Diabetes and Fatigue

Fatigue is the most disabling and most common of all diabetic symptoms.  As many people know, exhaustion can interfere with many parts of your life.  So what causes diabetic fatigue and how is it so common with diabetics?
Diabetes can cause fatigue whether the blood sugar is high or low within any diabetic person.  When the blood sugar is high, your body is getting less oxygen and its necessary nutrients; you have a drugged feeling that results in fatigue.  Lower blood sugar causes fatigue, because there are not enough nutrients for the body’s cells to work.  Inflammation through high blood sugar results with the blood vessels and when this happens immune cells flood the brain, causing once again fatigue.  If you are diabetic and you suspect that your fatigue may be the cause of your condition, you may be solely suffering from anemia and not diabetes which is a lowered blood count and deficiency of iron and certain other vitamins.  People with thyroid problems tend to have diabetes and they tend to feel tired and depressed from hypothyroidism.

Infections suffered by diabetics such as bladder or urinary infections as well as other bodily infections can cause fatigue.  These infections can raise the blood sugar levels and use more energy to fight off the infections.  Be sure to get a professionals opinion if you are experiencing fatigue while diabetic because relying on a self diagnosis of having a problem even as such as fatigue or other infection, though knowing yourself is the beginning of finding a solution with the proper help, mistakes will not be made in trying to overcome the problem.

Dealing with diabetes all the time is dealing with emotional stress and these emotional upsets can lead to negative emotions which affect our blood glucose levels.  As diabetes can be a devastating illness you must also face the truth that there is no cure for it and that taking care of yourself is a challenge.  This is why living with diabetes requires coping skills, from learning to control the diabetes to working with the emotions of having the illness.  

Written by Donald S

My Coping with Schizophrenia

I am a person with Schizophrenia. I have been diagnosed as schizoaffective, and have had no psychotic episodes for many years.  I have kept my family from knowing this for many years and because of the embarrassment of it all, I have very little contact with them for fear of their reaction to my state of illness.  Very few of my friends know this, those that do suffer from sordid types of mental illness, though they are not professionals of any type, we still keep in contact with one another, sharing information about how we live and how we see the world, caring about one another in this society of the twenty-first century.  I recently read a paper written by a doctor, who at the age of 25 was diagnosed with schizophrenia who is now a psychologist who works with people who are mentally ill.  He has done a number of presentations on coping with schizophrenia and has conceived ideas in lieu of his experiences with the illness, his patients and his own personal thoughts on the “Twelve Aspects of Coping for Persons with Schizophrenia.”

His ideas being so simple, staggered my mind, and I began to understand that I was not perfect in what I believed of myself, my own thoughts or my own beliefs.  I never once since my first hospital stay believed anything was wrong with me, yet as this doctor stated, “We accept that which is logical, that which is rational and reasonable.  That which is crazy is dismissed.”

It wasn’t hard soon after reading on-wardly, that I needed to learn acceptance and I needed to understand that I may be ill for the rest of my life, if, I wasn’t already living a fact of denial about having a disorder at all and denying to myself that it exist.  I read on, examining the author’s course on acceptance and his journey in understanding and saw my own experience of the illness of which was more spiritual than it had to be, tied to by the disruption of the biochemical side of reality I lived within my own mind.

I began to understand I had no special senses to see, or hear the world with and my insight to judge others, only a whim of judging myself.  I had no control over the rational side of myself; I was only daydreaming with other chemicals inside my brain, and I saw myself wishful thinking which gave me cause to partially deny, true logic, only as the author put it, living with “poetic” logic.” 

Written by Donald S.