The Tipping Point

Whether you have had diabetes for a year or 30 – we all experience the same peaks and valleys of managing our illness.

I will now use a novel approach to describe how and why a “low” period begins… a low period can last for a day or a year (depending on the linear amount of time you have been living with diabetes).

It is called the Tipping Point. (There is a book, called The Tipping Point, and I have borrowed the term…) This is the definition:

In epidemiology, the concept that small changes will have little or no effect on a system until a critical mass is reached. Then a further small change "tips" the system and a large effect is observed.

I believe that for many people there is a moment when you are stripped down to your barest and most raw feeling about confidence in managing diabetes, and in feeling secure about the decisions you have made – both daily and long term. It is when all those “little things” about diabetes finally become, as said above – a critical mass.

What made me think about this exactly? Well, obviously my own experiences but mostly from an email that I read on the “UK Pumpers” support group. Someone who has had diabetes for 46 years (and pumping for 5 years) wrote to everybody saying that he had had enough. BG’s were bad, A1c was terrible and he was overwrought in having to deal with another unpredictable day. Nothing was working.

Man! (I don’t often use that expression) I am undeniably familiar with this emotional precipice! One of my greatest tipping points was at a time when I was in University. Things were not easily manageable, and I couldn’t come up for air. My A1c was abysmal, and I felt terrible. I didn’t want anything or anybody. I cried a lot of tears before I finally woke up. That was my tipping point.

The result of the tipping point is then making the decision that something radical must replace the current situation. Sometimes we make this decision wittingly – other times, sub-consciously.

Once the tipping point has past, whatever decisions come next – (and I find this the most draining!) is the shed-load of self-coaching and reassurance that can only come from within. It is this unbelievable and magnificent will of a person who just won’t let diabetes beat him. As for the e-mailer…I hope he resists any radical moves while in a “low period.”

Have you had a tipping point?