I’ve got the Prendojitters, and maybe even a new entry to the Diabetes Terms of Endearment. You’ve probably contracted the Prendojitters before too, but you just didn’t know what to call this particular collection of symptoms. The Prendojitters are a collection of nerves, angst, and apprehension that you get before an upcoming endocrinologist appointment. Thus, pre-endo-jitters…Prendojitters.

It takes a couple of weeks for the Prendojitters to fully present themselves. They start with a mild case of reflection. You look back at the last few months of your life with diabetes and start to examine and evaluate how well you have been taking care of things. No matter how well your diabetes has been managed, if you’re anything like me, you’re probably overly critical of yourself. Maybe you haven’t done as many BG checks as you should have. Maybe you haven’t been wearing your CGM sensor around the clock like you had planned to do when you went into debt to buy the thing. Maybe you’ve let a few too many desserts invade your sensible diet, derailing your weight loss efforts and sabotaging your summer beach body.

Once you’ve given all these self-defeating thoughts a breath of existence, your case of Prendojitters progresses to the next level. You can diagnose yourself with stage two of the Prendojitters when you find yourself unceremoniously scrutinizing data. You compare your weight at your last doctor appointment with what that lying bastard of a scale in your bathroom is telling you now. You look at that last A1C and marvel at how good or bad it was, and go to work convincing yourself that this next one is going to be far worse and even less explainable. You look at your daily carb counts and exercise efforts from the logs you’ve been keeping (Right? Riiiiiight.) and settle on the data driven fact that you’ve been having too much of the former and not near enough of the latter.

In a blink, your Prendojitters progress to stage three, the third and final stage before intervention is scheduled to occur. Now you are at full alert to everything that is going into your mouth, every fingerprick and blood drop squeezed, every unit of insulin entering your subcutaneous layer, and every BG altering activity that you might be engaged in. The anxiety of the upcoming visit with your endo has sculpted you into a well-oiled diabetes managing machine.

Unfortunately, it is going to have little to no effect on your weight, A1C, cholesterol, or chances of winning the lottery, because your appointment is tomorrow morning and you’ve just caught on to what you should have been doing all along. So what do you do?

You finally relax a little in the blissfulness of seemingly defeat. You go see the endo, and then realize that things aren’t quite as bad as you worked yourself up to believing. Your endo is on your side, and he gets it: Diabetes is a lot of work to keep up with, and not every progress report is necessarily going to be all sunshine and daffodils with flying unicorns that poop sprinkles and sneeze glitter onto carbohydrate free cupcakes.

And just like that your Prendojitters are cured…until next time.