Diabetes is complicating

Most diabetic people know what diabetes complications are: neuropathy, nephropathy, retinopathy, etc. All those -opathies.

I would like to talk about a slightly different kind of diabetes "complication" -- the way diabetes "complicates" my life.

A few days ago my wonderful partner invited me to take an overnight trip to Vancouver with him, all expenses paid. Lovely! However, here is where the complications set in.

What do I take with me? Insulin pens, of course. Insulin. Extra insulin. Blood glucose meter. Test strips. Extra test strips. Pen needles. Yes, extra ones of those too. Glucose tablets in case of low blood sugar while on the road. A handful of granola bars and a couple of tins of so-called meal-replacement shakes (those things do not replace a meal, believe me) in case a meal gets delayed or I just get hungry in the middle of the night at the hotel. All the diabetes supplies I can carry, just for being away from home for less than 48 hours.

You never know what might happen. BC Ferries might go on a wildcat strike and shut down. Or the ferry might simply break down (they do that often enough.) We might miss our bus out to the ferry and have to spend an extra night in Vancouver. Better to have too many supplies than not enough.

That's just for an overnight trip. Imagine what I would have to do to go away for something like an entire week or more! Sadly, neither my partner nor I have the money for that right now. Who knows, maybe that's a good thing.

But really, there are "complications" that come with everyday life, not just with overnight trips, as I'm sure my fellow diabetic people know. I've written before about what happens when I forget my insulin pen. Everywhere I go, I try to remember everything I need to carry with me: insulin pen, blood test machine and test strips, glucose tablets. Maybe a snack if I'm not going to be somewhere that I can easily buy something.

I might not need to carry the amount of stuff that I would carry on an overnight (or longer) trip, but I need to carry pretty much the same things, just in smaller amounts. And I still might need extras of some of my supplies. I don't want to be drawing up an injection at dinner in the middle of a restaurant only to discover there's not enough insulin left in the pen, or taking out my blood glucose meter at work only to discover I'm out of test strips.

Then of course there are the meal planning complications. Things are somewhat easier than they were, say, ten years ago, with both faster-acting and longer-acting insulins. But having diabetes means that I do have to keep a somewhat regular schedule, and delaying or missing a meal or an injection can have some serious complications. Delaying a meal can mean low blood sugar because of lack of food, or high blood sugar because the mealtime insulin injection has been delayed.

Maybe you're spending the day/night/weekend with someone who has a completely different meal schedule from yours. They might skip breakfast, for example, and eat a bigger lunch to make up for it, but you can't skip breakfast. Or they might decide that they're not going to eat after a certain hour of the day in an effort to lose weight, and expect you to go along with that schedule when you can't.

Maybe your employer has scheduled a 7:00 a.m. meeting, which means that you might have to get out of bed and eat breakfast as early as 5:00 a.m. in order to get to work on time (depending on your commute), assuming that it's not a breakfast meeting. But lunch isn't until noon, and you have too much work to do to take a coffee break. Your breakfast time insulin isn't going to last until noon, and you're starving by 10:00 a.m. What are you going to do? This is where one of those granola bars I mentioned earlier, stored in a drawer in your desk, might come in handy.

Yes, diabetes has its complications, and it is complicated. But we do learn our own tricks to manage our way through those complications. Don't you wish we didn't have to?