do to take care of it, and it expends a lot of energy, and I know this because I have felt piece when I’ve given up the fight and just gone with the flow of things.

Back in January, I called a friend and said "I’m tired. I’m tired of fighting it. I don’t want it anymore now than I did when I was diagnosed but I don’t have the energy to keep fighting it."

Life was blissful for about 3 days as I did only what I had to do and I went about life as though the diabetes didn’t truly exist even though I was still taking care of it. And then, as it’s known to happen, my blood sugars went all out of whack and I went back to fighting with the diabetes because not fighting with it wasn’t gaining me much more than fighting with it was.

I have a hard time letting go and just riding the wave that is my diabetes. And it exhausts me. It wears me down and tears me down and I’ll get just enough energy to come back fighting. And the vicious circle that is my life with diabetes repeats, over and over and over again like a broken record.

I’m trying to change, I’m trying to not let it get to me as bad as it has for the last 16 years, but I’ve also been fighting it for 16 years, the diabetes and everything related to it, and it’s difficult to change something that’s so ingrained in me, and that exhausts me.

But I’m not one to just let things go. I don’t just accept things, because in a way, acceptance to me is defeat, and so I keep fighting. And it’s exhausting.

Yes, I add to the exhaustion that diabetes creates on it’s own. But one day, when there’s a cure, I’ll be able to say that it was worth it, that the constant fighting was worth it.