What API should be used to access to secret/resource in reconciliation loop after `kubectl edit <resource>`?

Hi,
hope I’m on the right place.
I’m working on the task to create the custom operator and for now I have successfully created the pod/deployment, service and secret.
However, I would like to have the ability to run kubectl edit secret secret-name and after changing the key in secret, ValueFrom of Container.Spec should be updated.
As a resources I’m using v1 package - k8s.io/api/core/v1 - pkg.go.dev
Can you please let me know what kind of API should be used here ?
The way I’m doing is to set the .status.secretSet custom variable when the secret is created, after that I’m checking in the loop if that variable is 0 and if it is create the secrete otherwise skip reconciling. Other things I’m doing with the Patch () (r = Reconciler) and Update() methods.

		err1 := r.Patch(ctx, root_secret, client.Apply, applyOpts...)
		if err1 != nil {
			return ctrl.Result{}, err1
		}

	if err := r.Status().Update(ctx, &app); err != nil {
		log.Error(err, "unable to update the variable status")
		return ctrl.Result{}, err
	}

I guess there must exist some kind of API to check the status of change of specific key in the resource (closest I could find is Patchstatus() ?) or do I need to check the old and new pointer before and after each reconciliation loop?
Currently it works after minikube is restarted.

Thank you in advance.