Burnout

I saw a Tiktok the other day about burnout—specifically, burnout among type 1 diabetics. Let’s talk about it.

The fifth anniversary of my diabetes diagnosis is next month, and it’s one of those experiences in life that feels like it happened an eternity ago and a few months ago at the same time. How has it only been five years, but also, it’s been five years?

I feel like I’m still coming to terms with how I was diagnosed and the trauma surrounding that, and also the diagnosis itself. How do you internalize the fact that, barring a cure, you’re going to be dealing with a medical condition for the rest of your life? It feels impossible to even wrap my head around—maybe that’s a good thing, though. Maybe it’s good that I don’t think about that too much, maybe it would negatively affect my mental health.

The Tiktok I mentioned earlier talked about how I, as well as other people with T1D and many other chronic illnesses, am constantly keeping myself alive. Now, we all do that all the time, but having to pay attention to how I feel at every moment of the day, to worry about when I can eat and when the last time I ate was, or how much I’m eating between meals can be exhausting. Having to say no to eating things I love because I just ate or my blood sugar was already high when I ate lunch, can be draining.

On top of those things, there’s also the fact that I have to advocate for myself whenever I go to the doctor. I recently turned twenty-one and subsequently aged out of my pediatric endocrinologist’s office. It was sad, I loved that office and the people there knew my family well. However, I knew I didn’t have a choice. I asked my previous endo’s nurse practitioner for a recommendation of a more local office for me to go to. She told me about a doctor whose office is literally across the street from my neighborhood. Great, right? Well…

It was a very stressful experience. Partly because this office in incredibly unorganized, but that’s not what this post is about. No, this post is about one of the two endocrinologists who work at said office who walked into the exam room and promptly told me he did not agree with how I calculated how much insulin I take at meals. Mind you, I had been using this system for nearly five years and had never had an issue. I was very caught off guard by how stand-offish he was.

He seemed completely uninterested in any explanation of this system, even though it was not that hard to grasp. No matter what I said, he insisted that I start using the equation he gave me to calculate how much insulin to take. I used that equation for a while, and I quickly noticed that it was telling me to take way more insulin than I normally would for my meals. Which, for the un-initiated, is very dangerous. So, I began using my insulin/carb ratio charts and was back on track to a great A1C.

Then again, I saw him again this week and he thought my system was fine and that I’m doing very well. So who knows, maybe I just caught him on a bad day the first time eye roll.

The moral of the story is, if you are also dealing with a medical condition—chronic or not—I see you, I understand what you’re going through, and I believe that we will continue to live our lives to the fullest, safely!

I believe in you.

—Abbie