Fasten your seatbelt.
With the exception of taking off and landing, these words illuminated on a flight can begin the meter on anyone’s stress level. The implication is that there are turbulence, or some rough weather ahead. “Get ready; for your safety–buckle up.”
In life; we do not always get those warnings, do we? We do not always have the luxury of a warning that something is coming that may be a little rough…..bumpy perhaps. Sometimes the ‘seatbelt’ light does not even have the chance to be lit in our lives; we just hit a patch of bumpy-ness.
By now, most of you are probably thinking of a night-time glycemic reaction; usually ‘a low’. It’s this aspect of a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) that I imagine many are thankful for when it comes to predicting what is ‘up ahead’. That ‘100 reading with an arrow pointing down’ is just like our ‘fasten seat belt’ sign….isn’t it?
Have you ever seen that commercial that tells someone “you will have your first heart attack at 4:12 pm today.”? The point of course is that one cannot really predict a heart attack so ‘be ready’ is the warning. And it is that ‘be ready’ that I want to bring to your attention today.
You do not know what will happen in this diabetes world and you also do not know when. Do you know where everything is, should it be needed? Do others know how to ‘step in’ if YOU are not available?
We have all heard the saying that you get one chance to make a first impression. You may only have one chance to get ‘the diabetes emergency’ correct. And just as much as a fire drill in your household should not scare the beejeebers out of you that your children will perish in a fire, being ‘ready in’ the diabetes household should not scare you either.
What it should do, is make you come up with a plan, and be ready to implement that plan whenever it is needed. If you do not have a plan——make one. Waiting for the car accident to occur is not the time to put on a seatbelt and the same can be said for diabetes in your household. Do it today, tonight, or even now. Being ready is about the easiest thing you can do in a world of so much unpredictability.
After the fact is about as foolish as it gets.
Be ready.
I am a diabetes dad.
Please visit my Diabetes Dad FB Page and hit ‘like’.