Balancing Act – Diabetes 365, Year 2 – Day 79

It wasn’t until recently that I discovered what managing my diabetes is all about. It was probably within the last 2 years that it finally dawned on me. When I started cycling actually to be exact. Managing diabetes is a balancing act.

I’m balancing my numbers, diet, and exercise. I can’t have good numbers without good diet and exercise, and I can’t exercise without good numbers, and food, well, it’d be better if we were all eating healthy, diabetes or not.

It’s like a three ring circus, except the rings aren’t next to each other, they’re intertwined, like a Venn Diagram. And where the three rings meet in the middle, there is diabetes nirvana. The place where everything comes together and works for the good of everything else.

In my three ring circus, where sometimes, I’m participating in all rings at the same time, we’ve got, in ring one: me trying to balance the stick on my hand with the plate on top of it and on top of the plate, FOOD. Glorious food, except it’s not so glorious because as I’m trying to keep it from falling on top of my head, I’m calculating the carbs in it in my head. And sometimes, there’s a second plate balancing on a stick that’s balancing on my other hand…it makes things doubly as hard.

In ring two we’ve got the bicyclist trying to cross the tight rope. It’s great exercise, except for all the anxiety it causes and a little fear put in there for good measure. Like the fear of "oh, I might go low while I’m doing this".

Which brings us to the third ring where I’m dancing with a bear, who at any moment could decide that it’s not happy to be a dancing bear and slash me open with it’s paws or decapitate me with it’s jaw. That dancing bear, that’s the blood sugar management of my diabetes care trifecta. It doesn’t take much to set the bear off.

Somewhere in all that is a net called insulin. But insulin alone will not take me to diabetes nirvana. Getting to diabetes nirvana takes some work, and I’m just now realizing that. It used to be that I thought I could have good diabetes management based on checking my blood a minimal number of times a day (4) and taking insulin when I ate. I was so wrong.

I now understand that reaching diabetes nirvana is a balancing act between two things I love (food and being an athlete) and one thing I hate (taking checking my blood and managing my blood glucose numbers). They need to work interdependently instead of independently.