My relationship with my Type 1 Diabetes.

Trying to form a view, kind of trying to weigh up, you know, if someone says to you, is having diabetes a good thing? It's a very strange person that says yes, right? I mean that that would be, that would be slightly bizarre. But at the same time, if somebody said to me, me, would you, you know, if you are allowed to change one thing about your life, would it be diabetes? Actually, it probably wouldn't. There are other things in terms of my general life, that, you know, on a day to day basis probably bother me more. And I think that's why diabetes can be such a strange thing, because I think your perception of it as a diabetic changes over time, depending on where you are in any given situation, you know, 12 year old me versus 18 year old me versus 25 year old versus 30-year-old me or have slightly different views on it or indeed an 18-year-old me's case have no view on it whatsoever. And then you've also whenever you know every day that you're a diabetic you've got to think both about the long term and the short term. I'm not a mathematician but I did a quick kind of calculation before we started talking. As at today I've probably done something in the region of 30 and a half thousand injections in my life. If you said to someone who was diagnosed as a diabetic on day one, yeah, you're going to be hitting 100,000 injections by the end of this, nobody in their right mind would be able to kind of quantify that in their head in a way that makes that rational, you know, kind of copable. But obviously you can't look at it that way. You take each day as it comes and you've just got to look at what your goals are at the end. And I think for most diabetics, the goal is not to have, you know, a 4.5 blood sugar for 24 hours a day, seven days a week forever, it is to have it within a boundary that allows you to live your life and prevents or minimizes the risk of health complications and frankly you do what you can within that and as long as you take that kind of I would say pragmatic approach and there may be people who disagree with me and some people may be going to the perfectionist route but certainly diabetics I know are very much in the pragmatism camp. means that there'll be days when you think, great, I have this under control. There will also be days when you look at your blood sugar, and you cannot understand why on earth it's gone up, down or sideways. But that sort of thing, you know, frustration with the way things are going positivity about the general path. That's not a diabetes specific thing. That's something that everybody deals with. Other medical conditions, people with no medical conditions at all. So I think it's treating it as part of your lifestyle rather than as something to be carried like a cross is really how you know how I cope with it and that doesn't mean that it's all sunshine and rainbows every day but it does stop you from sort of just dwelling on the on the possible risks you know every day for the rest of your life.