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Avoiding the Meter: The Vicious Cycle

It isn't a rare thing to know your blood sugar before you even check it. If you've lived with this disease long enough, sometimes you feel your lows coming from a mile away and you can feel when your blood sugar is anywhere above 200 mg/dL. Maybe it's because you know you ate something, didn't pay attention to the carbohydrates, and didn't take enough insulin...or because you just know by the way you feel, by that slow-as-maple-syrup feeling, that your blood sugar is high.

Either way, how often does knowing that you're high, and feeling that you're high, keep you from using your glucose meter to actually and check and see?

How often do you purposefully think, "Nope, I am not gonna check. I don't want to see that number. I don't want to deal with it. I definitely don't want to think about what I did or didn't do that led my blood sugar that high in the first place..."?

It's a habit. A very clever one. I wouldn't blame anybody for taking part in it. Who wants to see 350 mg/dL on the screen of their meter? Not me! No matter what you tell yourself, the first thought that goes through your head is, "Well, I messed up again."

Instead, it's easier to not check at all. Maybe give yourself a bolus or a quick insulin shot of what you think might bring you down from whatever number you think your

blood sugar is at. Then you might over-correct, plummet to a low blood sugar during the next two hours, over-eat to treat your drastic low because it came on so quickly, and find yourself high again two hours later after that.

It's a vicious cycle.

Or maybe you just skip the entire situation altogether. You feel high, you know you're high, but you're going to put it out of your mind.

It's a habit. While it might appear to be laziness or neglect, perhaps it's fueled more by fear than anything else? Perhaps it's the fear of knowing that if you check, you have to face it, and then...you have to take responsibility for that high, and start to change the way you manage your diabetes?

It's a habit and it's hard to break.

But what if just one time, when you feel that you're high, you check your blood sugar and you see that number...and instead of bashing yourself for your imperfections, you stop and think, "Okay, I have a few thoughts as to why this happened. For now, I'm just going to try to get my blood sugar down so I can feel better. Next time, when I'm ready, maybe I can try to prevent a high in that situation again."

"For now, I'm just going to take care of this blood sugar."

It all comes down to how you THINK and how you approach your diabetes. You can change that habit, that much I know for sure, but only when you're ready to. And it might hard, but it will definitely worth it.


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