Shoot Up or Put Up

Nectar of the gods!

By Samantha

The dreaded hypo’s are back. Uh-oh. Man the barricades. When I have bad hypos, I turn into something like the monster from the black lagoon, all growly, pale and nasty. And over the past week or so, I’ve been having some rather nasty ones in the vein of at least two a day whereupon my poor other half has to pour copious amounts of apple juice down my throat.

Yesterday, we decided to go shopping. And the supermarket we decided on was about a half hour walk away. Fifteen minutes down the road, I start noticing some weirdness going on with my eyes. Then the legs start shaking and the words start slurring.

“I dunt feel fery well…”

I’m trying to get my point across to my other half in the middle of a very busy street. Things are blurry and the world is spinning, and he laughs at me for a moment before making me sit on a wall and making me check my blood sugar.

“Oh dear…I think you need some sugar”

With eyes that seem to be making the world jump around and have a crazy party, I see the number on my meter. 1.6mmol/L. And silly little hypo me starts panicking and, with what must have been rather funny for any passers-by, I tip my handbag all over the pavement. My purse starts rolling away, my gloves flop uselessly on the pavement and various receipts start flying away. In my lack of sugar state, I’m trying to find myself some glucotabs. And I can’t. There is nothing in my handbag.

And then, to make matters just that tad more embarrassing. I start crying. My poor other half helps me put my things back in my handbag before helping me to my feet. Something is muttered about always making sure I have something on me, how come this time I don’t. So our next mission, should we choose to accept it, is to find me some juice. I’m muttering all the way to co-op about wanting juice.

“I want some juice. I need it. I’m soooooooooo hungrrryyyyyyyy”

It earns me yet more funny looks, but I stumble on with a grin. And then, I magically find some chocolate in my coat pocket. And it’s good chocolate, half a bar of Thorntons milk chocolate. It’s thrown in my mouth with the fervour of someone who hasn’t eaten in days. And then the hunger starts. My tummy rumbles so loud that my other half looks at me with raised eyebrows, “Hungry honey?”

I fall into Co-Op, and mutter something to the employee stood at the counter “I need juice. Where’s your juice?”

He points me in the right direction. And I see the biggest drinkable bottle of juice in history. It’s huge. And it’s shining at me, like gold. DRINK ME. DRIIINNNKKK MEEEE. So I grab it, and in the process end up knocking half of the other bottles over with a crash. But I don’t care; I rush over to the counter, drop a pound on the side and start chugging that sweet, sweet orange juice. The cashier is looking at me funny, and I grin at him.

“Diabetic” I say with a goofy grin, “Hypo diabetic. Not good. Need juice”

He just smiles and nods and I go back outside. The world is coming into focus by now; after all I’ve just polished off 500ml of orange juice. And that’s when I start feeling like a prat.

“Seriously…how much did I embarrass myself there?” I ask my other half.

He just looks at me with a grin and shrugs, no answer given. It’s probably best for him not to tell me I think, as we make our way around to the supermarket, where I still want to eat everything.

—————

Samantha is Type One and regularly blogs at http://www.talkingbloodglucose.com/

Me vs my grandad. Yesterday

Christmas. It’s a time for family, a time for sharing things, a time for complete overindulgence. But in my family its also time for the dreaded blood sugar wars. You see, both of my grandparents are diabetic. They’re Type II, both on insulin (and my grandmother with an insulin pump) and I have to say, my grandfather absolutely adores to try and beat me in the blood sugar stakes! And usually he wins.

“What’s your sugars Sam?” he asks every morning, only for me to look at him and say something along the lines of “7.2…” or “6.3” or as it was the other morning, “15.2…” And every morning I get a grin, “I beat you. Mine is x.x”. And every single morning I growl at him and tell him how much I dislike him and his good blood sugar levels.

It usually ends up with a lot of stick beating, handbags at dawn and of course the age old favourite of a renactment of the battle of Hastings. I kid you not, it’s that bad. It happens every Christmas without fail. The blood sugar wars, whereupon I lose in a not-so-valiant way, give up and end up eating chocolate cake. The only problem with this however is that the sugars go through the roof, and I end up being laughed at by granddad, who has a much better level than me. Never mind, eh?

I have to say, I had the last laugh after Christmas dinner, when granddad’s sugars were higher than mine. I was a humble 5.6 whereas he was up at 8.something or other. Excellent! It’s all in good fun though. It wouldn’t be Christmas without a bit of friendly diabeticesque rivalry in the Morris household! It has to be done, when the majority of people in said house are pancreatically challenged!

Although I have to say, it gets rather confusing when my grandmother has the same blood glucose machine as me…I wondered why my levels were coming out reading 100 or more. Silly French system!

Though this got me wondering, do any of you have blood sugar wars? Or play swap the numberwang? Maybe that’s just me then…

I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and have a brilliant New Year!!!!!

The Portaloo. My new best friend

By Samantha

So on Thursday of last week, after dragging myself out of bed at 5.30 in the am and chilling out with a nice few (four!) coffees to get myself ready for the day, I inadvertently found myself rushing like a lunatic to get everything ready and get my backside out of the door at 7.15.

Now of course, usually I’m alright at doing this and if I forget anything usually realise within moments of getting out of the door. Except on this particular Thursday, I was almost twenty minutes down the road when I realised that I had forgotten a few very important things.

First of all, the pills I take for my so called foot issues and then I realised with horror as I was nearing work that I had forgotten to put a new pot of test strips into my kit bag. I honestly wanted to slap myself across the face and yell obscenities at myself for doing so, but of course, wandering down the road in the middle of Southampton muttering to yourself isn’t exactly going to go down well is it? And I didn’t particularly fancy being carted off in a white van.

So instead I phone my other half and moan down the phone at him about how stupid I am and end up bursting into tears. It’s a scary thought, being at work without test strips or the pills that mean my feet will actually function without shooting pains. But I guess I had to deal with it. I was too far away to walk home as that would have meant being late for work, so I told myself I’d get on with it.

And I really wish I had gone home and gotten these supplies.

Up until lunch, things were relatively fine. I had enough test strips to see me through till lunch but of course, me being me I was wandering around this busy, hellish archaeological/building site having a right mooey all day. And in the end I got so fed up I went to the shop and brought myself the biggest chocolate bar I could find for my lunch. Except, lunch was my last test strip. And I was getting really concerned that I hadn’t taken this tablet too, searching frantically in my bag for anything resembling a strong painkiller. Thankfully I had something with me, and by lunchtime I needed it because I was seriously feeling the cold (thank you poor circulation) and nasty shooting pains in my feet matched up with numb toes (thank you transient peripheral neuropathy…not!).

And then, I think the hyper started. The thirst kicked in and I kept running backwards and forwards to the horrible plastic portaloo. Except I couldn’t test my blood because I had run out of test strips. Cue panic. And by this stage I had been sent to the office to do paperwork, so instead of sitting there doing ‘very important work’, I was pacing backwards and forwards trying to work out a solution to the tiny little problem in front of me.

It’s worth noting too, that this ‘neuropathy’ really sinks its teeth in when the bloods are high. And even if it looks amusing when I’m hopping around yelling obscenities, it’s really not.

Forgetting stuff. It’s something I do a lot. It’s assumed everything is always where it should be when I run out of the door, and when it’s not it feels as if that carefully built word of diabetes is slowly starting to crumble. And it’s even worse when you get out and realise that you should have changed your insulin, because now you’ve run out. But let’s be honest, I’m sure we’ve all done it and all felt like muppets when we realise. And spending the day hungry due to being forgetful isn’t very nice. I guess it happens though, we all do it.

It just makes you feel really stupid when things happen that could be avoided. And playing a guessing game with the blood sugars is just silly. I had no idea what I was running at and spent most of the afternoon feeling horrific, yet I could have been running low and have no idea about it. So one thing’s for sure, I certainly won’t be leaving the house without this stuff again in the near future. Yet saying that, what’s the betting that come next week, something else will be forgotten. Although saying that, I walked out of the house without my trowel this morning – my archaeology soul right there…and also my lunch. But that’s a different story for a different day!

—————

Samantha is Type One and regularly blogs at http://www.talkingbloodglucose.com/

Following on from last week’s post about a diabetes-related musical, my chum Dave took it upon himself to sketch out a rough draft for a plot. Therefore for your enjoyment, fun and entertainment I present the first draft of:

Diabetes: The Musical
Or “A spoonful of medicine helps the sugar go down”.

Act the First

Power-crazy, evil banker ditches lovely girlfriend Mindy for sharp-dressing power-mad tart Sadistica. [Song: "(I'm) No Sweetheart" - think Big Spender but evil, by evil banker.]

Evil banker then has ex-girlfriend sacked by devious means to get her away from and to assuage his guilt. He then gets his new girlfriend Mindy’s old job.

But what’s this? The dastardly fiend suddenly finds he needs to pee a lot and feels tired. He collapses. [Song: "Pancreatic Overdrive" - Sort of rocky, Pink Floyd paranoia number]

Act the Second

Power crazy banker is diagnosed with diabetes… He can’t believe it. He struggles to come to terms with what has happened to him [Song: Doctor explains in song - "That's Diabetes"].

Ex-girlfriend, who can’t help but care, meanwhile, is down on her luck. Things start to go wrong – banker struggles to maintain his blood glucose while maintaining his evil lifestyle. To make matters worse, the evil Sadistica is plotting against him to try and take his job. [Song:"Insulin Dependent Blues"]

The evil Sadistica succeeds in taking his job. In a mad state of despair, banker goes completely of the rails and has a hypo late at night walking through a bus station [Song: a bit of Wagner here).

Act the Third

The lovely ex girlfriend Mindy is selling lucky heather in the bus station, and sees all. Having spent the last six months living in a hospice, she is familiar with the signs of diabetic collapse. [Song: "Mindy" - sung by chorus, a rewrite of "Wendy" by the Beach Boys, then a racy Who-type number by  Mindy "He wants Candy"]

Running to WH Smiths, she steals some Lucozade and forces it between his lips. Sitting by his bedside in hospital, she waits for him to come round. He pours out his woes and begs forgiveness. Eventually, she grants it, and helps him put his life on an even keel. [Song: "When I'm Comatose" to the tune of When I'm 64]

Act the Fourth

In a final moment of salvation, the reformed banker lays a trap for the power-mad ex-girlfriend Sadistica. She falls for it and is sacked and humiliated by the bank.

The banker is offered his job back, but explains that it’s no longer his world and that he has a new role to play now, helping children come to terms with diabetes and working pro bono to raise money for diabetic sufferers and defend them against medical companies and those who would wish to do them down. Lots of diabetics (some blind, some with missing feet) run/hobble/are led onto stage for the final number. [Song: "Life Sure is Sweet"]

Curtain down.

I’m Alison’s pump. She talks about me a lot so I’ve hi-jacked the blog to tell my side of the story. I don’t have long because we’re not apart often so I’ll get straight to it.

I’ve been with Alison for over 2 years now and overall I’d say we get on well. She’s a very enthusiastic owner, she makes me blush at times the way she raves about how fantastic I am. And so she should, I have integrated CGMS, I’m at the forefront of diabetes tech. Personally I don’t think she uses all of my capabilities – I’m sure she could spend more time downloading and analysing all the data I collect for her but apparently she has a life she wants to live.

Most of the time I get to sit in pride of place on her waistband, although don’t think I haven’t noticed that for parties that involve a posh frock I’m relegated to the bra, out of sight. That doesn’t do a lot for my ego.

This job has some good perks. She’s taken me white water rafting, sailing and on safari. I like it that she never leaves me behind although it was a little embarrassing when she spotted one of my friends in the middle of the Costa Rican jungle. Despite it’s owner speaking no English I had to endure the shame of her and Alison attempting to compare pumps via the medium of mime. I was willing my battery to run out so I didn’t have to witness the humiliating spectacle any longer.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful, Alison’s a good owner, but she can be a little hard to live with at times.  

She has a tendency to shoot the messenger. I can’t predict how she’s going to react when I have to tell her that her blood sugar is too high, it’s like Russian roulette. If we’re in public I’m generally safe, she’ll acknowledge the high and put some more insulin in quickly and discretely. If we’re alone it’s a more hit and miss affair. Sometimes its fine, other times there’s furious muttering and occasional violence. Thankfully she’s only thrown me on the bed so far but she does talk about pitching me out of the window which I think is an unnecessary over-reaction. At times like this I fear for my safety.

There’s one thing though that hurts above all else. She thinks I don’t know, but I’ve seen her looking round at other pumps, seeing if there’s anything better on the market, eyeing up my replacement. I know I’ve got less than 2 years until I’m out of warranty and then what? I need to start planning for my future.

The things I know about Alison you wouldn’t believe. We’re rarely apart; I know everything about her, what I’ve told you so far is just a taster. If you want the more salubrious bits, please send money. I have to fund my retirement somehow.

Some of the awful scenes common in Edinburgh during August

My fair city of Edinburgh is currently in the grip of the Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe. For those that don’t know, the city plays host to the world’s largest arts festival. Each August a bewildering number of plays, dance routines, comedy shows, musical extravaganzas, street performances are put on in a warren of tiny, damp, uncomfortable venues scattered around town.

Every year we’re subject to a vast range of performances, ranging from the truly brilliant and inspired to the truly awful and downright bizarre. And not being one to miss out on anything, I thought we could all club together, hire a venue and put on:

Diabetes: The Musical!

It would be brilliant and would chart the daily highs and lows of being diabetic in the modern world through the medium of cheery song and dance. And I’ll think you’ll agree, there’s no better medium for broadcasting information about life-threatening chronic conditions than cheery song and dance.

I expect some of us can carry a tune (though actually being able to sing is probably just an optional extra); I did a bit of theatre lighting and sound at school; and my wife is very handy with a sewing machine and could knock-up colourful costumes. So we’re sorted – all we need now are lyrics.

It’s early days yet, but here are a few rhyming couplets I’ve knocked out so far that could form the basis of some songs:

It’s morning and I’m feeling low
I’ve got a busy day and I hope I don’t hypo

My friends just say I’m just sweet
But without insulin I’m incomplete

It’s true that on the blog we’re sometimes outspoken
But that’s just because our pancreases are broken

Some people think it’s just an affection
But we’re dead without our daily injection

When I was high I used to be a grump
But that’s a thing of the past now I have my pump

So there we have it – further suggestions below in the usual place. I think with only a tiny bit more work we’re only one step away from a sure-fire five-star Festival hit!

Lancets, photographed artily, yesterday

I’ve just had a brilliant idea that will, without any doubt, benefit the entire international diabetic community! It’s so good, in fact, that if I wasn’t so dedicated to the good of the common weal, I would be heading down to the UK Patent Office right now to claim exclusive 20-year rights.

There are two parts to my idea. Part one – diabetics frequently refer to themselves as being members of a giant club, a brotherhood if you will, of pancreatically challenged hoards who share a common bond of insulin dependency.

Part two – the outward-bound freaks amongst you may have heard of GeoCaching. Basically, people hide Tupperware boxes of trinkets around the countryside and publish the latitude and longitude of said boxes on the Intermaweb. Armed with your trusty GPS, you can then head out into the wilds, find said box, add a trinket, take a trinket and move on.

It sounds a rubbish waste of time, but it’s actually quite fun (honestly). Through it you can find new places you might not have visited before and there are a huge number of caches around the world.

So, here’s the idea – we combine Part One and Part Two! As a local diabetic you firstly bury a box of spares – needles, Fruit Pastilles, lancets, a few test strips – under a tree, or behind a loose brick in a city wall. You then log on to a special website only diabetics can access. Allowing access would be simple, you would just have password challenge question like “What was your last Hb1AC?” Diabetics will instantly know the answer, while non-diabetics will be left bemused. Once on the website you would log the position of your cache.

Now, imagine another diabetic comes to visit your town and, shock, they run out of lancets. They simply dial into the website using their mobile phone and are directed to the nearest cache of spares via GPS. Everyone’s got Internet and GPS-enabled phones, yeah?

With this system in place, worries about running out of cannulas, strips and needles would become a thing of the past and the world would thus become a happier, better, utopian place.

So to kick off, I’ve just left a cache of lancets behind the statue of Robert Dundas, 2nd Viscount Melville, in the street outside my office; anyone visiting Edinburgh at the minute for the International Festival can help themselves.

I think you’ll all agree it’s a scheme that is completely and utterly without any feasible flaws or problems at all. Go me – I await my knighthood from a grateful world.

A scantily clad lady in a lurid magazine, yesterday

We quite often talk about the downsides of diabetes – the problems with hypos, sight issues and legs rotting off with gangrene. But a recent headline in Scotland’s daily rag The Herald gave me renewed hope – “Diabetes sufferer sacked from school wins back job“.

As an aside, the Scottish press is world-renowned for its quality reporting. The famous Aberdeen-based Press & Journal is celebrated for its huge bias towards local issues at the expense of world events. It’s perhaps apocryphal, but the day the Titanic sank in 1912 the Press & Journal apparently reported the disaster with the headline “Aberdeenshire Man Drowned At Sea”. Even more recently, only one week after the 9/11 attacks the paper’s World News section totalled just a single half page.

Anyway, I digress. In essence the story here is that a teacher in an Edinburgh school was fired for bashing-the-bishop (add your favourite masturbatory euphemism in the comments section below!) over some soft core porn on the web – apparently the Maxim magazine web site of all places.

Nevertheless, the teacher in question denied the allegations and took his former employers to an industrial tribunal. Attesting on his behalf, his doctor said his behaviour “could have been caused by hypoglycaemia…symptoms [of which] include memory loss, atypical and automatic behaviour.” Apparently he had been taking the “wrong strength of insulin at the time” and this, he alleged, could have contributed to the likelihood of him being hypoglycaemic.

This excuse was accepted and the teacher got his job back and was awarded some compensation for his troubles.

His explanation is obviously complete and utter nonsense – I think the last thing you would do when suffering from a hypo would be to log on to a lurid website and burp the worm. But it does give me hope that there is an upside to diabetes – we have a fantastic excuse for pretty much everything!

“Why have you stolen all those pens from the stationary cupboard, Brown?” “Sorry sir, I was having a hypo”.

“You’re driving a stolen car again, Brown!” “Sorry officer, I was having a hypo”.

“Brown! Why did you organise that military coup in that central-African country and resume the trade of conflict diamonds?” “Sorry Prime Minister, I was having a hypo”.

So it seems there’s just no situation where you can’t play the diabetes card. Fantastic! Excuse me while I go and rob my local bank!

The Daily Herald

Just a quick post for the entertainment of all you wonderful pancreatically-challenged victims. I recently caught site of a health advice column in soaraway rag The Jakarta Post which is written by Ade Rai whom, if you didn’t know, is one of Indonesia’s most famous body-builders.

In his weekly column he gives out health tips but notes that the column “should not serve as medical advice…” which is probably just as well. His latest column covers Type One diabetes, which he defines as a “condition where pancreas produces large amounts of insulin to clear the blood of sugar from food”. Phew! I’m cured!

He then goes onto describe hypoglycaemia as a condition where with an “absence of food…may lead to death”. Eek – I thought I was cured, now a simple hypo may lead to my untimely demise. He then helpfully suggests that “you work your schedule around your meal plan, not the other way around.” Obviously he’s not heard of DAFNE or carb. counting then. Exercise is easy though – our weightlifting friend suggests that resistance training for diabetics is fine as long you “do it after at least two meals”. Why after two meals I wonder?

So there you have it – quality diabetes education for us all! Who needs a specialist diabetes nurse to help you when you have the depth of knowledge inherant in Indonesian body builders?

The Jakarta Post

Monday was a beautiful sunny bank holiday in north west England. We spent most of it gardening. It was a perfect day for washing so I stripped the bed and the washing line was soon full of nice clean bedding drying in the breeze.

On Monday night we climbed into nice, clean, crisp bedding. It was lovely. The only thing that would have made it nicer was if it’d been ironed but sadly I believe life is too short to iron sheets so our bedding is never quite as crisp as my mother’s who has much higher standards than I do and irons her sheets.

And so it was, clean, fresh as a daisy, crisp (yet unironed) bedding. Until Tuesday morning when we woke up to what can only be described as the aftermath of some sort of massacre. Splatters of blood all over the duvet, sheets and pillowcases.

A quick check revealed that thankfully we hadn’t been gunned down in the middle of the night by invaders from another planet. No, the explanation was far simpler. It appears the flow of blood from my pre-bed blood test hadn’t been stopped with the usual quick lick and unbeknown to me had continued to bleed well into the night.

Those with a working pancreas might never have had the opportunity to track where their left hand middle finger travels during the average night. Let me enlighten you. Mine seems to have spent some time bleeding under the pillow before migrating to the top of the duvet, then spreading blood around the middle of the sheet before what looks like a very grand finale on top of the pillow.

The still quite fresh but now blood stained to the point of looking like it was used in major surgery bedding is now out of the very hot wash and drying in the office because typically, when I really need to wash the bedding, it’s pouring down with rain.