I’m constantly amazed at how little education some people get when it comes to diabetes – all kinds. I’ve just been reading some entries on FaceBook where some people seem bit clueless about diabetes management. While tempted to jump in, I stopped myself.

It would have opened a can of worms, and taken way more time than I have right now, to start suggesting answers to some of the questions being raised, and frankly, I can’t see their full medical picture and I’m not a medical person. I was in their position once upon a time, and while others answered some of my questions, I really did have to do lots of learning on my own. I did leave some reading suggestions (see below). Someone medical should be answering all their questions. Clearly the questioners’ medical teams weren’t providing much.

I’m not amazed that medical people just don’t have the time to help, and people are left with constant blood glucose readings way over 11 mmol/l /200 mg/dl.

It’s NOT OK folks!

Firstly, if you expect to get your education at any medical facility, that’s for the very lucky. You probably won’t get as much as you need. Secondly, diabetes is one of those conditions where you have to take responsibility for its management. No one is going to do that FOR you. And no one said it was going to be easy. There’s a lot to learn.

The problem often is that you receive a diagnoses, are given a brief overview and then you’re left to your own devices for the most part until the next appointment.

I would like to recommend some reading and some activity:

Books:

Think Like a Pancreas by Gary Scheiner – this should be required reading for the newly diagnosed and anyone struggling with control of blood glucose

Your Diabetes Science Experiment by Ginger Vieira (available at lulu.com) – this one too, a well-written, easy to understand path to improving your blood glucose where you learn and get to figure out how your body reacts to various situations.

Using Insulin by John Walsh – another one that should be required reading.

If you’re thinking about an insulin pump:

Pumping Insulin by John Walsh

Buy yourself a really good Carb-Counter. Your blood glucose depends on your knowing how many carbs you are eating.

Look for a DAFNE course which teaches you how to count carbs and manage medications accordingly.

If you have consistently high blood glucose, or one that is wildly fluctuating and you don’t know where to start – one way is to reduce your carb intake. The less carbs you eat, the less insulin you need and the narrower is the room for error. Once you have your diabetes under better control, you may stay with lower carbs or not. Up to you!

Participate on forums like tudiabetes.org where you can find 19,000 others with all kinds of diabetes or carers of people with diabetes.

Whether you are newly diagnosed, or diagnosed long-term, no one can make the decision for you to take the bull by the horns and to take steps to get your diabetes under good control. It’s not impossible, but it’s not easy. It requires time, some discipline and a great deal of learning and tweaking what you already do. But don’t lose heart – it’s possible to have good blood glucose readings, no matter how impossible you might think it is right now.

It’s well worth the effort!

I will be updating this from time to time as I come across some worthwhile reading, activity or online participation.

A while ago I wrote about how I was battling with unexplained highs. Now I have the opposite problem. Lows for several days now, even on a reduced basal.

In the last 24 hours, a 70% reduced basal overnight (by that time, I’d given up and just wanted some sleep), still only put me a mmol/l over normal by this morning, and that was after not bolusing for dinner (around 30 carbs) and several snacks after. By dinner, I was on a 50% reduced basal and I did a half-strength correction at 10:30pm. By 3am I was having yet another hypo.

I’m pretty much hypo unaware these days, so I’m on hourly BGL checking.

My diabetes educator and I have had several conversations over the last few days, and we can’t come up with anything obvious to explain it. Now it’s more conjecture than anything else, unless we want to run a bunch of unnecessary blood tests, and even then there might be nothing obvious to explain it. No point really unless it doesn’t resolve.

The situation seems to be slowly improving as the day wears on, but it’s as tedious to deal with these unexplained lows as it is to deal with days of unexplained highs. It is, however, a fact of life for people with diabetes!