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Grief, Diabetes and Covid.

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NotWorriedAtAll

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Screenshot 2020-07-23 at 21.38.49.png
It occurred to me that many people seem to go through stages like this with regards to huge changes in their lives and not just when they lose a loved one.

When I saw this diagram it made me think about how lots of people are responding to the Covid crisis and many of them appear to be in the first four stages and it might explain why so many people are acting as if nothing has changed and they are refusing to take precautions or railing against it. I think many people are grieving the pre-Covid life and are stuck in those four stages right now.

Which then led me to thinking about how some people go through something similar when diagnosed with diabetes.

I always seem to skip the shock, denial anger, bargaining, depression stages and tend to leap to the testing and acceptance stages. Maybe because of having spent my entire life expecting dreadful things to happen for one reason or another and so when they do I'm very rarely surprised and I focus all my efforts into making the best of things as quickly as possible. It might be something to do with having my brain wired atypically.

But I find it interesting to spot patterns and I thought maybe people here would find this interesting too.
 
I'm still in the denial phase... :(
 
Sadly I've never spotted a pattern, but me mother was fatalistic about life hence wherever we went for what ever purpose an essential always was ' ... and a clean pair of socks for Jennifer'.

I generally do always look on the bright side, we're all stuck with diabetes one way or the other, so best try to get it to behave!

For now with Covid I think I'm somewhere at the start of Stage 6, but I'll need to test Stage 6 come August 1st and see how that goes for a while before I can even consider Stage 7.

[Mod edit: Useful Insulin/air travel discussion split off to here https://forum.diabetes.org.uk/boards/threads/insulin-and-air-travel.88067/ ]
 
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I thought maybe people here would find this interesting too.
Thanks @NotWorriedAtAll, it is a colourful and helpful diagram.
Indeed there are many parallels between the grieving process and Diabetes diagnosis and we can see people progress through this on the forum.
'Newbies' can be grieving previous health and lifestyle and we sometimes say to Type 2s that having gone through the grieving process they will find many advantages in their revised lifestyle .
 
Yes there certainly does seem to be an overlap @NotWorriedAtAll

The important thing to remember about the ‘stages of grief‘ models (whether applied to significant change, loss of health or loss of a loved one) is that it is not a nice neat progression through a sequence of stages. It can be a far more messy, organic, tangled and often chaotic whirlwind in and out of several of the stages in the same day, all out of sequence, and with no regard for logic or orderliness.

Having said that, I do find the stages models helpful to understand that what I am feeling is completely normal and simply part of the process of adapting to change.
 
Interesting comparison, @NotWorriedAtAll, it’s fascinating how that model works in other situations.

Getting diabetes didn’t bother me - my mum was T1 since I was 5 years old. Grieving, particularly for the loss of a child, is very much a modern phenomenon. 150 years ago it was quite normal for infectious diseases to cull one or two of your children, so that expectation didn’t cause prolonged grieving. Grief differs from country to country. In those countries, in rural Africa, a good dose of loud wailing seems to make the jump from stage 3 to stage 7 much easier.
 
Many people in the Indonesian village of Toraja believe the soul doesn't leave the body until a funeral is held. Until a family can afford a worthy sendoff, the corpse often remains at the family home, where it's treated like a living family member. Inside the Indonesian tribe that dig up their loved ones' corpses, comb their hair and pose for family photos together. Bizarre photographs show Indonesian families digging up their dead loved ones before combing their hair and posing alongside the corpses for family snaps.
 
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