"Well, you know," she explained patiently. "A lot of different situations can come up on any given day when you have diabetes and you won't always have somebody right there to help you figure it out. So it's important for you to learn how to identify and respond to things yourself when you can. Problem-solving is the process of deciding how to address a particular situation to resolve it and maybe keep it from happening again."
Looking back at whatever it was we were talking about at the time, I could see she was right. I was already problem-solving to the extent my limited experience would allow. But all these years later, I still get opportunities to flex my problem-solving muscles on a regular basis several times a week.
Maybe one day my glucose level will be unexpectedly and unusually high without an obvious reason. I have several tricks in my tool kit to bring it back down (as explained in my book). And that's part of problem-solving, but I also take a minute to search my mental data base and see if I can identify a cause.
On another day, I might eat an ordinary lunch at work and take my usual dose of insulin, only to have my glucose level crash two hours later, leaving me shaking like a leaf in the middle of a lecture. Problem-solving will offer me a solution to my immediate difficulty. But it might also help me think back to what could have set the crash in motion in the first place.
I was reminded of problem-solving again a couple of days ago at a health fair where I was handing out flyers for my book and setting up some speaking gigs at various local venues. After a couple of hours of non-stop high energy networking, I sat down at one clinic's table and shortly discovered that my blood pressure was higher than it should have been. They did it twice. And despite them telling me that it could just be a reaction to what I had been doing that afternoon, I became concerned.
The fact is that I've been pushing pretty hard this year on a number of projects that haven't given me much time to breathe. I keep a fairly hyped-up schedule most of the time anyway. But this year has taken it to a whole new level. So, when my BP was a little high the last couple of times I saw a doctor, I shook it off as understandable. After all, I've never had a problem with my blood pressure before. In fact, I'm normally steady as a rock regardless of what's going on. These latest readings, though, suggested that I needed to problem-solve -- and quickly.
My first thought was that I need to slow down, but that can't happen for at least a month. My next thought was, "If I tell my doctor, he might suggest medication and I would really like to avoid that, if I can." A half hour later, in a presentation on yoga, I realized that practicing yoga techniques might help me greatly, but right this minute, I'm tapped out financially, having sunk all my extra cash into marketing my book. So I went home tired, worried, and sure I was in trouble, since strokes and heart attacks are two of the things they warn people with diabetes about. And high blood pressure contributes to both.
With no instant answer, I spent a quiet evening and went to bed, waking up in the morning to a day off from work. After breakfast, I headed over to the park to do my 3-mile walk/run and while I was sucking up all that morning air, it occurred to me that there's yoga training on Netflix (to which I already subscribe). So, when I got home, I put 4 yoga videos of varying lengths on my list to watch later. And in the process of doing that, I came across some lovely videos about breathing and mindfulness exercises, specifically geared to making stress levels melt.
In almost no time, I was walking around my apartment so mellow, I wound up grinning at myself in the bathroom mirror. This problem-solving is some good stuff. And it works.
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