Living with Type 1 diabetes means routinely dealing with situations that would sound completely unhinged to anyone who hasn’t lived them.
You make calculations, carry supplies, respond to alarms, and spend a significant amount of energy trying to manage a biological system that frequently ignores you. It’s exhausting. It’s frustrating. And occasionally it’s so absurd that laughing is genuinely the most reasonable option available.
If you’ve had Type 1 for any length of time, most of this will be familiar.
1. Going to Bed Feeling Like You’ve Finally Got It Figured Out
You check before bed. The number is exactly where you want it. You haven’t over-treated anything, you haven’t missed a dose, and for once everything appears to be cooperating. There’s a brief, dangerous moment where you think you might actually have the hang of this.
You wake up the next morning to discover that diabetes had a different night planned. What happened between midnight and 6am is unclear. Your pump doesn’t know. You don’t know. It just did something.
2. Turning Every Meal Into a Small Maths Problem
Everyone else sits down and eats. You run a quick assessment: total carbs, fat content, protein, likely absorption rate, whether this particular meal has a history of causing problems three hours later. Some foods require more analysis than others. A straightforward sandwich still requires a calculation. Pizza is practically a research project.
3. The Hypo That Has Terrible Timing
There are a lot of hours in a week. Low blood sugars seem disproportionately interested in the inconvenient ones — job interviews, long drives, meetings you can’t easily leave, the moment you’ve finally sat down at the end of the day. The timing is, in its own way, almost consistent.
4. Leaving the House With an Unreasonable Amount of Stuff
A ten-minute errand shouldn’t require a packing list. And yet: insulin, glucose, more glucose, a backup pen, something to treat a hypo, something else to treat a hypo when the first option gets eaten for unrelated reasons. Everyone else is out the door with their keys and their phone. You’re checking you haven’t forgotten anything critical.
5. “But You Don’t Look Diabetic”
Usually delivered with complete confidence. Nobody seems sure what a person with diabetes is supposed to look like, but a surprising number of people are certain this isn’t it. It’s one of those comments that manages to be both well-meaning and completely impossible to know how to respond to.
6. Explaining Type 1 for the Hundredth Time
No, it wasn’t caused by eating too much sugar. No, it’s not the same as Type 2. No, cinnamon isn’t a treatment. No, that thing someone’s neighbour shared online is not a cure. The questions cycle through reliably. Most people with Type 1 have given this explanation enough times to do it in their sleep.
7. The CGM Alarm and Its Sense of Occasion
Continuous glucose monitors are useful. They are also, at times, spectacularly poorly timed. Silent for hours, then loudly operational the moment a room goes quiet — a cinema, a meeting, somewhere you’d genuinely prefer not to have to explain yourself. It’s not personal. It just feels that way.
8. Treating a Hypo With the Recommended Amount of Glucose
The guidance is clear: treat it, wait, recheck. In practice, a low blood sugar tends to produce a fairly strong drive to eat considerably more than the recommended amount, immediately. The original plan involved a few glucose tablets. By the time fifteen minutes is up, the kitchen has taken a hit and the overcorrection is already underway.
9. The Unexplained High
You counted the carbs. You took the correct dose. You did what you usually do. Nothing was different. A few hours later the numbers are climbing anyway, for no reason that’s apparent. One of the things Type 1 teaches you, eventually, is that doing everything correctly is not a guarantee of anything.
10. Getting Genuinely Pleased About a Number on a Screen
A good HbA1c result. A day mostly in range. A CGM graph that looks like something other than a seismograph reading. These things are objectively small, but after long enough with Type 1, the satisfaction is real and you stop feeling the need to justify it.
Why It’s Worth Laughing About
Type 1 diabetes isn’t funny. The situations that come with it often are, in a dry and slightly grim way. Humour doesn’t reduce the mental load, fix a difficult week of numbers, or prevent burnout. What it does is make it harder to feel like you’re the only person having these experiences — because the chances are, someone else with Type 1 has had the exact same thing happen and found it equally ridiculous.
Sometimes that’s enough to make the day a bit more manageable.
The Day to Day
One of the stranger things about Type 1 is how isolated its day-to-day moments can feel, right up until you describe them to someone else with the condition. Then it turns out they’ve had the same unexplained highs, the same poorly timed alarms, the same conversations about cinnamon. The experiences aren’t enjoyable. But they are shared ones, and for a lot of people, being able to laugh at them is part of what makes the whole thing liveable.
A Final Note
Sometimes you haven’t got in you to laugh because at times it can feel despairing, and that’s okay as you can’t can’t switch it off. I know because I’ve been there many times over. On that note, when you’re ready, I’d really like to have a chat with you to see if we’d be a good fit to work together. Book a free discovery call here.
Until next time,
Pete
T1D Mindset Coach