The Path to Sustainable Health: A Personal Reflection #34

Welcome back to DiabeticReal. I'm Deborah E, your host. It's been a while, longer than I intended, honestly.

Life and health had other plans for me for a season, and I needed to step back and focus on getting steady again.

Not just blood sugars for us diabetics, not just lab numbers and all that fun stuff like A1C or anything like that, but my energy, my nervous system, my clarity, my overall health.

There was actually a period during all of this where things became serious enough that my husband and I genuinely were not sure what was happening to me. For several months, I was barely functioning.

And when I say that, I mean getting out of bed to eat something or use the bathroom was sometimes the extent of my day. And that's not like me. I don't just lay in bed. I mean, hey, I'm the type that sneaks out of bed to go play with my server. You know the code.

I don't just lay in bed. So it honestly, it felt similar to what many people described during COVID Except it wasn't Covid.

And because I've lived with diabetes for decades, I knew it wasn't simply, well, quote, unquote diabetes. Something else was happening.

At one point, we were trying to make careful decisions about whether hospitalization would even be financially survivable before the new insurance benefits kicked in at the beginning of the year. So I started doing what I could. You know, since we're Apple people, I had my Apple watch at Apple Health.

All of these things I really looked into, what could I do, what little apps could I have on my. My iPhone, what exercise could I do from the bed, that kind of thing. And I started out small, not extreme things, just basic things.

Breathing deeper, moving more. There's a lot of exercises you can do from your bed, by the way.

Trying to exercise even two or three minutes a day at first, getting airflow, managing stress. I always thought that was a bunch of bunk, by the way, but there's something to that. Anyway, managing stress, getting rest.

And not just rest, quality rest. So I started measuring that and trying to slowly rebuild strength somewhere in that process.

We started looking at environment factors too, especially with all the massive construction and dirt disruption happening around the area.

Looking back, there's a strong possibility I may have been dealing with valley fever exposure or something similar connected to air quality and spores in the environment. I can't say that definitively.

I'm not presenting that as a diagnosis, but what I can say definitively is that the experience completely changed the way I think about health even beyond my focus on listening to your body, which of course is still at the core of my belief with health, I now add to that several aspects of intentional focus, which I am still learning during this new part of my journey, and I will share that with you in this podcast. The podcast episodes going forward as we can grow together and journey together. Because health is not just about prescriptions and lab work.

It's also environment, stress, sleep, airflow, movement, recovery, awareness, and understanding that our bodies are affected by more than we sometimes realize.

And honestly, going through that gave me an even deeper respect for how fragile health can become, especially when chronic illness is already a part of the equation.

And if you live with diabetes or any chronic condition you already know, sometimes the most responsible thing you can do is pause long enough to stabilize, not quit, not disappear, just regroup. This podcast has always been called DiabeticReal for a reason. Real life with chronic illness is not perfectly curated or perfectly calibrated.

Oh, we try. Yes. It doesn't always run on a schedule or anybody's schedule.

And sometimes the healthiest thing we can do is stop pretending we can push through everything indefinitely. So over this past year, I've been reevaluating a lot. A lot.

How I work, how I manage stress, how I structure my days, how I take care of myself sustainably instead of running on adrenaline. And honestly, that process changed me. It also gave me a lot of new perspective that I'm excited to bring back into this podcast.

We're still talking diabetes, we're still talking health, but we're also talking about the systems around health, as we've always been.

But we're going deeper on things like energy, stress, mental clarity, sustainable living, and what it actually takes to function as a real human behind managing chronic health challenges long term. Oh yes, we've always been talking about that health for the real person. Not just the real diabetic, but the real person collectively.

But I had the opportunity to practice, have some real practice on some of those extended systems this past year. And when we're talking about this health, it's not perfectly, it's realistically. And I think that matters.

I also have some really great upcoming conversations already recorded that I'm excited to finally share with you.

I know I mentioned some of that coming up in some of the previous podcast episodes, but yes, they are coming even closer, including discussions around glucose and weight management, gut health, and healthy living with diabetes. Those conversations are still important, maybe even more important now.

So if you're listening today after your own difficult season, if you've ever felt behind or feeling behind, if you had to step back from something you cared about. You're not alone. Sometimes consistency isn't about never stopping. Sometimes it's about never returning. And that's what this episode is. A return.

I'm glad you're here. Welcome back to DiabeticReal. This is Deborah, and thanks for listening.