Me & peace of mind became the best of friends

I started this blog with the best of intentions, and I’m still so excited about it, but the last week has been draining, physically and mentally, and I can feel the impact it’s had on my motivation. And that got me thinking about the link between my diabetes, physical health, and my mental health.

For at least the last ten years, I’ve definitely suffered with anxiety. At times, this has been more extreme than at others, and I should start off by saying that it has never been a real concern; never more than something that stops me sleeping, or makes me worry more than others; but it has been there pretty consistently for pretty much my entire adult life.

What I didn’t realise until probably around three years ago is that people with diabetes are around 20% more likely to suffer with anxiety than people without. I think this goes for most people with a chronic illness. It’s no surprise, really; imagine having to deal with the injections, finger pricks, carbohydrate calculations, hypos… just keeping yourself alive (literally) on top of everything you already deal with everyday. It’s quite exhausting, and obviously it’s more or less a constant worry.

When I started to take my health more seriously, around ten years ago, exercise became a massive priority for me. I think I’ve mentioned before, but when I get into something, I want it to go well, straight away. So it wasn’t enough for me to lose a bit of weight and run 5km; I had to run a half marathon. And I couldn’t just go and run a half marathon, I had to run it in a certain time. Typical me.

At first, I think exercise had a really good impact on my mental health, and my physical health, in terms of both my weight (I was definitely slightly on the overweight side, back then, as the photo below probably shows you!) and my diabetes. I saw my HBA1C go down to around 8 - I know this isn’t great for some people, but for me, then, it really was. But it sort of took its toll after a while; I’d be at work, panicking about whether I’d have time to run after work that day, and not really concentrating on what I was doing. Or I’d be eating sweets I probably didn’t need, to make sure my sugars were high enough to run when I got home. It became a bit all consuming, and definitely took over most of my thoughts.

It kind of came to a peak in summer 2021, just before my wedding.

Back before the pandemic (and I think about a week after I got engaged… I wasn’t eager at all!), I bought my dream wedding dress. I was completely in love with it. The only issue was, it was quite ‘risky’ for me; it wasn’t like any other dress I’d ever worn. And the day I bought it, I knew I was going to spend every waking minute leading up to my wedding in the gym, panicking about wearing it.

Then the pandemic hit, we moved our wedding (twice, tiny violins please!), and then, somehow, it was June 2021, and I had just over 3 months to get into my wedding dress. Cue a massive panic and the biggest ‘fitness kick’ (I hate that term, but I can’t think of a better one) I’ve ever known.

Honestly, the amount of exercise was insane. I’d wake up, have my (small) breakfast, maybe head to an exercise class. Then I’d run anywhere between eight and ten miles on my lunch break, and after work, I'd go to another exercise class. I’d also run another couple of miles before or after the class.

These pictures show just how small I got (and how much I loved polka dots, clearly!). I still love these photos, but I was putting my body through so much.

Obviously, this was obsessive. And needless to say, my diabetes management was taking a huge hit from all of this. I wasn’t running high all of the time, because of the amount of exercise I was doing, but at least in the mornings before my lunch time run, my sugars would be pretty high. It was the only way I could manage to get through the rest of the day without crashing.

I went to my quarterly diabetic clinic in the July. Obviously, my weight had come down and my HBA1C had gone up. I mean, I certainly wasn’t surprised by this, and I was totally honest with my doctor from the second I walked into the clinic; my wedding dress was my priority, not my diabetes management.

The thing is, that sounds crazy now. And I knew at the time that it was crazy. In some ways, I felt amazing, because I knew I looked the best I had in a long time. But I wasn’t sleeping well, and I was definitely worried about my diabetes.

The crazier thing is, instead of coming up with solutions, my diabetic team told me that it was okay; I could just continue the way I was, and we’d revisit my diabetes management after my wedding in October. They were genuinely quite happy for me to continue the way I was. I think I was actually quite shocked; I think I was expecting (or hoping for) them to give me some sort of solution?

That same clinic visit, they asked me about our plans for having children, as they always do. Although it wasn’t top of my list, for a while I had been thinking about speaking to someone about getting my body ready for eventually having kids; being diabetic, there are a few things you (ideally!) need to think about, before you actually think about getting pregnant. Given that we were getting married in a few months, I thought it would be helpful to go and chat to the consultant who would be dealing with me, should that happen. I thought they could give me some guidance on how to get my HBA1C down, and how to be the healthiest I could be before we made that step.

So they sent me to the prenatal diabetic clinic in the August. It felt very weird and grown up; most of the time, I forget that I’m an actual adult with a house, job, and a husband, so I felt like a bit of an imposter. That was before I even got into the doctor’s office.

When I went in, I found the doctor SO intimidating. She didn’t even smile at me. She asked me why I was there, and I said because at some point in the next couple of years, we probably want to have kids, and before that happened, I wanted to be the healthiest I could be.

She turned her computer screen round to me; she had downloaded my data from my Libre, and could see all of my blood sugar readings from the last few months. She actually said to me “does this look healthy to you? Do these look like good levels to you?”. I said no, and explained to her that I was getting married in October; told her that my consultant had said to start to think about diabetes management then. I said I’d come to her clinic to talk about a plan going forward; to talk about a way to get my readings down to a good level and get my HBA1C in check either before or after October. Honestly, I just wanted some sort of guidance.

She told me to go away and come back in October, when I’d got my control tighter. I felt so shit. I actually walked out crying.

It made me feel like such a failure. I felt so hopeless; I had no idea what I was meant to do, either before or after the wedding, to manage my sugars properly.

So, we got married (and you can all breathe a sigh of relief; my dress fit and I loved it!), and I started to try to manage my diabetes better. My readings got better, but I couldn’t exercise properly, and I put on some weight. I went to my diabetic clinic, and my HBA1C was 6.5 - the best it has been since I was a kid… and they told me that I’d brought it down too fast, that it was dangerous to bring it down so quickly. I didn’t know what I was meant to do. It felt like I couldn’t win. I actually felt quite alone with it all; I don’t feel like anyone was helping me properly at that time.

I’ve thought about speaking to someone professional for years, but I always thought things weren’t bad enough for me, that I’d just be wasting their time. I always thought I was just moaning a bit about exercise, it didn’t seem that important. But after those few months, I knew I had to do something.

I’ve actually recently read about ‘tiny t traumas’ - they aren’t as obvious as the sort of catastrophic, life-threatening events you probably think of when you think of traumas, but they can build up and cause the same sort of impact. I think as a diabetic, we probably go through more of these than a lot of people. I certainly felt like I’d been through a few of them in those months.

So in January 2022, I started Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). CBT is a type of therapy that helps you manage your problems, by managing the way you think and behave. We spoke mainly about my diabetes; those recent experiences, and experiences from when I was younger. I hadn’t realised the impact my diabetes had had on my mental health, at all. I obviously knew it did impact me, but talking through things - hospital admissions with DKA, my fear of hypos, my recent experiences with clinic - made me realise how much it affected me.

As a side note, I found CBT so helpful. I would recommend it to anyone who has ever even considered speaking to someone. I feel like I worry so much less, and sleep so much better. Although my problems never seemed that bad, it was a genuine life changer. Things don’t have to be terrible for you to speak to someone!

I left CBT after about 12 weeks with a few personal aims (not all relating to diabetes). One of them was to speak my diabetic team about the care I was receiving, and let them know exactly what I needed, rather than just expect them to give me solutions. I do think this is fair, actually; I realise some of this post has been quite moany, and you might wonder why I didn’t do this sooner. Well, I just sort of thought they were the experts, and they’d tell me what I needed to know, and what I should do. Turns out (and I mean this in the best way!) if you don’t take things into your own hands, ask the right questions, and push for what you want and need, you probably won’t get what you need. I guess the priority for the diabetic team are the people making noise and voicing that they want to improve their management, and, as usual, I wasn’t doing that.

I guess you know the rest! I made some noise a few months back, and now I have my Omnipod. I think the only reason I managed to get to this stage was that I realised it couldn’t hurt to actually speak to someone. As a diabetic, I go through a lot, but I genuinely think embracing the fact that you are struggling, and asking for help, is the best thing that anyone could do. I would recommend it over and over again.

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I started off by saying this week has been a rollercoaster; it really has. My sugars have been up and down; I’ve lost a bit of motivation with inputting data and so I’m not seeing patterns like I was. But I’m working on it. It’ll be a work in progress for a while. And whilst I say that my sugars have been up and down, they certainly haven’t been anywhere near as bad as they were before I got the pump. I would still wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.

My god, if you’ve stayed with me right to the end of this one, you are an angel! I’m sorry for the length of it. I hope it wasn’t too boring. I would say I’ll reward you with a funny one next week, but I’m not that funny.