Diabetes For Dummies. Rubin Alan L.

      ✔ Get to know your pancreas and all it does for you, allowing you to appreciate what it means when it isn’t working appropriately.

Chapter 1

      Dealing with Diabetes

       In This Chapter

      If you have diabetes, in the course of a year you live with that diagnosis for about 8,760 hours. During that time, you spend perhaps one hour with a physician. In Chapter 12, I introduce you to many of the other people who may help you to manage your disease. Clearly, however, the ball is in your hands alone practically all the time. How you deal with your diabetes determines whether you score or are shut out.

      

One of my patients told me about working at her first job out of college, where each employee birthday was celebrated with cake. She came to the first celebration and was urged to eat a slice. She refused and refused, until finally she had to say, “I can’t eat the cake because I am diabetic.” The woman urging her said, “Thank God. I thought you just had incredible willpower.” Twenty years later, my patient clearly remembers being told that having diabetes is better than having willpower. Another patient told me the following: “The hardest thing about having diabetes is having to deal with doctors who do not respect me.” Several times over the years, she had followed her doctor’s recommendations exactly, but her glucose control hadn’t been satisfactory. The doctor blamed her for this “failure.”

      Unless you live alone on a desert island (in which case I’m impressed that you got your hands on this book), your diabetes doesn’t affect just you. How you deal with your diabetes affects your family, friends, and co-workers. This chapter shows you how to cope with diabetes and how to understand its impact on your important relationships.

      Achieving Anything … Or Everything!

      Diabetes has become such a common disease in the United States that in any group of ten people, one will probably have it. Is it any wonder that successful people have diabetes in every walk of life? In this chapter, I tell you of the accomplishments of just a few of them. Just like them, I can promise you that if you follow the advice in this book, your diabetes will never prevent you from accomplishing your goals. In fact, your success in managing diabetes may lead to success in other areas of your life.

      If you have diabetes, you’re not alone. Quite a few famous people live with diabetes every day, just like you. Here are just a few actors that you may recognize:

      People with diabetes also successfully perform in every professional sport. Here are a few sports and the athletes who live with diabetes and still perform at high levels: (To read about the role of sports and exercise in your life, see Chapter 10.)

      If you think that diabetes might prevent you from a career in the sciences, just consider these modern day researchers with diabetes performing at the highest level in every field:

      The names in the preceding paragraphs are just a few examples of people with diabetes who have achieved greatness. Here is my point: Diabetes shouldn’t stop you from doing what you want to do with your life. If you follow the rules of good diabetic care, as I describe in Chapters 7 through 12, you will actually be healthier than people without diabetes who smoke, overeat, and/or don’t exercise enough.

      Reacting to Your Diagnosis

      Do you remember what you were doing when you found out that you had diabetes? Unless you were too young to understand, the news was quite a shock. Suddenly you had a condition from which people can die. In fact, many of the feelings that you went through were exactly those of a person learning that he or she is dying. The following sections describe the normal stages of reacting to a diagnosis of a major medical condition such as diabetes.

      Your first response was probably to deny that you had diabetes, despite all of the evidence. Your denial mindset may have begun when your doctor tried to sugarcoat (forgive the pun) the news of your condition by telling you that you had just “a touch of diabetes,” (an impossibility equivalent to “a touch of pregnancy”). You probably looked for any evidence that the whole thing was a mistake. Perhaps you even neglected to take your medication, follow your diet, or perform the exercise that is so important to maintaining your body. But ultimately, you had to accept the diagnosis and begin to gather the information you needed to help yourself.

      

When you accepted the diabetes diagnosis, I hope you also shared the news with your family, friends, and people close to you. Having diabetes isn’t something to be ashamed of, and you shouldn’t hide it from anyone. You need the help of everyone in your community: your co-workers who need to know not to tempt you with treats that you can’t eat, your friends who need to know how to give you glucagon (a treatment for low blood glucose) if you become unconscious from a severe insulin reaction (see Chapter 4), and your family who needs to know how to support and encourage you to keep going.

      Your diabetes isn’t your fault – nor is it

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