I’ll never forget the first time I saw my mother’s bio in her high school yearbook: She’d listed “sleep” as one of her favorite past times. I though it was hysterically funny then, and I still do now, but I also think it makes her incredibly relatable. Who doesn’t love catching some z’s?

I may not be unique to others when I say that I love a good night of sleep, but only people with diabetes know the real struggles that we, without functioning pancreases, face virtually every night at bedtime.

Because that’s right, diabetes doesn’t just make life hard for us when we’re awake, it also disrupts our precious slumbers. How dare you, diabetes!

Here’s four ways in which diabetes can make it difficult to sleep:

1 – Beeping and buzzing devices. Nobody actually likes waking up to a blaring alarm clock. Imagine not only having to contend with that, but also the possibility of low and/or high alarms going off at any hour of the night. The shrill alarms built into my Dexcom are very rude awakenings and definitely serve as an extra incentive to do everything possible to try to stay in range overnight, but we all know that diabetes can be unpredictable, so this isn’t always possible.

2 – Rolling over on uncomfortable sites. I toss and turn throughout the night: Usually, I fall asleep on my back, then switch to my side, and roll over on my stomach…multiple times throughout the night. And I never seem to be able to do it without rubbing up on a site. It doesn’t matter where it is – my arms, legs, stomach, or back – any rockin’ and rollin’ I do in my sleep is almost always bound to push my CGM sensor or pod uncomfortably harder into my body, and it can be the reason why I wake up in the middle of the night to make yet another adjustment in how I’m sleeping.

3 – Waiting for a high to come down. There have been a handful of occasions in the last year of life with diabetes ALONE in which I’ve been so, very tired but too afraid to go to sleep until my blood sugar has come down to a “safe” level. It doesn’t matter if the high was caused by incorrect carb calculations or a site that I’m not sure is working properly – I just want to avoid sleeping knowing that I have a hyperglycemic blood sugar because waking up to one in the morning is bound to start my day off on the wrong foot. And it even resulted in a trip to the ER one time, which I don’t want to experience again.

4 – Waking up to a low. Just like high blood sugar, low blood sugar can also delay and/or interrupt sleep. Whether the low happens just after brushing my teeth and I’m forced to ruin my fresh breath with something sugary (just thinking about the orange juice and mint flavor combination makes me wanna yak) or if it wakes me up from a sound slumber and I proceed down the stairs to eat the entire kitchen because I’ve run out of low supplies on the nightstand next to my bed…you get the picture. It’s downright annoying and honestly I bet that I’ve had at least a couple hundred nights of sleep in my 22+ years of diabetes disrupted to a low.

So you see, as much as a person with diabetes like me enjoys a full night of sleep, I’m always aware of the fact that my diabetes doesn’t sleep…and instead keeps me on toes.