The Pandemic

2020. A cursed year for the world. A kind of Apocalypse for many. An extremely unlucky streak of events which forced us to spend a consistent period of our lives closed into our houses, thinking about ourselves and about a world which had never seemed so extraneous. But every cloud has a silver lining.

For my personal growth, the first lockdown has been an extremely important period, especially in terms of diabetes management. Being basically free from any kind of task, I found myself with the possibility of the discovery of a more scrupulous approach towards my disease. I was convinced that, since I had plenty of time to dedicate do diabetes management, I could have totally mastered my disease, eliminating the hyperglycemias which had been annoying me during the previous period. In fact, I almost succeded, but, due to some lacks in terms of experience and knowledge, I was paying a price which I wasn't aware of. Let's examine the events deeper.

Being convinced that my main enemy were hyperglicemias, I totally focused on the elimination of them, which wasn't a wrong approach, even though I didn't possess nor the knowledge neither the experience to accomplish it in a safe and healthy way. And so I started to exponentially increase the doses both of my basal and of my rapid insulin: I became so obsessed with this tendency that at some point I even found myself rage-bolusing with tremendous amounts of insulin for absolutely in-range BG values. After some months, my A1c had come down from 6.9% to the low 6%s, but the situation wasn't all roses as it may seem.

Due to my extremely aggressive behaviour in terms of insulin dosages, I tended to provoke to myself deep and repeated hypoglicemias, which I usually corrected with tremendous amounts of fast-acting carbs. The results were, of course, a not exceptional Time in Range, which sometimes consisted of hypos percentages even up to 15% of the total daytime, and a severe increase in terms of bodyweight, which went up from 67 to 77 kg.

At the time I wasn't aware of the long-term effects which hypoglycemias can cause, such as dementia and a generally accelerated death rate for brain cells, and this was probably why I wasn't that much concerned about them. Furthermore, I wasn't able to understand that I was missing an extremely important part of what defines a perfect diabetes management: physical activity. And, as I mentioned before, the negative effects of this were evident on my body, even though I didn't care that much about them, as I didn't realize that they were becoming a problem also in terms of diabetes managements. In fact, as the fat mass of an individual grows, so do his insulin requirements, and we all know that higher insulin doses imply a wider range of uncertainty.

However, after a bit more than a year, also helped by the muffling of the pandemic situation, I finally found the occasion to decisely improve my diabetes management techniques and to bring them to a way closer level to the actual one.

Are you curious to know more on this more recent period of my life? All you have to do is to keep rading my website!