How do you handle emotional upset due to medical reasons?

I usually just apologize and hope that they know that it’s not intentional.

Any chance of regulating your blood sugar levels better so that you don’t get out of control? I know a friend’s son who has Type 1 diabetes and it took him many years to realize when he was getting low. Since then, he is on a much more even keel.

I think @janbb raises the crucial point: if you’re doing everything you can to keep this under control, that’s a lot easier to forgive than someone who knows this is a problem, doesn’t do anything about it, and blames the medical condition after the fact. (I don’t mean to imply this is what you’re doing, just offering it up as a contrast.)

Are you aware of what you’re doing when you’re doing it? Maybe another solution would be to just warn people: “I have low blood sugar and I’m not myself right now. I need to talk about this later.”

@nikipedia Sometimes I am cognizant and other times I won’t remember anything but a misty fog. I do what I can to control it, but sometimes I won’t time my meals just right or if I’m dehydrated or if the moon is in retrograde… my medicine won’t work correctly. So sometimes it is my fault and others it’s just happenstance.

I guess it’s not so much that I’m worried about the other people fogiving me, it’s more about how to forgive myself.

Could you put family and friends on the alert to warn you if your behavior is indicating a low blood sugar? Are you a ‘brittle’ diabetic? Because then it’s even more important that you have some assistance. You forgive yourself because it is not your fault.

@gemiwing: thanks for clarifying. That sound really frustrating, to not be able to control your own behavior. But I think my advice is probably the same…if you know you’re doing everything you can, hopefully you can cut yourself some slack when it happens anyway.

Is there something in particular you’re feeling badly about, or are you just talking about this in general?

And (at the risk of going all philosophical on you) I think people totally overestimate how much control we have over our behavior, anyway. Not to say we’re all off the hook when we screw up, but I think an awful lot of what we think and do is out of our hands, anyway.

@nikipedia How to you mean ‘out of our hands’? Interesting comment.

@faye I’m not diabetic, it’s from a different medical condition that mimics diabetes symptoms (plus others as an added bonus). Hubbs knows what to look for but often times It’s because I’ve turned into a raging ermm.. female doggy. You have a good point though, perhaps I need to try to be more aware of my states.

@nikipedia It’s so frustrating. Today was a bad day. I took my meds in the morning and ate an hour later (perfect timing) but the meds didn’t work as well since we’ve been having issues with this generic. So about half an hour later I’m on an insulin high- shaking etc- and then an hour or so after that I crashed. I started yelling about nothing in particular and couldnt think straight at all. The words didn’t make sense in my brain, if that makes any sense at all.

Hubbs doesn’t hold it against me, but boy I sure do. Perhaps this is a case of ‘let go of the damn reigns already because you’re not as in control as you think’ ?

@gemiwing: Do you think it would help to have your husband actually say, “hey, I’m not upset about this morning”? Even though you already know it, maybe it would help to hear it out loud?

@faye: Oh boy. I guess I think we have a pretty artificial sense of control over our actions. Tons of experiments in cognitive science show how easy it is to bias people’s behavior in ways we never notice. This is the premise of marketing—getting people to behave in a specific way, i.e., buy what you’re selling. Subtle shifts in language and color make huge differences. The color of a placebo pill (or a real pill, for that matter) affects how well it works. Asking people to fill out a form specifying their gender immediately before a math test makes women perform worse. Women’s preferences for male partners change depending on where they are in their menstrual cycles. (Men’s preferences in women change with menstrual cycles too, for that matter.) And we would never think to attribute our behavior to any of these things if we hadn’t done a scientific study to examine it. So think of how many other thousands (millions? billions?) of things are subtly influencing your decisions…to me, this calls into question how much we are really deciding our decisions. But there is a lot of room to disagree with me here.

@nikipedia thanks, stuff to think about

If your husband can tell when this is starting to happen, is there anything he can do to bring it to your attention? For example, a code word, or simply telling you that you need to take a break, or offering you whatever it is you need to counter the problem? What if you adopt a different eating schedule, one of many small meals throughout the day rather than three larger ones?

You really need to figure out how to keep your blood sugar stable because you are accruing damage every time it gets out of limits whether you are a diabetic or not. The damage happens to individual cells, including nerve cells and the cells making up your blood vessels in all parts of your body. My husband is dealing with most of the complications that can result from not controlling your blood sugar, except he hasn’t had an amputation yet.

The fact that you know your moods are affected by this means you need to work diligently to find a solution. While your body may dictate your emotions, your brain can figure out methods to keep your body more stable.

Are there other meds you should be trying? Should you get a second opinion, to see if there are any other means of treating your problem? Have you asked your husband if he can thibk of something that would help him help you?

Otherwise, all you can do is keep the lines of communication open so your husband can express his frustration without feeling like a bad guy and so you can apologize without internalizing your feelings.