“Your estimated wait time is less than 3 hours and 58 minutes.”

The dulcet female voice reported, before the recording transitioned to obnoxious elevator music.

A four-hour wait time? Surely, that couldn’t be true. I decided to stick on the phone for a little while longer in the hopes that a customer support representative would pick up in the next few minutes as opposed to the next few hours.

The elevator music faded and that same female voice said: “Your estimated wait time is less than 4 hours and 16 minutes.”

What the heck?! How did my wait time increase? I pulled my phone away from my ear and looked at it in utter disgust, before deciding I’d hang up because I simply didn’t have the patience to wait any longer – whether or not that meant 4 more minutes or 4 more hours.

This is just one example of the many phone calls I have to make in order to get doctors appointments scheduled, supplies reordered, and issues troubleshooted…and some days, I’ve got more resolve to wait than others. This just so happened to be a day where waiting felt unfathomable to me, but like it or not, diabetes doesn’t wait. It’s far more impatient and needy than I am. And this is a side of diabetes that I’m not sure other people really understand – the sheer amount of time it requires to be managed. It doesn’t care that I’d rather spend that time doing literally almost anything else (even cleaning the bathrooms sounds more enjoyable than waiting for 4 hours on the phone). Nope. I don’t have time to not have time when it comes to diabetes, which can be a frustrating truth to tolerate at times.