A couple of days ago, I tweeted about Time In Range. It was a tweet inspired by my previous week of blood glucose data which saw six days of fabulous numbers then one day of less than fabulous. As day 7 progressed and I struggled to establish a BG under 10, I felt the frustration build. My 24hr TIR was 33% and I was beginning to get pretty irritated by what I was seeing. Perhaps that is something you've experienced? Our hard work can pay off on one day then the same hard work just will not yield the same results on another day. Annoying, huh?!
Prior to that TIR tweet, I had recently been involved in many discussions surrounding research. I'm rarely dismissive of any single person's experience unless it is dressed up as research. It is pretty difficult to accurately conclude a study based upon your own data, your own research of... yourself! There are tonnes of problems with that from having the absolute minimum in sample size to your own biased, skewed, point of view. Research should involve big numbers, where possible. Many aspects of Diabetes are researched to form what is deemed as a good opinion or even safe advice. Not all of that "research" has been conducted adequately to form a good conclusion. I'll leave it to you, reader, to discover the shoddy research which backs some aspects of Diabetes. Back to TIR!...
...and big numbers, your research, should apply when you're concluding how things are going in regards to your own management and your Time In Range. So, after the initial frustration of 33% TIR I made a coffee and had a few biscuits (bolused for, ofc) and relaxed. One poor day doesn't represent how hard I work to take care of my T1D. The same could be said for any period, really. A bad year isn't enough data to determine how hard you work to take care of your lifetime with T1D - maybe that bad year is only 2% of your time with T1D and you've been living through a pretty rough 12 months, personally? Perhaps there isn't an obvious reason because, as Diabetes loves to prove, there are very often no apparent reasons for what's going on.
The title of this blog post is Take It Easy and I think it's time for me to worry less about day to day fluctuations in my Time In Range. I have a lot of history and TIR data since using an insulin pump. I know that I float around 77% - 80% and I know that is a pretty good level of management so, why should I stress about a very tiny snapshot in time? I'm certainly going to try to be less of a drama llama about the numbers in future and try to remember my own words; you'll never be a perfect diabetic - there is no such person. Easier said than done! but I'll try.
I wonder if I/we worry about the wayward days because of the nature of our condition. Essentially, our body is attacking itself and we have no control over that happening despite it being OUR BODY! That's the crazy thing about this autoimmune disease; We have absolutely no say and no control in it happening. When it's here, we're left with trying to manage it to stay alive and stay well, no easy task. Perhaps now we have the tech and the data to establish some form of control, we think we can tame the beast every single day. Maybe we tame the beast so well, so often, that when we do have a wayward day it feels far more stressful and worrisome than it might if we were managing our T1D via guesses and infrequent finger pricks.
All our technology and information is massively helpful (to me, at least) but it doesn't guarantee perfection, it is certainly not a cure.
So, I'll end this short blog by encouraging you to not beat yourself up over your Diabetes and everything related to it. You will make mistakes and you will do everything right - that's called being human. Doing your best as often as you can is all you should aim for. Your best is not the T1D management of somebody else. You do you.
As you might have seen, a conflict has broken out in Ukraine as Russia has invaded that country. The scenes on TV and on social media are horrifying. What can we do? Well, I don't think there is a wrong way to help if you donate to charities who are active in helping the people of Ukraine. I support many charities but one which has always had my heart is MSF. Medecins Sans Frontieres translates as Doctors Without Borders. When it comes to the health of others in disaster areas, war zones and the like then I think we all have a duty to do what we can to help and help those who directly help! such as MSF. With that in mind, all donations to me via Buy Me a Coffee and all the pennies generated through the ads dotted around my pages will be donated to MSF. I will make up the difference for the fees taken by PayPal and Buy Me a Coffee. That will run until further notice, no time frames and possibly until Ukraine is a free country again. Thank you for reading my blog.
