Over the years, people have asked me things like, “is his diabetes stable?”, or “why do you need to check his blood sugar so often?”, or “you don’t have to do much anymore… now that he has an insulin pump. Right?” To be honest, I’m never sure how to respond to these questions. For months, I have been trying to figure out an analogy that might explain that “stable” is not a word we often use to describe T1D. Lucky for me, another T1 Mom has explained it very well, using cars.
“Type 1 Diabetes is like Driving a Standard Car”
By: Ashley Sampson, T1D Mom
Everyone’s blood sugar fluctuates constantly through the day and changes based on the various conditions: eating, exercising, temperature, and so on.
All cars need to fluctuate what gear they are in constantly through a drive, based on various conditions: speed, other traffic, weather, and so on.
Type One Diabetes is like driving a standard car and not having diabetes is like driving an automatic car.
The conditions are always going to be changing around you. You have to adjust your actions to fit the conditions. You can drive the same stretch of highway five days a week, going back and forth to work, and no two trips down that road will be the same. Just like you can make the same actions every day and your blood sugars will never be the same throughout the day.
If you hit that red light you’re going to have to switch gears and slow down to make a stop. But the next day you catch the green light and you just keep going.
One day the sun is out and there’s no traffic so you speed up a little and move the car into a new gear. The next day traffic‘s a little heavy, even though the sky is clear, so you drive a little more slowly and don’t have to go up to a new gear. The next day on the same stretch of highway there is no traffic, but it’s raining so you keep it steady.
Three different days doing the same drive but in a different gear at that particular part of the road.
Maybe one day you decide to take a different route
You’re still going to the same destination, but you’re on a different road. When you change gears and how often you change gears is going to change from your normal routine. It doesn’t mean the route you took was bad; it just means you have to pay a little bit more attention to the drive.
Automatic cars still shift gears in the same way and at the same times for all of those conditions. They just do it without you having to think about it and take action to physically make that shift.
In standard cars, you have to be paying attention and you have to think about what you need to do to keep the car running properly. Then you make the same shift an automatic car would make.
This is why people with type one diabetes can find it hard to answer questions like…
Do you have it under control yet? I thought you had this all figured out. What are you doing wrong? Why is it so different today than it was yesterday?
It isn’t that it’s not being properly managed. It’s just that conditions change constantly so you have to constantly make adjustments.
Just like driving.
You’re still driving properly. You’re still following the rules of the road. Your car isn’t broken – it’s working exactly the way it should. We don’t control the weather, but we adjust our driving for it. We can’t control when someone stops in front of us and we have to slam on our breaks. And even if we leave at the same time every day and take the same route every day we can’t guarantee that we’re always going to get the red light or the green light. We just shift gears as the conditions change.
People without diabetes go through the same gearshifting experiences daily, they just don’t think about them because their body does it automatically. People with T1D have to think about it and shift the gear themselves.
How do you explain that your or your child’s diabetes is not really ever going to be “stable” like people seem to think? Do you use analogies? Give real-life scenarios? What’s your favorite response to “why isn’t your diabetes under control yet?”
Let us know in the comments section. And don’t forget to head to the Carb Counting Mama Facebook Page and “like” it for more T1D posts!
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