Reflect for the future.
Remember this guy? Lack of diabetes knowledge and heavy accent aside, he’s quickly becoming my favorite boxing instructor at my boxing gym. He’s a real deal Holyfield pro boxer from Russia, and he trains like one. He has a seemingly endless arsenal of drills and exercises that make his classes fun, sometimes funny, and always a good workout. My favorite part of his classes though are at the very end (and not just because the pain is over). After our last core strength drill, he has us lie on our backs, eyes closed, hands outstretched, and bodies relaxed. He tells us to take a few moments to think back on the class we have just taken, to view ourselves from the outside, looking in on our imaginary selves. He tells us to think about our movements, what we learned, and what we looked like, and commit this practice to memory so that we may learn to be better with each 60 minute class we take. I love this act of reflecting on what you have learned that day, and especially the idea of looking at it from outside yourself, from an observational point of view.
It got me thinking about what this kind of review and processing would do for my diabetes management. True, diabetes is an unpredictable beast. And also true that it is already my years of experience that generally guide my management decisions. But I wonder if I took some time to review my “diabetes exercises,” that is the management choices I make every day, if I might learn something while observing them in 20/20 hindsight. What if I took a few minutes every day or perhaps every week to think back on the choices I made for my diabetes, on what worked and what didn’t and committed that “set” to my memory so that I can work smarter in the future?
It reminded me of how helpful my logbooks are – when I keep them. Every three months, in the week leading up to my endo appointment, I keep a meticulous Excel spreadsheet with every blood sugar, every dose, every morsel of food and moment of exercise logged in it. When I review these logbooks by myself and with my CDE, I’m always amazed at what mysteries suddenly become so clear in hindsight. I see patterns that had previously felt like isolated issues, and I find problem spots that I would never know existed without this review. Even with 18 years of diabetes experience under my belt, I find I learn something every time.
I’d love to take the time to have a mental review of my d-management every day, but the trouble with this disease is that I’m already thinking about it 24/7. It seems like there’s a different decision to make every other second with diabetes, so I rarely have the time or energy to contemplate my ‘betes in retrospect. But, perhaps if I committed a little more memory energy to looking for patterns and logging what works and what doesn’t (e.g. my post from Wednesday), I can pull that formula up in the future and see if it helps.
For example, around 5 o’clock tonight, I’m going to need the reference notes for: Managing Happy Hour. Cuz it’s been one long week my friends, and this gal needs a Happy Hour! Happy Friday folks.
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I am giving a refresher/reminder to a group of inpatient nurses next week on the importance of excellent diabetes care in the hospital, and I found your post to be both awesome and timely.