Take your pick: MI or CVA

What would you pick (if you HAD to pick)? A heart attack or a stroke? Once in a while, as a diabetes educator, I would ask that question of a client I was seeing.

I much prefer people to take care of their diabetes for positive reasons, as opposed to fear. However, if that doesn’t work and I genuinely think someone is at a very high risk for suffering a heart attack or stroke, I ask them the question above.

Of course, nearly 100% of the time, people look at me (as if I were crazy) and firmly say, “Neither!”  I remind them that they have it in their power to drastically reduce their risk of having either one of those problems by managing their diabetes well.

Just a little fear can sometimes get the ball rolling in the direction of better diabetes management. Going blind or losing a leg to diabetes are real risks, in the same way that plane crashes are a real risk.

Yet on only one occasion in the last 8 years did I frighten a client about losing her foot. (I could not HELP but frighten her, because my own fear for her imminent loss of her foot and her probable subsequent loss of her leg, was written all over my face.)

 However, heart attacks and strokes are the car crashes of diabetes complications. Plane crashes and car crashes are both devastating, but the risk of dying by the first is much much less than the risk of dying of the latter.

Once in a while, a client of mine would answer my question with certainty that he would much rather have an MI, even if it killed him, than have a stroke, especially if it did not.

Personally, I can understand that reasoning. Fortunately, it turns out that there are 4 ways you and I can cut our risk of a stroke in half. 

It doesn’t involve any surgery or medications or trips to the rain forest to collect rare botanicals. It’s pretty simple, actually. Read the blog on “Four Ways to Have a Stroke” to find out more.