My Health in One Word . . .

Earlier this month, Amanda from WEGO Health challenged us to Finish This Tweet:

“My health in one word is . . . “

Summing my health up in one word seemed like an impossible task at first.  But I found it didn’t take me too long to find a word that I felt fit.

“My health in one word is COMPLICATED.”

First of all, I feel that overall, I am a healthy person.  I am a healthy person with a chronic illness.  That statement alone feels like a contradiction in terms - and that in itself is complicated.

Beyond that, being a human pancreas? It's very complicated, you know?  Eating involves testing my blood sugar, weighing and measuring portions, tallying carbohydrates, checking fiber content to see if it requires subtracting some carbs, and thinking about how fat and protein will influence how quickly my  body will process my meal or snack.  Using all of that information and my Insulin to Carb ratio, I must then compute how much insulin I should take.  I also need to figure out how long to wait between dosing that insulin and beginning to eat, so that hopefully the insulin is working by the time my food is hitting my blood stream.  I also need to decide if I should take the entire dose at once, or if I should let my pump infuse it over a period of time, again hoping to match the insulin’s action to the spike I’ll see from the food.

As if that isn’t complicated enough, let’s think about reasons my blood sugar could be too high or too low.

• I didn’t exercise enough
• I exercised too much
• I didn’t sleep well
• I’m stressed
• I’m coming down with a cold / flu / miscellaneous illness
• my period is coming in a few days
• my period started yesterday
• I’m feeling depressed
• my insulin has gone bad
• my infusion site feels fine, but the cannula beneath my skin is actually kinked
• I had a glass of wine

The list goes on and on.  And now let’s talk about the randomness of diabetes.  I can have two days where I get the same amount of sleep, do the same amount of exercise, eat the exact same foods, have the same level of stress and hormones, and guess what?  Things can still be completely different.  Why?  Because, DIABETES IS COMPLICATED!!

How would you sum up your health in one word?  You can see what some other people said here.