Tick, tock, tick, tock.

Every one of us with diabetes hears that clock ticking away.

Glucose, insulin, ketones, tests.
The endless cycle never rests.
Fail once to heed the daily strife
And that day you may lose your life.

Alarmists are everywhere. Family, friends, strangers, all with the best of intentions. (READ MORE)

Three topics that come up on any diabetes blog or forum, as certain as death and taxes, are blood glucose levels, hemoglobin A1c levels, and guilt. The usual dialog goes like this:

"No matter what I do, I can't get my blood glucose levels to stay within 'normal' non-diabetic levels. This is going to really screw up my A1c, which means more medications, getting yelled at by my doctor and my spouse and my family, not being safe to get pregnant, and all the 'Diabetes Police' coming down on me. If only I had avoided that one jelly donut three weeks ago...!"

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While diabetes may affect the way we celebrate our holidays, those holidays should never be about diabetes. Holidays are about family, about G-d, about freedom, about love... not about chronic diseases and disease management.

That being said, I sometimes find the holidays give me greater insight into my diabetes, and ways to deal with it. While changes in diet (rarely good for my numbers!) are certainly a component of most of my religious and family holiday celebrations, when I am "properly introspective" -- that is to say, doing the sort of "soul searching" that one is supposed to do when approaching these holidays -- I find many ways to put myself "at peace" with this condition, and to turn it from a negative into a positive. I believe some Christians refer to this as "giving it up to G-d (or Jesus)"...

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One underlying theme of diabetes blogs and complaints is the difference of our daily routines from those of people who have never known a blood glucose test, never chosen foods based on specific ingredients or an organization's endorsement, never had to dress in a manner different from those around them, and never had to follow a ritual not of the mainstream. Yet we see, meet with, and talk to people who do this on a daily basis, who could never think of not doing this (or who would never consider it)... who do not have diabetes, nor are they housemates of people with diabetes. (READ MORE)

As people with diabetes living in the 21st century, numbers rule our lives. The first number that comes to mind (other than weight, which for me should be my morning fasting weight -- and which should be much lower than it is) is blood glucose level. My morning reading tells me what I should have for breakfast: if it's high, I look for something with fewer carbs; if it's low, I start running for the fruit bowl. (Which might be the exact opposite of what I should be doing, considering that if I've been running high for several hours, a serving of fruit may hike me further in the short term, but will bring me back to normal by the end of the two-hour postprandial period. Then again, my diabetes is diet-controlled; food choice is critical.) If you're on insulin, that blood glucose check might tell you either to grab some sugar quickly, or to administer a correction bolus.

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With capital-I Independence Day weekend upon us, I figure it's worth a look at how small-i independence plays into our diabetes management.

For those of us who were diagnosed as children, and for the parents of children with diabetes, there is the independence of a child learning to care for himself -- from finger pricks to injections to calculating insulin doses to doing pump corrections. Zita writes of her son's first self-administered injection here.

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