A little too much ice cream, a little less control...

Diabetes probably looks pretty easy to the outsider. Here's your insulin, here's a syringe, a bottle of test strips and a glucose monitor. There you go. Take the meds. Use the tools. Finito. Piece of cake.

Not quite.

Yesterday, I ate ½ cup of oatmeal mixed with 2 scoops of whey protein shake (because I do a lot of heavy weightlifting and my body needs a lot protein at every meal now to take care of the extra fifteen pounds of muscle I've gained in the past year!) - and so I took 7 units of insulin because this is what I usually take for a breakfast of about 35 to 40 grams of carbs.

Two hours later my blood sugar was 375 and I was really confused and just annoyed.

I did everything I usually do. It should've worked. I'm honestly still not sure why it was so high. It's possible I injected it into a bad site with too much scar tissue (I over-use my belly to inject), but at the moment I really can't think of what else might have happened. Hey, who knows, maybe I was in such a rush I actually only took 4 units instead of 7? It's possible. I don't do that very often, but it's possible.

Either way, it was annoying because I felt like a sugar-filled blob for several hours and I simply felt guilty for letting my BG get so high so quickly. Fortunately, because I checked my BG when I knew I wasn't feeling quite right, it didn't stay that high for too long.

The point is, I can't get thoroughly upset every time I lose control over my blood sugars, because this could and will happen throughout my entire life. There have been times in the past ten years that I've had diabetes when my control has been fantastic. I was eating well, checking often, totally aware of every gram of carbohydrate I ate and how much insulin my body needed to cover it.

There have been other periods, my first year in college comes to mind, when my blood sugars were, well, whacky. Out of control. All over the place. And I can look back on what I was eating, how much I was exercising, if I was really paying good attention to my carbohydrate and insulin ratio, and how much alcohol was drinking, and it shouldn't surprise me that my blood sugars were all over the place.

But it's also okay. I mean, yes, we want to be in control all the time to be as healthy as possible...but even a non-diabetic goes through phases of their life as they get older when they're eating more junk food, they're more stressed out and skipping the gym, sleeping later, and just plain not taking great care of themselves.

We can't be amazingly perfect all the time. (Well, we're already living with diabetes, so we're already pretty amazing...heh). So I think we're all due for a little breathing room. If you know that right now you haven't been keeping as close an eye on your blood sugars as you could be, okay, acknowledge, think about what might be keeping you from staying in range and maybe even make a list of what you think you could do to start making better habits.