How To Sync Diabetes Up To Your Life (A More Sophisticated Delayed Gratification Story)

I’ve always believed that I can do anything with diabetes. This idea of freedom is one of the primary reasons we started the site. For sanity’s sake, it’s good for me to venture the great unknowns, test the boundaries, and find new possibilities for my life with the disease.

Yet… as the saying goes, there’s a time and a place for everything. And maybe, just maybe, there’s more freedom in understanding of our own limitations first. To demonstrate what I’m getting at (this just recently came to conscious awareness in my own life), let’s examine a few of my daily choices:

• Should I start that long bike ride when I’m sitting at 84?
• Is now that right time to answer my Mom’s call when I’m 302?
• When my body just isn’t responding to insulin and I’ve already replaced every part of my pump’s supply line, is this the best time for a stout?
• If I wake up to a blood sugar of 262, should I still have the bowl of cereal with sliced bananas?

Nah, I probably shouldn’t Because you know what happens next if we just say no here? We arrive in a place later, where we can explore, take risks, and possibly play with house money (you know that moment when you’ve just done a huge workout, you see your sugar’s steeply trending down, and eating anything you want is just about possible), instead of landing back in a similar place where our hand is forced again by blood sugar. We’re essentially playing the long-con on diabetes: You got me this time blood sugar, but I’m setting you up good. 

Nice reminder in the before-mentioned moments

This is the syncing, or the conscious placement of choices that align our life with diabetes management, not against. Delayed gratification is another way to phrase it, but being a millenial and all, just doesn’t feel right using the term.