You know those days when everything seems to be happening at once? Your phone is about to die but you're in the middle of a conversation with your mom whom you haven't talked to in several days, while you're attempting to work on an assignment that only requires 15% of your attention so you can semi-effectively write while "hm"ing and "uh-hu"ing to your mom, and five of your friends just walked down the hall and are excited to see you because you've been MIA all day due to your full schedule. On top of it all you know that as soon as you finish the conversation with your mom you have to write a 4-5 page essay and save the world from ebola all while trying to balance your social life.
College is challenging in many ways, especially in the middle of a semester, but diabetes makes it far more complicated. Because while you're on the phone and typing on your computer and actively avoiding your loud friends in the hallway you start to feel shaky and everything starts moving in fast-motion. A cold sweat begins on the back of your neck and you can't do much about it at the moment, but you can feel a low blood sugar coming on. So you quickly finish up your conversation with your mom and pause in typing on your computer to grab a juicebox and packet of skittles, rolling your eyes at the irony of the perfectly imperfect timing of such an occurance. Of course I would go low right now.
That's the thing, though. Diabetes doesn't concede to your demanding schedule. I realized while I was dealing with my low BG this evening that complaining and crying about the woes of diabetes doesn't help deal with the problem at hand, nor does it keep the disease from inconveniencing me again. In fact I was lucky that I was in my room when it happened and had immediate access to my stash of juice and skittles, because if it had happened an hour earlier when I was running around campus the low blood sugar would've been far more dangerous. It's being prepared and knowing your body that helps with the lows, prevents them, and ensures that when the inevitable happens you're able to handle a drop below your target number no matter what life throws at you.
So this evening, after I had stopped shaking and had double-checked my blood sugar to make sure I was in the right range, I made sure that the next time it happened I would be equally prepared. I added a pack of skittles to the side pocket of my backpack and monitor case and made sure my gym bag had a juice box. I triple-checked that my glucagon was closeby and that my friends knew where it was.
While the situation was initially an inconvenient additional stress to the evening, I decided to take it as a reminder that being prepared makes treating a low blood sugar take only 15 minutes of waiting for the juice to kick in instead of an hour of popping skittles and checking that I had stopped shaking because it took me 15 minutes to find my supplies while I continued to drop.
For those of you who live busy lives like myself and are living with such a disease, I cannot stress the importance of preparedness. It's easy to forget, especially after living with the disease for so many years, how important such precautions can be. In our case it can be life or death, so double and triple checking everything every once in a while is for the better.
My diaversary was a couple of days ago, 11 years strong, so the importance of advocacy has been on my mind more than usual the past week or so. Knowing that your friends are prepared is just as important as your own preparedness- it doesn't do you any good to have skittles in your purse if your friends don't know where they are and you're imobile.
Anyway, I'll step off of my soap box now. Carry skittles.
Best,
Heather
