It's world diabetes day

To be honest I'm not sure I really need a day for this, I've had type 1 diabetes everyday since I was diagnosed in mid 1999(sorry I can't remember the exact day) , so to be honest I'd kind of prefer day off from dealing with it.

Being diabetic involves rather a lot of maths, calculating the carbohydrates in anything I eat, figuring out how much I need to inject, remembering to include an injection for a cup of coffee (my favourite flat white has 6 grams of carbs) having a beer or glass of wine gets even more complicated, not only will it make my blood sugar go up, it will also cause it to go down. There is a lot to remember and to calculate and if I make a mistake my blood sugar either goes really high or drops really low, both can put me in hospital and even if they don't I end up feeling lousy. Getting the answer wrong results in now than just a red cross on the answer sheet.

All this remembering is also really tricky and doesn't play nicely with my ADHD, remembering to take insulin 15 minutes before I eat is tricky and assumes a lot more forward planning than I am easily able to do, especially seeing as it doesn't take much for me to get into a hyper focus and forget to eat, or to eat and only realise I didn't take insulin when an alarm goes off.

So it has come as a bit of a relief to have some of this mental arithmetic taken out of my hands. The new insulin pump I've been given actually talks directly to my glucose monitor and adjusts my insulin automatically even stopping it is it goes too low. It still requires that I remember to put carbs in when I eat, but even in a couple of weeks it has made a dramatic difference. It's not cheap the insulin pumps and glucose monitor cost more than some of the more traditional treatments, however it is worth it and will almost certainly cut down on hospitalisations and complications from diabetes.

Living with diabetes is a lot more complicated than simply not eating sugar and getting exercise, in fact sometimes exercise causes problems which require me to have sugar. So if you know someone who is diabetic whether they are managing well or whether their blood sugar is out of control, be aware of the amount they are having to think about just to stay alive.