I’ve entered into a brief period of nonchalance with my diabetes. Not quite diabetes burnout, but definitely not the level of vigilance and care that I currently was operating at. While I don’t want these feelings of apathy to last, I’m okay taking this mini break. I’ve learned that for me, my self-management kind of ebbs and flows. I’ll have periods of high motivation, followed by some time where my diabetes seems to take a back seat. I don’t want to get as far as burning out and having my self-management truly suffer, so if I need a week or two where my diabetes isn’t the all consuming focus of my life, then so be it. Luckily, I have my CGM to keep me on track and alert me when I’m too high or too low when I forget to test or check.

So what does nonchalance in my management look like?

Well, allow me demonstrate.

A few days ago, I was changing my CGM sensor. I still don’t like inserting the sensor, so I try to just get it over with. I started to push down the inserter into the left side of my stomach and felt this incredibly sharp pain shoot across my left shoulder. Um that’s never happened before.

I had stopped pushing when I felt that sudden pain, the inserter only halfway down. Awesome. I held my breath and pushed down the rest of the way. Luckily, there wasn’t any more shooting pain. I looked down at the sensor and saw red begin to seep through under the plastic. Yeah that’s not suppose to happen.

Common sense would say “okay just don’t touch it, it will probably stop bleeding.” But sometimes common sense goes out the window. So I pressed down a little bit and even more blood started to gush, filling the plastic. Oops. While it didn’t hurt, apparently I may have hit a capillary and maybe a nerve that caused that shooting pain in my shoulder. Who knows.

Here’s where the nonchalance comes in.

What I probably should have done:

• Removed that sensor
• Taken rubbing alcohol to clean the area that was bleeding
• Inserted a new sensor somewhere away from the old one
• Called Dexcom to explain what happened and request a replacement