Some people seem to think that having diabetes, in particular type one means that you play a numbers game for your entire life. I don't really think this is so.
Now granted alot of us try to get as good a set of numbers every day as we can. That doesn't mean that we wake up and the first thought of the day is "oooh, I'll aim to get perfect BG's today and will test so much". Far from it. Yes I do test my BG when I awake just to see where I am but also it may be a while until I eat. If I'm higher than I'd like to be when I wake I'll put in a correction and wait for the BG to drop enough for me to be comfortable enough with it to eat. I suppose this is a case of rolling with the punches.
I do test alot. I don't do this for the sole reason of perfecting my control all day, every day. I do this because I use a pump and the pump is only as good as it's user. The more tests you do the more data you have to work with and it makes things easier to sort out. I also can't really trust the way that I feel as much as others can so I'd rather test.
Back to perfectionism. I do admit that at times I am something of a perfectionist as far as my diabetes goes. However, I feel that this only applies when things are going a little wrong as I want to get things sorted as quickly as I can so that I can be back on track as soon as is possible.
The perfectionism isn't my sole objective in life. I do put alot into my diabetes however it's not because I want to see near perfect numbers every day of my life. Far from it. That would be a nice thing but it won't happen. The reason I put alot of work into my diabetes is because I don't want to fall prey to a variety of complications that can come about as a result of poor control.
What kind of conclusion must I come to then? Well based on what I've written above and how I'm feeling at the moment the perfectionism isn't my goal, it isn't something that is always at the forefront of my mind. I don't live to be the master of my diabetes and to get perfect control. This would take my entire life over, stop me having fun and ultimately, to gain perfect control you'd have to isolate yourself in a laboratory and remove all fun and things that can interfere with the diabetes from your life. The trouble is that there are so many things that can interfere with diabetes that it'd be impossible to remove all of them. Diabetes isn't about making your control so perfect that no one could tell the difference between your BG's and that of a non diabetic. It's about finding the balance between good control and having a fun and fulfilling life. Someone else has put this much better than I can ever hope to. When I was at Friends For Life in October this year one of the organisers said a few words to round it off. It was based on his daughter who has been diabetic for many years. He said " we don't live to be diabetic, we live to dance on the beach." That says much what I want to in a much more eloquent way than I ever could.
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