Not a Flat Line

This week I had my annual eye exam with the retina specialist. I thankfully don't need a retina specialist at this point, but figured it would be good to get to know a good one before I do. And it fulfills my annual oath as a person with diabetes to have the all important dilated eye exam. OK, so there is no oath, and I apparently turned it into a biennial kind of thing since they don't send out reminder cards and neither did my brain. But I digress....

The real reason for this post is the conundrum posed by the ineveitable questions posed by most health professionals to those of us who are pancreatically challenged. The first of those is "so, what do your blood sugars usually run?". This time I dodged that bullet by giving them my A1C of 6.5, which drew a "not too bad" response (is that like a 7 from the russian judge?). Then, the tech or assistant or whatever her title moved in for the kill..."so, are they pretty steady?", she queried. At this point, I couldn't help it, and just laughed. After I got that out of my system, I told her that "Type 1 diabetes simply isn't like that. Different days bring different challenges, and blood glucose is not always a flat line, so that is a very difficult question to answer. Today happens to be a good one, but a couple of days before that...not so much." Then a really good and unexpected thing happened, and she told me she has a friend with type 1 who says the same thing. Well, yippee, at least we are singing the same song.

Anyway, I'm not sure why those questions are so annoying to me, but they are. The tech was very nice, and our exchange was amicable, but I always feel icky after answering, like I'm taking a test with no correct answer. Basically, anyone who asks me things like that, other than my endoc or another person living with T1, just draws an automatic assumption on my part that they won't possibly understand a real answer. I have this desire to whip out a few weeks worth of CGM data and ask them to tell me "Can you define steady? Is this steady enough?". Maybe I'll do that next time :). Life is not a flat line, and neither is my CGM graph.