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Yesterday evening was the last session of my four week course at the hospital, called 'Living With Type One Diabetes'. Sure I've been doing that for a year, and sure it's not the catchiest name of all time, but in its way, I found it useful.

Two of the sessions that we had, involved some time talking as a group with a 'psychologist with a special interest in diabetes'. If you ever get the chance, I would encourage you to take it. I think others in the group would have found it much more useful than I did, but it did make me ponder over a few things.

She asked us what we actually thought about diabetes. About what it might look like. Personally I couldn't come up with an answer for that, but the nearest that I could come up with was something that I remember hearing off someone a while back. I can't even remember who it was. Whoever it was, what they said was that diabetes was like wrestling a tiger. Sometimes it's a baby tiger (one of the cutest things in the world), but it still has teeth and claws! But other days it's a full grown, and rather angry tiger. Sometimes you've stepped on its toes as well. But how do you learn to do that? No-one is good at that. Also, on the days when things go right, is it that the tiger is behaving better, or that you have better control of the tiger? Or both? How can you know?

This also makes me think of a discussion that I had with Andrew a while back. Imagine a trying to stand on a surfboard, whilst being in the possession of naff all balance. That's hard, I'm told. But paddling along moves to standing up, and you get the hang of the basics. After that though, the waves start. You never know whether these waves are going to be big or small, and when you're knocked off the board, you might feel like you're drowning under the water. 

You come to the surface though, and you have to get back on the board and start again. Like everything, the smaller waves which flummoxed you at first become easier to handle. But there are always more waves coming. Bigger ones. Because you can't stop the ocean, and you can't stop a tiger. You don't mess with nature.