Today, I am at the Diabetes Victoria and Baker IDI Health Professional Symposium and the first session has me thinking – and sitting down the back of the auditorium banging out this post.

The keynote presenter for the Symposium is Professor Herzel Gerstein talking about hypoglycaemia. He made a wonderful point in the Q and A portion of his presentation, one that I think is frequently overlooked.    

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The language (yes, I’m talking language AGAIN) we use around hypoglycaemia is misleading at times. Generally, we have severe hypoglycaemia and mild hypoglycaemia.

Severe hypos refer to those we need assistance to treat. It may inolve unconsciousness or seizures. Severe hypos sometimes need paramedics’ assistance, or a trip to the hospital.

Mild hypos are those that we can manage ourselves without too much hassle.

The problem with using these two terms is that it makes it sounds as though mild hypos are nothing. They’re just a part of living with diabetes, deal with it, off you go.

That may be the case in practical terms. A so-called mild hypo may mean grabbing a handful of jelly beans, waiting a few minutes and then off you go. Or it might be slightly more than that and take longer. But whatever it is, it’s termed ‘mild’ because no assistance was required.

But the thing with ‘mild hypos’ is that they do have the potential to weed their way into your psyche and suddenly become very significant.

If those mild hypos mean that you are often running late for things, you start to wonder if others are questioning your reliability. If those mild hypos have you needing to sit things out for a moment, you worry your friends or your kids or your family think you are disengaged, not wanting to participate. If those mild hypos result in you being a little vague for a while in work meetings, you start to fear your boss or colleagues think that you are not paying attention, not interested, don’t understand.

These are not ‘mild’ things. These are really significant and mean worrying and stress and anxiety and anger and sadness and fear and guilt and all the other things that diabetes makes you feel. There is nothing mild about it!

I think this is a really important issue for healthcare professionals to remember. By brushing away mild hypos as just a short-term-complication-everyone-has-them notion, the actual impact on the person living with diabetes is ignored. it’s minimising just how big a deal mild hypos can be and not providing any strategies for coping and managing with the emotional side of these episodes.

A mild hypo may not necessarily be terrifying in the moment, it may be quite manageable at the time, it may not affect anyone else or draw too much, if any, attention to the person having the hypo. And this is good!

But don’t for a minute think that it doesn’t mean a silent feeling of dread (and possibly a silent word of thanks to the hypo gods that it was nothing more!) or feelings of significant distress afterwards.