Life is messy. So is diabetes… Professional athletes lose many games and Type 1 experts (me) still have high and low blood sugars. It is impossible to be perfect when it comes to managing type 1! I’ve had type 1 since 1980, when I was 7 years old. I’ve never had a seizure, until last month. Here’s what happened… I was getting injections in my knees. Of course us with T1D are fine with injections, but the thought of injections in my knees totally freaks me out. I felt very nervous and anxious. It was 10 am. About 45 minutes prior, I had given myself 2 units intramuscularly (IM) to cover my Perfect PB bar that I ate right after I dosed. Truth be told, I’m in a bad habit of giving all of my shots IM now instead of in fat, as we are taught, because IM shots work so much faster thus reduce the risk of a post-meal high. Yet I forgot to pause and realize that I did not need 2 units all at once. (Thus with the right guidance, caution, and skill, they can be a great too, especially to bring highs down faster. Do not use IM without proper education!) Had I paused and thought it through with what I was eating, I should have given 1 unit IM to cover the spike that the honey in this bar causes, and then given the second unit in fat 30-60 minutes later, to cover the slow and steady BG rise that this bar tends to have due to its heavy protein and fat content. (I have a great, online course on why we must consider protein and fat when dosing, and why carb counting alone doesn’t work. I highly recommend it. Check it out here.) So there I was freaked out and anxious, with too much insulin surging through my body, allat the same time. I had the first knee injections and felt my heart racing. I told them I needed to pause before doing the next knee so I could give myself time to calm down. I took a few deep breaths. My CGM was still saying I was fine…I think it said 100. Then they did my other knee and I seized. My eyes rolled back and my body contracted. I was out for luckily less than a minute. I woke up with that horrible feeling of the world spinning and with no awareness of where I was. That lasted about a minute before I finally realized where I was and what had just happened. As hopefully all of you already know, there can be a lag in the accuracy of a CGM. It showed I was 90 when I came to, but sure enough, within the next 10 minutes, the arrow turned down and the LOW alarm started beeping. I started eating glucose tabs, praying that I could somehow find the sweet spot of having enough sugar to bring me up, but not so much to send my number soaring. I was totally disoriented. I kept eating some glucose and then trying to be patient for it to bring me up. I didn’t have a regular old meter with me which was a huge bummer because we all know the CGMs can have a huge lag in accuracy after a low. They usually show we are low for much longer than we actually are. Feeling post-seizure plus being low, there was no way I could actually feel clearly enough to truly know if my BG was back to normal or not and my CGM kept reading that I was low. I finally gave in and just kept eating sugar since that was the safer of the two options in that moment. I knew I would spike and sure enough, about 30-45 minutes later, I had a 165 with a straight up arrow. I sat there and felt horrible and just had to ride it all out. After a few hours, I felt ready to stand up and drive home. In retrospect, if giving too much insulin for my bar happened when I was not full of anxiety and fear about getting injections in my knees OR if I was just getting injections in my knees and my number was steady with no insulin on board, I am pretty confident I would not have had a seizure. But that’s not what happened. Life happened. And life has a way of not always turning out the way we’d like.

If you’ve been alive long enough, hopefully you have learned by now that all of us must accept that reality. Life is full of challenges and curve balls. Not a single person will have an easy, breezy life, where everything always goes their way. That’s just not how life is designed.

I believe we are here on this planet to encounter a wide variety of experiences and feelings. This is necessary for growth of all kinds, and to create newness and change. Growing because of trials can be compared to the oyster that has a little piece of sand lodged inside. In response to this intruder, the oyster makes the most of its trial and makes a beautiful pearl! Without the challenge or setback of having this uncomfortable piece of sand, the oyster would never have made the pearl. We need challenges to grow, and as we grow, we become even more beautiful.

My passion is to help type 1’s understand and feel confident with how to get better blood sugars. But I secretly also love to inspire people with lessons of how to enjoy a more fulfilling and joyful life. I think I am a good teacher because I have worked so hard on this in my own life.

In the spirit of accepting that we have diabetes, the club none of wanted to be part of but alas, here we are, and in the spirit of embracing that inevitably we are faced with many challenges in life, here are some of my favorite quotes:

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
― Lao Tzu


“For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’
‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.
‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’
‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’
‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

It’s the holiday season. Maybe it’s your favorite time of year or maybe it’s your least favorite. Regardless, please know…
You are braver than you believe,
Stronger than you seem,
Smarter than you think,
And loved more than you’ll ever know.
Here’s to you being the incredible person you are, doing your best, day after day, to manage the demands of living with type 1 diabetes, and of life itself.