Shoot Up or Put Up

Edinburgh - bloody drafty

In between slaving away writing posts for your beloved soaraway Shoot Up I have a day job. That I’m actually employable may come a surprise to some of you – but there we are. Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details of my job as it usually requires a plethora of pencil-drawn diagrams to explain what the hell I actually do, but I will – instead – tell you about our office.

I work in the west end of Edinburgh, within a World Heritage Site and in a Grade One listed building that was built in around 1825. As the whole street is heavily protected it’s a wonderful example of classical Georgian architecture with the massive, imposing and somewhat gothic St Mary’s cathedral dominating the far end of the street. Which is nice.

However, every silver lining inevitably has a cloud. The Grade One listing means that we can’t really do anything major to the building – like have wonderful modern things, such as central heating, or double-glazing, or windows that actually fit into their frames. As the rooms in our office are all double-height and we have floor to ceiling sash windows this is somewhat problematic come winter. The bitter Scottish wind simply blows through the massive gaps in the frames, around my feet and chills me to the very marrow. Unfortunately, the massive marble fireplaces have been blocked up and so we can’t even warm ourselves in front of a roaring fire.

Anyway, now that November’s here we saw the first heavy frosts and really cold weather coming in this week. It was cold enough to see my breath in front of me – while in the office. This was undoubtedly a Bad Thing.

As usual I had lunch at my desk and was so fed up with the cold by the early afternoon that I paused and thought whether to put in a few less units of humalog, therefore letting my BG go really high and thereafter enjoy the inevitable hot flush that I have whenever my BG is off the clock.

It was sorely tempting and it came down to a choice of having my toes amputated through frostbite or amputated through neuropathy brought on by high BGs. It was a tough choice but in the end I opted for the amputation through frostbite option; it’s much more manly – I must be the Captain Oates of the diabetes world!

We’re all sensible people here. Well, most of us are.

By that I mean that we all know how we’re supposed to behave as good diabetics. We know that if we’re on MDI we should use a new needle each time we inject and we should rotate our injection sites. If we’re on a pump we should change the cannula every three days.

All of us, regardless of insulin therapy method, should use a new lancet each time we finger prick to test our blood glucose. Which, of course, we do regularly (remembering to throw in the occasional random check to make sure there’s nothing untoward that we’ve missed).

We also know that sharps should be collected and disposed of properly – bloody used needles shouldn’t chucked in the office paper recycling bin because we can’t be bothered taking them home.

We all know this stuff; but, and be honest now, how often do we find ourselves slipping into bad habits? Being late to the party I’ve only been a member of the diabetic club for four years and I’ve noticed more and more that I just can’t be arsed changing my needles all the time and putting a new lancet in just seems a bit too much like hard work.

However, I’ve noticed a pattern and for your benefit I’ve plotted this over time using the hugely scientific method of rough guesswork:

Scientifically generated graph of bad habits over time

As you can see, plotted over time, bad habits do gradually get more frequent; but this is then offset by occasional bouts of guilt. These are brought on by any number of sources – a concerned wife asking about sore-looking eyelids (always a sign of bad BG control with me); a couple of days feeling rough, or just a revitalised determination to manage things well and be top of the class at the next trip to the clinic.

I suppose as long as the bad habits don’t drop beneath a certain level things will be fine. But I wonder if this pattern continues indefinitely – until we get so bad we’re using rusty, three month old needles to inject into our eye as we can’t be bothered moving off the sofa to inject in our blubbery, overweight stomach. I don’t know, maybe some of you old hands can comment.

I’ve just emptied the washing machine (stick with me, it does get  marginally more interesting I promise). There’s a nice clean load of  washing ready to be hung out. Except for one small problem. It’s  covered in slime. Every item of clothing has different coloured sticky  goo on it, and there are bits of paper all over the place too.

Sadly this isn’t the first time I’ve had this washing machine slime  issue. It’s a diabetes complication caused by using fruit pastilles as  my preferred “I’m a bit low need something now” treatment. They’re in  most of my pockets and most of my husband’s too. Most of the time we  remember to take them out before we put the clothes in the wash. As I
said, most of the time.

Top diabetes tip readers – fruit pastilles should never be washed at 50 degrees, they can’t take the heat.