Being outside a range you have been told to be inside is not a compromise. It's a failure.
I'm told to be between 5 and 7. I am often outside that range. That is not a compromise. That is a failure. You can make all the excuses you like, the damage will still happen.
I reckon the part of you that’s most likely to be damaged is your mental health. And it’ll be damaged by trying too hard to stay within those guidelines! They’re an ideal, but they’re not the reality of many of us who’ve lived with the T1 thing for longer than you’ve been alive, and are still powering on. Admittedly, it’s really not good to be swooping a lot from high to low, or to have prolonged highs. Are you still in the ‘honeymoon’? (It seems an over-romantic term imho). If you are then it could be making it even more difficult to stay within those guidelines.
As time goes on and you become more familiar with your own reactions to being higher or lower you’ll probably find it easier to recognise what your blood sugars are and be able to take action. You’ll no doubt find that the amounts of insulin you need to cover basal and to bolus for carbs settles too. I admit there are hiccups, I’ve had one recently, and they require more attention to get them sorted. I had to have 10 days away from close tracking as it was beginning to be counter-productive, the causes weren’t being addressed (I could be very rude about the lack of medical expertise) and the stress was infecting the whole of life.
I think it can be much more stressful now for a newly diagnosed T1 than it was in 1969 when I was diagnosed: unlike then we now have the means to follow our bs minutely, we’re told what we should be achieving, we’re given blow by blow accounts of what to expect if we fail to get the right numbers, we’re given a set of calculations to do before we inject and the time we should leave between injecting and eating, and on top of that the times it’ll take for different kinds of food to encounter various parts of our endocrine system. We’re expected to take this all on board and do it all perfectly. I’m really not surprised that the end result can be a maelstrom of stress. When I was diagnosed I was given a two-page leaflet of the carb values of about 20 foods, told how much carb to eat at each meal, a couple of glass and steel syringes, three steel needles and a wee testing kit. That was it. No follow ups. No consultant appointments.
Is the stress also there because in this age of targets, accountability and rewards for achievement , and punishment for failure, that we’re now hard wired to see ourselves as failures when we don’t achieve perfection? How many of us do achieve it? We’re humans, with all the variability and complexity that a spreadsheet cannot encompass.
Add to that the way that bad bs makes us feel rotten, and if you’re frightened, or a perfectionist, you have a recipe for disaster.
NoKindOfSusie, you are NOT a failure!!!! You’re doing an amazing job of trying to get it all right, and doing it against the odds. But, a big but, in another post you said you were diagnosed only last September and it’s still very early days. Being able to run T1 with less effort takes time. I think trying to keep your blood sugars within 5-7 at this stage may also create too many roller-coaster events when corrections lead from high to low to high again. I know you feel you can’t relax but I hope it’s encouraging to know that some of we less than perfect ones have lived a long time with this T1 thing. 48 years for me and no complications yet.