I Can

It's Diabetes Blog Week again!

This year, the topic for the first day was the empowering I Can.

Lets kick things off this year by looking at the positive side of our lives with diabetes. What have you or your loved one accomplished, despite having diabetes, that you weren't sure you could? Or what have you done that you've been particularly proud of? Or what good thing has diabetes brought into your life?

The first thing for me, obviously, is all that I have accomplished with Sensotrend this far. Both myself and my wife have worked for our startup company full time for over a year already. I feel incredibly empowered, being able to create tools that can help me gain better understanding of how my body works, and better treatment outcomes.

I've written before about the change that using a Continuous Glucose Monitor brought to my life as a diabetic and to my attitude towards treating myself.

For the first time, I was able to see how my blood glucose really behaved. No more shotgun charts. The resulting chart was rather a roller coaster, showing the glucose go up and down, sometimes fast, some times slower. Very far from the ideal curve, but providing so much more insight than the isolated dots of the meter.

I had been told I can control my blood glucose by simply calculating all the carbs I eat and taking little less insulin when I'm exercising. But for me, it was not so simple, and I could never really explain all the variations in the values of my isolated blood glucose measurements. The CGM curve showed me how the values changed, and prompted me to find out what was causing the different ups and downs.

That's what changed my attitude completely. I had already given up, found good control of my blood glucose values to be beyond my capabilities. Getting more insights from the CGM curve was the ground breaking change I needed, to get the sense that there is a way to learn what exactly affects my blood glucose levels and how, so I can start to keep it better under control.