The Best It Can
As a chronically ill person, I feel lucky to have not had a lot of bad days with my health. Sure, my blood sugar drops and swings way up now and then, but those instances don’t define my entire day.
Well, until this week.
On Wednesday morning, I woke up and checked my blood sugar like normal. I was surprised to see that my blood sugar is quite a bit higher than usual. I shrug it off and adjust the amount of insulin I need to take for breakfast and move on. After getting ready to leave for work, I check again. It’s higher than before, which makes sense—I had just eaten, of course. I went outside to start my car, grabbed a glass of water to offset any chance of dehydration by way of high blood sugar, and waited until it was time to leave.
Right before I left, I checked again: Even higher. I took some more insulin, chugged some more water, and headed out.
I didn’t have a chance to check my blood sugar again until about an hour into work, and it had gone down quite a bit. I breathed a sigh of relief and went about my day. About another hour later, it was my break time. I tested my blood again, and it had dropped considerably more. It was low enough to be considered a severe low. I immediately grabbed a Coke from the vending machine and drank it, hoping to spike my sugar back up. It seemed to work, and I went along with my day.
It was around an hour before my lunch that I started feeling off. Not just off, but bad. I told one of my coworkers and she told a few other people to keep an eye out for me. I didn’t get much farther before I decided I needed to go home.
Earlier this morning, I saw an Instagram post from an account I love called @blackliturgies (seriously, it’s great—if you’re religious at all I would highly recommend it). One of the slides in the post said This body is good, and that made me think about my relationship with my own body. It’s not perfect, it has its issues, but at the end of the day, it’s doing the best it can with what it has.
Now, this is not me saying that you have to think positive and be hopeful to outsmart your chronic illness. What I’m saying is that it’s important to give your body, and yourself, some grace. It’s okay to put your health first on days when you just can’t push yourself any farther. Normally, it would take a lot to convince myself to leave work early, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to keep going—and if I tried, it would not be good for anyone, especially me.
Be gentle with yourself. You deserve it.
—Abbie
