isn’t contagious; no one can catch it from you.
When you pass the stage of denying that you have diabetes, you may become angry that you’re saddled with this “terrible” diagnosis. But you’ll quickly find that diabetes isn’t so terrible and that you can do something to rid yourself of the disease. Anger only worsens your situation, and being angry about your diagnosis is detrimental in the following ways:
✔ If your anger becomes targeted at a person, he or she is hurt.
✔ You may feel guilty that your anger is harming you and those close to you.
✔ Anger can prevent you from successfully managing your diabetes.
The stage of anger often transitions into a stage when you become increasingly aware of your mortality and bargain for more time. Even though you probably realize that you have plenty of life ahead of you, you may feel overwhelmed by the talk of complications, blood tests, and pills or insulin. When you realize that bargaining doesn’t work, you may even experience depression, which makes good diabetic care all the more difficult.
Studies have shown that people with diabetes suffer from depression at a rate that is two to four times higher than the rate for the general population. People with diabetes also experience anxiety at a rate three to five times higher than people without diabetes.
If you suffer from depression, you may feel that your diabetic situation creates problems for you that justify being depressed. You may rationalize your depression in the following ways:
✔ You can’t make friends as easily because diabetes hinders you.
✔ You don’t have the freedom to choose your leisure activities.
✔ You’re too tired to overcome difficulties.
✔ You dread the future and possible diabetic complications.
✔ You don’t have the freedom to eat what you want.
✔ You’re constantly annoyed by all of the minor inconveniences of dealing with diabetes.
All of the preceding concerns are legitimate, but they also are all surmountable. How do you handle your many concerns and fend off depression? Following are a few important methods:
✔ Try to achieve excellent blood glucose control (see Part III).
✔ Begin a regular exercise program (Chapter 10).
✔ Tell a friend or relative how you are feeling; get it off your chest (Chapter 20).
✔ Recognize that every abnormal blip in your blood glucose is not your fault (Chapter 7).
If you can’t overcome the depression brought on by your diabetic concerns, you may need to consider therapy or antidepressant drugs. But you probably won’t reach that point.
You may experience the various stages of reacting to your diabetes in a different order than I describe in the previous sections. Some stages may be more prominent for you, and others may be hardly noticeable.
Here are some key steps you can take to manage the emotional side of diabetes:
✔ Focus on your successes. Some things may go wrong as you find out how to manage diabetes, but most things will go right. As you concentrate on your successes, you will realize that you can cope with diabetes and not let it overwhelm you.
✔ Involve the whole family in your diabetes. A diabetic lifestyle is a healthy lifestyle for everyone. For instance, the exercise you do is good for the whole family. By doing it together, you strengthen the family ties while everyone gets the health benefits. Also, should you need your family to help you, for instance, during a particularly severe case of low blood glucose, their early involvement in learning about diabetes will give them the peace of mind to know they are helping you, not hurting you. (See Chapter 20 for ways to enlist help from people around you.)
✔ Develop a positive attitude. A positive attitude gives you a can-do mindset, whereas a negative attitude leads to low motivation preventing you from doing all that is necessary to manage your diabetes.
✔ Find a great team, pinpoint problems, and set goals. Determine the most difficult problems that you have with your diabetes and then consider how you can solve them by yourself or with a great team of supporting players like a primary care physician, a diabetes specialist, a diabetes educator, a dietitian, an eye doctor, a foot doctor, and so forth. Set realistic goals to get past your problems. (Chapter 12 tells you everything you need to know about getting help from the supporting players.)
✔ Don’t expect perfection. Although you may feel that you’re doing everything right, you may experience blood glucose levels that are too high or too low. This uncontrollable situation happens to every person with diabetes, and it’s one of the biggest frustrations of the disease. Don’t beat yourself up over something you can’t control. Keep doing the things I suggest in the treatment section, and you will be very gratified at the end.
Maintaining a High Quality of Life
You may assume that a chronic disease like diabetes leads to a diminished quality of life, but you don’t have to settle for anything less than a full and fulfilling life.
Many studies have evaluated the quality-of-life question, and the following sections not only describe what these studies found but also describe my hope that you can take control and ensure that you maintain a high quality of life.
People who do regular exercise often describe it as addictive. They find it so pleasurable that they look forward to the next session. And the benefits for the person with diabetes are enormous.
