on being a mature adult with diabetes

Six Until Me has a great post this morning about transitioning from being a child with diabetes to becoming an adult with diabetes and when you start to take responsibility for yourself in your diabetes care. There’s a lot to think about and a bunch of great perspectives from others about when and how they made that transition.

It immediately made me think, of course, of whether there is a similar transition in folks with type 2 diabetes. We generally come to the disease as an adult, often a comparatively older adult, so we don’t necessarily have a parent or other person taking primary responsibility for our diabetes management. That doesn’t mean, however, that we jump right into being a mature “adult” with our diabetes.

Consider to begin with, how many people with type 2 diabetes are told by their primary care physician to simply “take this pill” and come back in 3 months or 6 months or a year and we’ll see how you’re doing. We often aren’t taught the importance of testing our own blood sugar and understanding how food and exercise and stress impact it. Insurance companies tell us we only need one test strip per day to get a general idea of how well we’re doing. We don’t need, they say, to test after meals or before bed or before or after exercise. So, from my perspective, we give over control to the doctor from the beginning. Maybe we get some nutritional training, maybe we don’t. Maybe we’re told to “not eat white bread” or to lay off the sweets. If our a1c doesn’t come down, we’re given more pills so maybe it’s the pills responsibility to control our diabetes.

I think we only grow up, in terms of diabetes care, when we take that control back from the doctors and the pills. When we demand that we need to understand what is happening with our bodies. When we seek out nutritional guidance and put the effort into making the changes that work for us to better control our diabetes.

This is a hard process. I don’t know that you can directly compare it to a child learning to dose him or herself with insulin and taking responsibility to not be too high or too low when driving, etc., but it shares some similarities, does it not?

Personally, I spent a few years when my diabetes became less easy to control because I was not producing enough insulin anymore for the pills to work alone and my blood sugar was consistently too high. I would nod off at the wheel while driving and I blamed in on not getting enough sleep. I gained weight and made my diabetes even harder to control. I started insulin and still didn’t test enough, after all, I thought, there’s nothing I can do about high blood sugars.

That is not being a mature adult taking care of my diabetes. It has nothing to do with my age and a lot to do with my attitude. In fact, I’m going through a little phase of not being a mature adult right now. Because I lost a lot of weight and my body miraculously is producing the right amount of insulin again, my diabetes is much easier to control. IF I do the right things: follow my nutritional guidelines, get the right amount of exercise, test consistently and pay attention to my body, THEN my diabetes is easy to control. IF I let slide on any of that, my blood sugar and a1c start going up again. It’s hard to be a mature adult all the time. As a type 2, I have a bit more leeway than a person with type 1 but it’s still my responsibility.

What do you think? How do people with type 2 transition from letting the doctors or pills control you to taking responsibility for yourself?