Receive to a special edition of our weekly diabetes advice column, Ask D'Mine, hosted by veteran type 1 and diabetes author Wil Dubois in New Mexico. Today, Wil is waxing poetic happening Groundhog Day with diabetes.

{Got questions about navigating life with diabetes? Email us at AskDMine@diabetesmine.com}

D'Mine happening Groundhog Day

The alarm is imperative, sharp the layers of foggy sleep in my creative thinker. I slip one arm out from under the covers and blunder for my iPhone, stabbing randomly at the touch screen with my index until a lucky strike reaches the snooze button. So I open one eye. The world outside my window is pearly grey. Pre-gloam. The stars have retreated, but the sun still hides under his covers like Maine.

Seriously, God, is it really morning?

The sleep slow drains from my mind and body like brackish water in a razor-backed-up dip liberated by Drano. I stretch, itch my eyes, and slowly stay up. Then I reach for the phone, scratch the short sleep consternation, and open the Dexcom app to check my blood sugar.

Other day with diabetes.

Just like yesterday, and just like the day before that. And it will be just the Saami tomorrow. And evenhanded the same the day after that. Yes. I'm living Groundhog Day. The Posting Murray pic, that is, in which broadcaster Phil Connors seems eternally trapped in the identical day, reliving it again and again. Not the Pennsylvania-sponsored quasi-national vacation starring a sleepy rodent yanked from his burrow for the weather prognosticating entertainment of the public.

And looking at the calendar this morning, I see that today actually is Groundhog Day, the holiday. So this seems like a good day to talk about how our disease is equal Groundhog Day, the movie.

In the movie Connors relives the same day—2-Feb the vacation—again and again, and again, and once more. No substance what he does (including kidnapping famous groundhog Punxsutawney Phil and committing suicide) he wakes up at the same time, in the same hotel room, at the commencement of the same day. All terminated once again.

Sound familiar? If you take up diabetes, information technology should.

Because to some degree we'atomic number 75 all cornered in the same Clarence Shepard Day Jr., day aft solar day, required to carry out the one tasks. And non just any tasks. Diabetes is replete with endless, mind-numbing repetitive tasks; and if we do them all forever right, the best we hind end Leslie Townes Hope for from our efforts is, to quote my Quaker Dr. Bill Polonsky, that "zero bad happens."

Testing blood sugar some times per day. Calculating carbs of every morsel that passes our lips. Pickings dose after dose after sexually transmitted disease of insulin, day and night, turning our bodies into homo bowling pin cushions. Trailing a host of other meds. Responding to a symphony of alarms—real and false—from devices sold to facilitate US stay rosy-cheeked. It's ceaseless, and while we're not trapped in one stead like the star topology of the film, we're distillery at bay in this unity life.

All morning when we wake up, no affair where that may be, it's Diabetes Groundhog Day.

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What to do? Actually, I think that Groundhog Day the film give the sack give us some counseling hither. After going finished a period of increasingly wild behavior and finding no escape, the hero of the film accepts his entrapment and finds ways to use each identical day to grow as a anthropomorphous being.

How would that work out in the echt D-world?

Well, rent out's start with acceptance. I visualize a caboodle of people with diabetes who rebel against their genetic fortune and circumstance. Can I just say: What a frickin' waste of energy? Sure, the Big D sucks. No way around that. But hating every single second of it simply increases that suckage. To survive lengthy term with this bitch (and the alternative is not surviving) you need to adopt something similar a Far Oriental metaphysical mental attitude to that. Common people in that part of the world seem more culturally susceptible to accept what they cannot do anything about. They seem to make up better able to shrug off what they call karma or kismat and move on. We Westerners, but then, seem more predisposed to try to fight what we call circumstances.

To change it.

But given the limited clock time and energy we totally have, and the odds of successfully changing our D-destiny, I have to say that acceptance seems to me a better usance of our intellectual, physical, and spiritual resources. If you can accept that this is what your life is, if you can release your psyche of guilt and your soul of anger, you will exuviate yourself of a heavy weight.

In the same nervure, I hate to get word people living for a future cure, grasping on to any chaff, zero matter how fragile, spending large DOE in hoping that some outside source will shift their destiny for them. Which isn't to say that you should live without hope. In that location very well may be a cure someday, but it's been a promise long unfilled. I'll be delighted to throw my time and syringes into the bonfire with the rest of you when that day comes to fall, if information technology comes to pass in my lifetime, but I'm not wasting any mental bandwidth on it in the meantime. I think our energy is better fagged in determination ways to live better in the present moment. In the never-ending Diabetes Marmota monax Day.

Which brings us to growth. How do we go beyond beyond accepting our D-karma, and go on to the next tear down? Like in the movie: One day at a time. One task at a time.

Stealing some other page from the Easterly, I can't help merely think all but the Nipponese tea ceremony. It's a simple task that's evolved into a high artform with an emphasis happening paragon. Why not challenge yourself to regale blood sugar monitoring the same right smart? Instead of viewing it as a chore, a burden, a tariff, a trial—why not view it as a challenge to be formed? Become a master of the BG check. A martial artist of the lance and fora.

Crazy? Perhaps. Simply if you can displacement your mind to turn an exasperating chore into a challenge, an art to master, why not? Wouldn't this be growing as a person? As a individual with diabetes? Likewise, why not treat a crack every bit an elegant dance? A carb calculation as an interesting puzzle to solve? Tracking meds as a memory-building exert? Alarms A a language to learn?

Yes, we're cornered in this ongoing Groundhog Twenty-four hours, but what we coif with the time spent Hera—for what May be a personal timelessness—is up to each of us.

This is not a medical advice column. We are PWDs freely and openly sharing the wisdom of our collected experiences — our been-there-done-that knowledge from the trenches. Bottom Personal line of credit: You still call for the guidance and care of a authorised checkup professional.