Blog #3 Dealing with Unpredictability

Hello again from myself Justin, another month older and hopefully wiser living with type1 diabetes. This past month I have devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to racing my mountain bike which has recently come to a halt as I have now settled in for two weeks with my in-laws on the family fruit farm in Northern Michigan, USA. This farm has been in the family for six generations and sadly it is looking this may be the last. Being surrounded by the life and stressors of a life in agriculture has made me more cognisant of the ever increasing challenges to make this life work in an ever globalised world. In farming your boss can be a mean, toxic and stubborn dictator whom has no mercy and often throws tremendous curve balls to you when you least expect it. That boss is mother nature or the weather. Two years ago after a six month season of back breaking work cultivating a bumper cherry crop a freak hailstorm lasting six minutes came through and destroyed the entire yield for that season, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost profits. Unplanned occurrences can be completely debilitating especially for those unprepared.

It is times like these when it seems very unfair to be living with diabetes and I feel like it is holding me back from making the most of each day. Being on the farm puts this into perspective about the challenges we all face in life and how approach things that are not fair. Farming is rarely fair, but if the farmer does not put his frustrations about this to one side then we the consuming public will have no food on our dinner plate. Bike racing can be a very unfair game but if the athlete does not move on from this he or she will be forever stuck in a state of dissatisfaction. Diabetes can be VERY unfair and throws the most obscure, unpredictable hoops for us to jump through. If I do not hold on to the strength of those traits- Confidence, Composure and Anticipation it can and does very easily get the better of me.

We are very lucky in the diabetes and farming world that we now have tools that enable us to get much better at the ‘A’ in C.C.A- Anticipation. Weather forecasting, more efficient fertilisers, efficient irrigation equipment and decades of recorded data has enabled more efficiencies in farming. The farmers whom are investing and embracing these technologies are often the ones whom are still successful. We are faced with a similar turning point in diabetes management. The technology and the tools to enhance our anticipation are becoming increasingly available. CGMs, pumps, loop technology and better basal insulins are all designed to help us. In Australia, I am very lucky this equipment is becoming increasingly accessible, I know this is rarely the case in the rest of the world.