50% Battery

Hello gang, thought I'd give you a little update. Apologies for the lack of blogs but I was busy celebrating my 18th birthday..it's what happened afterwards..

A couple days post birthday I caught tonsillitis, and was prescribed penicillin. Fast forward 5 days and I had an allergic reaction to the tablets they had prescribed, great! So I went back to the doctors, and found I had a secondary eye infection, which means I had about 50% of my vision, and everything was blurry and dizzy (still is). All of that is pretty rubbish for a non-diabetic person, tonsillitis is the worst - I should really have mine removed, I catch it too often. Plus secondary infections are just the cherry on the cake. We all agree that being ill for two weeks is crap? What about diabetes..

I spend each day injecting, scanning/testing, calculating, measuring and correcting to ensure my body works the same as a person without diabetes, REGARDLESS of illness/time of the month/weather/activity . On the photo above you can see the blue line, this is where my blood glucose should be.. and any tine it is above or below it has an impact on how I feel. Being low (below the line) means I feel dizzy, emotional and shaky. Being high (above the blue) means I feel exhausted, hot and thirsty. Now when my body is fighting a virus these indicators become blurred which means I often miss highs and hypos, making me feel 10X worse. The picture above is what goes on behind the scenes, if you like. I always take longer to recover from viruses, and I can spend days once my symptoms have gone in diabetes hell.

The only person that sees what is going on 24/7 is me, I don't show my parents nor my family, because it's boring and it's every single day, who wants to see that? Luckily, they can switch off when I'm having a rant about diabetes, but me? Never. I don't think this condition should be minimised because it's hard work! And I challenge anyone to take the role of their pancreas for the day, it's constant and there's never a day off. No matter how many times I wake up and think 'just not today', be assured I wake to fight the same battle.

I'm writing this as a little reminder that us PWD are fighters, we are strong. We have to wake up every morning with a new tank of motivation, no matter what is going on in our lives. So I think a little rant is okay every now and again. Diabetes is rubbish and I just want others to be a little more considerate. We are striving for a level of health others are just not aware of.

Toodle-pip!

Amber xx