“What you are afraid of is never as bad as what you imagine. The fear you let build up in your mind is worse than the situation that actually exists.” Spencer Johnson the author of Who Moved My Cheese wrote this musing about fear.
Recently I found it to be amazingly true. When I thought my dog Natcha, was diabetic, I was traumatized at the thought of having to give her a daily or twice daily shot. I didn’t believe I could do it. I just could not imagine sticking her, my girl, this dog I hand carried home from Mexico as a 3-month old puppy.
Our vet taught both of us how to give the injection. It started that I would be the back-up shot giver. As things quickly progressed, I became the main shot giver. It was and continues to be amazingly easy.
What is not easy is everything else that goes along with diabetes. She is supposed to eat before she gets insulin. But some mornings she does not appear to feel like eating until she gets insulin.
Her dose of insulin is a guess until she can get the glucose curve test. She can’t get the test until she has been on insulin for 14 days. Until she gets the test on day 15 it is kind of a guess.
Some days she will eat her new food for diabetics. Other days she won’t touch it. Some days she will eat her food with chicken. Other days she won’t touch chicken. Some days she likes tuna fish mixed in her food. Other days she won’t even give tuna a sniff. Yesterday she liked faux chicken salad!
The shot is the easy part. How many times in life was what we feared NOT as bad as we imagined. Perhaps a new job, a speech, the zip line, there is a lesson here somewhere.
It’s not the things that we build up in our mind that really challenge us. It’s the things we could not and did not expect.
