Yesterday I was a guest on Gary’s podcast, ‘Think like a pancreas.’ If you don’t know, Gary is a former Diabetes Educator of The Year and founded, Integrated Diabetes Services, his clinic outside of Philadelphia that is type 1 focused. He and his type 1 staff work both on site and remote.

Our podcast talk centered around the myth that you can control your blood sugar and diabetes. I will post it when I get the recording. Meanwhile, I had to laugh when I woke up this morning and looked at my CGM (above). Really…at 6 am, while I was still asleep, my blood sugar starting rising to 150. How the heck was I supposed to control that? The subsequent rise at 9 am, when I got up and started moving, was the Dawn Effect. Another thing I can’t control.

We’ve got to break this myth that you can control blood sugar. It’s insidious and harmful. If you missed it, you can read what I wrote about the topic on diatribe, ‘Why Controlling Blood Sugar Shouldn’t Be the Goal.’

I had hand surgery on Monday. At noon, after not eating since 8 pm the night before, after managing the dawn effect upon waking, after judging how much insulin I could take without going low because I couldn’t eat or drink pre-surgery yet I had to walk to the subway and from the subway to the hospital, at noon my blood sugar was 107 mg/dl.

For anyone who understands type 1 diabetes 107 is celebratory, yet for a medical institution that spits out clinical data, it is abnormal because it is about 99 mg/dl. That’s data without context. That’s data without human eyes, without stories, without relationship. That’s sad and disappointing and shades of the future for healthcare, already “care” slipping away.