This time last year, I had about 7 years of managing diabetes under my belt. I had gotten over the panic of adding insulin to the mix 6 months before. My daughter had come for our annual holiday visit. And I was enjoying myself.
I had no idea that in the year to come, I would write an entire book on managing diabetes (Your Life Isn't Over ~ It May Have Just Begun!), learn a mind-bending number of things related to the process of marketing said book, and generate and spend $2500 to publish and put it out there -- only to discover that's not all it takes to make it a household word. That's a lot to jam into one year on top of a full-time job, a healthy handful of other demanding projects, and the not-so-minor matter of managing my own diabetes on a daily basis. It's not like I can push it to the bottom of the list till I get around to it.
Christmas week. From what I can gather, it's one of the most stressful weeks of the year. Families under pressure to produce just the right presents for children and the costs going up by the minute. Decorations demanding to be dug out, repaired, augmented, and put up. Extended family and friends with expectations that contradict each other. A hundred details vying for attention besides what's already normally on your plate. And, of course, you're supposed to be smiling radiantly through it all.
And the alternative, of course, is sitting alone in your living room without funds, trying to figure out how you wound up isolated while the rest of the world is dancing all around you. With these two options, no wonder people get depressed -- and even suicidal -- during "the holidays."
Then, on top of it all, we have our diabetes to think about. (Sigh.) Glazed ham and candied sweet potatoes. Green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup and fried onion rings. Buttered rolls and fruit cake and all the family favorites piled and stacked and eaten until everyone else is lying stupefied on sofas or recliners. And we're crying into a napkin somewhere, either feeling sorry for ourselves or beating ourselves up for shooting our glucose through the roof. Right?
It doesn't have to be this way.
I'm remembering a song this morning with words that say something like, "Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again!" It has an upbeat tempo and was introduced in a movie decades ago, but the sentiment is classic. None of us is perfect and life can run amok on occasion. But as I am quick to tell my students: it's not what happens; it's what happens after that.
When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, my diabetes nurse educator, in the process of throwing a thousand seemingly unrelated bits of information at my cowering psyche, said brightly at one point, "But, then, always remember: YDMV!"
"YDMV?" I repeated, lost.
"Yes. Your diabetes may vary!"
"My diabetes?" my brain said in a crabby voice. (I most certainly had not claimed this condition as "mine" yet.) But she continued, as if we were just two buddies chatting about our plans for the weekend.
"Each body is different. What works for one person may not work for another. Even medication may affect different people differently."
"Oh, great," I thought, feeling like a new kid in town walking up the steps to a middle school full of students I'd never seen before. What if I couldn't find my classes? What if the other students didn't like me? What if the teachers thought I was stupid? I was trying to pay attention, but there was so much to learn and now this: "Your diabetes may vary."
