I realize that I've fallen into a strange way of thinking regarding my diabetes. It's what I call magical thinking, the idea that if I focus on my diabetes all the time, I can keep it under control. I believe this started when I began seeing Dr. Bernstein. As I've mentioned, he is all business when it comes to diabetes, and he demands a high degree of discipline and dedication from his patients. In order to "fine tune" my insulin doses, he asks me to check my blood sugar eight times a day: when I wake up, before breakfast, 2 hours after breakfast, before lunch, 2 hours after lunch, before dinner, 2 hours after dinner, and before I go to bed. I don't mind all the finger sticking, but I do mind the fact that there's never a moment when diabetes is not occupying space in my head. What's worse is that I've become addicted to all that checking. I'm incapable of not checking!
For the past few days, I've been in Chicago with my son, looking at potential colleges. Lots of driving around, sightseeing, and eating at weird times. A normal person might have said "OK, I'll give myself a break and test my blood sugar only a few times a day until I get home." But not me. I continued to test 8 times a day, because . . . if I didn't test, who knows what it might be. Now rationally, I know this is ridiculous. If my BG is normal at noon, it's not going to zoom up to 300 by 2pm. The problem is, I'm not being rational. I think that if I test all the time, my blood sugar will somehow know I'm watching it, and it will hesitate to do anything extreme. Ridiculous? Yeah, I think so.
So my goal is to start spacing the visits to Dr. B further apart, and to limit the 8 times a day routine to the week or so before I see him. Because there's more to life than being a professional diabetic -- at least I hope there is!
