Let’s talk about juggling life with diabetes

Real life can be stressful. Add diabetes on top of it, and juggling life with diabetes is a real challenge. Bridget McNulty wants your advice…

Friends, hello! How are you? How intense is life right now? Many people seem to be juggling a lot at the moment, and then there’s diabetes on top of it. How does it all fit in?

Juggling life with diabetes

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately. About how life often throws so many things at us, and we have to surf the waves we are given. But when we’re living with diabetes, there’s always an added element to think about – we’re surfing the waves we are given while juggling blood sugar and food and exercise and stress. Surfing while juggling! No easy feat.

I have had an exceptionally intense month and a half. A few highlights, to give an indication of what daily life has been like – and how it affects my diabetes management.

I wrote a new book!

How thrilling. It will be internationally published next year, and I’ll share all the details as soon as I have them, but for now you can follow me on Instagram for updates if you’re interested. Writing a book is such a gift and an honour, but it also requires a lot of extra time in front of my computer, early in the morning or late at night or on weekends, seeing as I already have a full-time job and two young kids.

Juggling diabetes: More time in front of my computer means less time moving my body (which means higher blood sugar) and less time sleeping (which means less regulated blood sugar).

We’re renovating our house.

So exciting! We’ve been saving for 3 years, and now we’re finally doing it. But it means moving out of our home and into a rental, and settling my kids (and myself!) into a new routine and a new space. And, you know, renovating stress.

Juggling diabetes: New space, new routines. Some of these have been positive – I’ve been walking my kids to school in the morning, which is fantastic for blood sugar. Some have been trickier – needing to squeeze in visits to the house while still making healthy food, juggling renovation decisions on top of all the inevitable diabetes decisions.

We had to pack up our childhood home.

My three brothers and I flew to Durban to pack up our childhood home, now that my dad has moved to Cape Town. It’s the house we all grew up in, and my family has lived there for 35 years. My grandpa built it! It was an emotional and physically exhausting time, but also kind of beautiful.

Juggling diabetes: Packing and carrying boxes up and down stairs is physical exercise (lower blood sugar) – balancing that with snacks was a challenge, especially because my brothers brought great snacks and they were hard to resist! Emotions also effect blood sugar, as we all know, and it was a fairly tumultuous couple of days.

We went on a multi-day hike in the Wild Coast.

After we packed up the house, my brothers and I went on a four day Pondo Trail hike in the Eastern Cape. So incredibly beautiful! So healing.

Juggling diabetes: Walking all day with a full backpack, different distances every day. Staying in rondavels with no fridge for insulin for four days. Eating very different food, whatever we were served. I’ve done a lot of multi-day hikes, so I was prepared, and all the walking actually made my blood sugar very happy. I didn’t have to inject much insulin, and ate a lot of dried mango to keep my blood sugar up!

My dad was rushed to ICU.

He is 80, and has had a series of really bad health episodes in the last 5 years, but this one was intense. 6 days in high care, another 4 days in hospital, and we weren’t sure he was going to make it. Extremely stressful and emotional, as you can imagine.

Juggling diabetes: I went to visit him as often as I could, but visiting hours are 7pm to 8pm, and it takes at least half an hour to get to the hospital. So I had to either eat very early (which was tricky to prepare some days, and meant I couldn’t eat with my family) or very late (8.45pm – not my favourite because then my blood sugar might be unstable overnight). The stress of a very sick parent also played havoc with my blood sugar.

Work stress

I have the best job (thanks, Sweet Life!) but we’ve been going through a lot of changes lately, and working really hard on the Sweet Life Chatbot (which we’ll share with you as soon as it’s released! Definitely this year). I really care about my work, and really want to do my best. Sometimes that’s possible! Sometimes, given the above list, it’s not as good as I’d like it to be. And that’s fine! I’m only human…

Juggling diabetes: Deadlines! Stress. (Here’s what our community says about stress.)

You don’t get a break from juggling life with diabetes

This is perhaps my biggest complaint about diabetes: You never get a day off.

Just one day off would be so great! Please? But no.

So I’m curious – what do you do when life is full on and intense? How do you incorporate diabetes into it all? Any advice most welcome!