Doting on a Diabetic Mother

In this series, our Resident Sage responds to challenges readers are grappling with in their lives. All stories are anonymized for privacy.

My precious mom is in her 70s with serious health issues. She has had diabetes for 19 years, has four stents placed in her arteries from a heart attack, neuropathy where the numbness and tingling have crawled up to her thighs. In short, she is an invalid.

She refuses to take any prescribed medications, tries a bunch of homeopathic treatments (which I appreciate), and I believe wholeheartedly that she is only sustained by God’s grace.

Is there a way that I can help her? Is there anything that I can say that will at least get her to try her prescribed medications? And if I just have to accept her decisions, how can I come to terms with the fact that she’s not fighting for her health?

I’m sorry to hear about your mom’s health, it must be very difficult for you to watch her suffering and to feel like there’s very little you can do to help her. Diabetes is a disease that takes a tremendous amount of care to manage, and what people do not usually know about are the mental and emotional side effects long-term diabetes has on a patient.

According to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), diabetes is a disease of Earth imbalance, so an overlooked effect of having diabetes is people’s diminished ability to organize their lives. I had a patient who is a lifelong diabetic, and his disorganization took a serious toll on his marriage. His wife would tell him they had to leave the house at 6pm, and when the time came, he didn’t know whether to grab his keys first or to put his shoes on. He would go to the Home Depot looking for screws and he’d get stuck evaluating the merits of the different heads, threads, lengths, and gauges of absolutely every one. His thoughts could be either completely scattered or totally fixated, neither of which allowed him to complete a task. When your Earth is imbalanced, keeping yourself organized is difficult and caretaking for others is nearly impossible.

This breakdown of organization is particularly frustrating for people who didn’t have these difficulties before they were sick, because they have no idea why they can’t manage their treatment plan all of a sudden. You have to stick yourself and track your blood sugar and measure food and give yourself the right amount of medication. When you’re already struggling with keeping yourself organized, you feel you are unable to take on the treatment regimen, which can appear to people on the outside like you are unwilling to take it on.

My suspicion about your mom is that she doesn't want to take her medication because in the many years that she’s had diabetes, it was made clear to her that diabetes is something that you have to carefully manage, and she’s not up for it. Unfortunately, after 19 years of uncontrolled diabetes and the damage it has caused to her body, it’s unlikely that the neuropathy could be reversed even with the best of care. What may help are medications that can ease the pain caused by the neuropathy, so at least she feels better and her life feels easier. And have your dad be responsible for administering her medication so it takes the pressure off of her to have to remember.

People with poorly managed diabetes are easily depressed because, as a person with an imbalanced Earth element, they think they have done everything for everybody and nobody takes care of them. Or they don’t want to deal with feeling that they owe people something when they receive care. Still, your mom can have a good life if the people around her are gentle. As her family, the best thing that you can do is to show your gratitude for her as a daughter (or for your father, as a husband) just the way that she is. Maybe she has made peace with herself that she doesn’t want medication, and overall, one should respect her decision.

The care she is offered should come with absolutely no strings attached. It might be tempting to dangle a carrot in front of her as an incentive to “take better care of herself,” but someone in her condition cannot maneuver mentally, emotionally, or physically to go for the carrot, because they feel that if they do, they will fall. Pay close attention to what she might like and give it to her with gratitude for being a good mom, and make it clear that she does not have to reciprocate. At this point, the best thing that you can do for her is to make sure she has the best quality of life possible.

-E