Managing the ?Daily-ness? of Diabetes Through Text Messages

[Northerner]

Managing diabetes, both type 1 and type 2, takes daily, if not hourly, vigilance: checking blood sugar, taking medications or the right amount of insulin, thinking about what foods to eat. Even people who have had diabetes for years and are doing relatively well can struggle with the routine. Just one miscalculation about how much insulin to take before a meal can lead to a dangerous low blood sugar, or a very elevated one that can leave them feeling terrible for hours.

Shantanu Nundy, MD, a clinical instructor of medicine at the University of Chicago Medicine, calls this constant struggle the ?daily-ness? of diabetes.

?A lot of people with diabetes do well for a while and then they slip up,? he said. ?We don?t have a systematic way of getting people to really buy into their diseases. We just say, ?Here?s some medicine,? but we don?t really have a mechanism for teaching people the idea of what it really means to have this disease and have it every day for the rest of your life.?

http://sciencelife.uchospitals.edu/...daily-ness-of-diabetes-through-text-messages/

 

[DeusXM]

This is the very heart of what's hard about diabetes. I remember a few years back there was a Channel 4 documentary about 'difficult' teenagers with diabetes and one of them made the most astute point I've ever heard about having D - "People think the worst thing about it is doing the injections, but to me it's like cleaning your teeth. The hard bit is the whole having to manage everything yourself constantly and think about what it's doing to your blood sugar."

I still find going to the clinic to be the best motivation for me personally and what it means if I don't get everything under control. I was at retinopathy screening on Monday and I was the only person in a waiting room of 30 people who wasn't shambling around barely able to walk like a zombie. That'll be me if I don't get a grip on things. That ain't gonna be me.