Worth The Effort

I'll confess. Sometimes I just go through the motions during an endocrinologist appointment.  We have an awesome doctor at an excellent clinic.  I care very much about keeping my daughter's diabetes 'under control' (or whatever other phrase you want to substitute because you too recognize the impossibility of that one). Yet sometimes I'm just not into it.  Maybe I'm overwhelmed by too many concerns or questions.  Maybe I feel like things are going fine and we don't need much help at the moment. Maybe the trip in, the parking and the check-in process have sapped my day's allotment of mental energy. Maybe there are other things going on in life which seem more important. Maybe it's just a bad day.  It happens.  I hope when I'm not feeling terribly focused, I can look back on our most recent appointment to see why I should try to dig a little deeper.

I didn't come into this particular appointment with a written list of questions and concerns.  I wasn't geared up to address a series of specific problems.  I knew a things were not going perfectly, so there would be some tweaks, but I wasn't feeling the intense need for help that I sometimes do.  Yet as I focused on the blood sugar graphs before us, and on what the doctor had to say about them, I found myself fully engaged.  And engaging him.  So a conversation which could have glossed very simply over Sunday night's lows turned into a long and helpful conversation about the absorption rates of all kinds of different site locations and what the factors are.  A suggestion to change the correction factor wasn't just jotted down, but led to some really interesting information about the general math behind correction factors.  And on we went. By asking follow-up questions, I picked up several useful tidbits of information.

We also had conversations which included my daughter as an active participant. We addressed some things I already knew (pre-bolus breakfast at least 15 minutes ahead, for example). But what I realized as we talked was that my daughter hearing these things from the doctor was entirely different than hearing them from me. I can tell her to pre-bolus every day, but it's often as effective as telling her to pick up her room.

There are countless other reasons to use our endo time wisely. High co-pays, making the most of the time away from school and the rest of life an appointment requires, and taking advantage of the unique opportunity to receive high quality medical care are reasons which come to mind.

So even if just one of the above reasons is true for you, I'd encourage you to make the most of every endo appointment.  You're bound to gain some nugget of information or support which will make it worth the effort.