not getting the hang of this

You're in the right place, anyway. Good luck - I hope you get some kind of control really soon.

It sounds like you are very depressed. Being a practice nurse is a bloody hard job. Are you soldiering on with that as well as coping with the diabetes?

The how to course at dsolve.com should help you get to grips with knowledge gaps and give you plenty of options. The trouble is that you may be just too miserable to take much in right now.

Here is a link to the website address.
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=11071&p=111000#p111000

It can help a lot knowing that others have had similar experiences to yours. We are all in the one big boat here.

Hi

No you are not the only one who feels just like you do!

I am so sorry that you are not getting the support you need from colleagues. Just because you share a profession does not mean that you automatically share all knowledge or every specialism. It is very hard but you need to press for answers to your questions and for the help you are asking for.

I have a feeling that it is almost necessary to actually have a disease yourself before you can understand the shock to the system that the diagnosis gives to the patient. Without that I don’t know how you really can even start to get a handle on it and all the training in the world makes no difference to understanding something which can only be pretty nebulous - you need to live with it or with someone close to you who has the disease.

Once you have a diagnosis and you feel in your body the results of the disease it changes everything. Suddenly it is imperative to get the required understanding and make the effort to understand and just get on and do it, waiting for appointments and floundering for information makes everything so much worse.

As a stroke survivor whose thinking mechanism is not what it was it has been a struggle ( :? ) and I have had to make it ‘my job’ to understand. I have only been diagnosed three months and have been counting carbs for one month, since I found this site, and I am only just starting to get a handle on it.

It really helped to get a bg meter and to start testing to see what my food was doing to my blood. I have tweaked my diet, which was good for a healthy person, to a new way of eating for someone who has a system which can’t manage the usual high carbs. The difference is amazing and I feel so much better and the bg numbers are starting to show a small change. I am hoping that what I am attempting to do will lessen the amount of drugs I may eventually need and I want to control my own future as much as I possibly can. 8)

This site is great for knowledge and encouragement and I will guarantee that you will find more of both of these qualities here than you will from colleagues because of the depth of understanding due to personal experience.

Things will get better!

I don't think you're alone at all, but having the tools to use is alwayss helpful. Two books either of which might teach you far more than the specialist nurse does.
Think like a pancreas Gary Scheiner and/or Using Insulin John Walsh