Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Things I hate About My Diabetes Educator

This woman should be sued for malpractice. In the interim, I will give her a scathing evaluation. So what do I hate about this woman? Let's see:

1. Her inability to celebrate good choices. Someone will bring a box of oatmeal where they switched from the instant in a packet to the stuff in a cylinder. She will proceed to upbraid them about having too much of it. Lady, you yourself said this is about baby steps. They cannot change their lives overnight. All of us brought our glucose pills as instructed. She then tries to zing us about the expiration date. WE DID WHAT YOU TOLD US TO DO ASSHOLE!

2. Her glee in pointing out bad choices. The woman can spend half the class picking apart a bad choice. A guy who previously ate one big meal a day, reports he ate three full meals on his day off. She asks him what he ate and it turns out he ate twice the amount of carbs per meal. While that wasn't good, she decided to spend 20 minutes of a two hour class picking apart every single thing he ate.

3. Her obvious lack of food knowledge.
She was looking at my food log and simply had no idea what pomegranate seeds were. OR QUINOA. QUINOA the wonder grain. No idea.

4. Her complete lack of interest in the emotional aspects of dealing with disease.
So here's the entire section on dealing with the emotions you have when you live with diabetes: "Here's a list of emotions you may feel. Have any of you felt them? Fine, don't let them get in the way of making good choices." THAT'S IT. Seriously. Three sentences. We have a chronic disease BEEYOTCH. One that carries a lot of guilt, frustration, and shame. If that's all you can do to help us deal with it, don't even try.

5. The stank attitude.
PLUH-EASE. Spare me the eye rolls and sighs. We are all here to take more responsibility over our health. Having our health educators act like spoiled teenagers will not help. You say it's about moving forward but clearly you cannot find a ladder and get over yourself to help us do that.

If I didn't have to take this damn class to get to a nutritionist, I would have bolted after the first class.

1 comment:

Stef said...

Can you file some kind of complaint? I forget, is this a class you're taking through some kind of medical health center?

I will be very curious to learn more about what you learn from a nutritionist. I'm sure I've got a lot of stuff wrong in my own head.