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.

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

Satsumas, a dangerous force

Satsumas are one of my favourite things about Christmas. I know it’s a shocker to hear that I prefer satsumas to traipsing round overcrowded shops and avoiding hysterical toddlers who’ve just had a traumatic encounter with a Type 2-in-waiting in a red coat with a bushy white beard but obviously I’m just strange.

Many moons ago when I was a child we didn’t have chocolate at Christmas, for obvious reasons. Instead we had satsumas and nuts that you crack. Any other time of the year I can happily let Tesco shell my almonds and brazils, but at Christmas I must do it myself.

This is where having diabetes at Christmas gets dangerous. If I simply bought a box of Quality Street and ate my bodyweight in sugar over Christmas life would be simple. Instead, I indulge in the perilous pleasure of satsumas and nuts.

Last night I nearly broke my poor husband’s nose whilst passing him a satsuma via the medium of a poorly aimed cricket throw. It appears that when a satsuma hits you in the face at speed it isn’t as soft as it looks. This wouldn’t happen if we just bought chocolate.

Then there are the nuts. There’s nothing nicer than a freshly cracked nut. Sadly when I do it we either end up with a hazelnut shattered into a million pieces all over the living room, or I do myself some form of mischief with the nutcrackers.

My inevitable conclusion to this deeply scientific study is that having diabetes at Christmas is a hazardous occupation for me and my family. Christmas pudding, chocolate and eggnog are inherently safer than the diabetic friendly satsumas and nuts. For the sake of my family I fear I must indulge.

Do I really believe that?

When I was a child my mother used to carry an uncooked baking potato in her handbag. She knew that potato contained 30g of carbs. When my meal arrived in the restaurant she’d get the raw potato out of her bag and compare it with the one on my plate. Ta-da, a very early version of carb guestimating technology.

Now, I will admit that it isn’t practical to carry in your bag a ready weighed version of all the food you intend to eat. I’m the woman who whinges about the amount of diabetes junk I have to take on holiday, a life size specimen of all foods I may encounter certainly isn’t going in my hand luggage.

Over the years lots of people (ok, more than 10, less than 100) have said to me that we should campaign for all restaurants to publish carb counts of their food. Sounds sensible.

However, I’m a big fan of self sufficiency. I don’t want to be dependent on someone else publishing carb counts when I go out. Surely it’s better to learn the skill of guestimating carbs with the help of a good book and some trial and error rather than rely slavishly on companies to publish the data? That way, you can go anywhere.

I’ve already recounted the Chinese dumpling banquet debacle. A label on each dumpling wouldn’t have helped, there’s no way I would have believed they contained so many carbs and I wouldn’t have been brave enough to put in the full bucket of insulin required.

McDonalds do publish carb counts and if I inject according to their carb count I’m on the floor within 2 hours begging for sugar. I’m sure it’s factually correct; it’s just that the fat content is so high it slows the absorption of the carbs. It doesn’t tell you that on the box.

I’m all for a bit of help to make life easier. However, I also like to pick my battles. Getting CGMS funded by the NHS? I’ll fight til I drop. Getting insulin pen needles on prescription when the Govt refused in the early 1990’s? Done it. Campaigning to ensure that all people with diabetes have access to decent patient education and support? Oh yes. Pushing water up hill to get all restaurants to publish carb counts? Nice to have but if I put my efforts into getting decent education and support for people with diabetes, this one almost becomes an irrelevance.

Tim heading off on his hols got me thinking about my travels with diabetes.

A couple of years ago we spent a month travelling round China. It was brilliant and surprisingly easy from a diabetes point of view. The food was delicious and I ate pretty low carb food for the whole trip which made a real difference to my control.

The exception was the Chinese dumpling banquet in Xian. A meal comprising twenty two courses of dumplings stuffed with everything from fungus to crab to shark! That’s a lot of dumplings. And nowhere in my many years of accumulated diabetes wisdom have I come across the carbohydrate count of a dumpling.

So I did what every good diabetic does when faced with previously unencountered gastronomic delights, I guestimated.

The banquet was interesting, although after the 14th dumpling it did start to feel like a bit of an endurance test. But we passed; we ate all the dumplings and waddled home looking quite dumpling-like ourselves.

Of course, I had wildly under-guestimated the number of carbs in a dumpling and when you multiply that by 22, that’s quite an error. When I woke up in the middle of the night unable to detach my tongue from the roof of my mouth I guessed I’d underdone the insulin. 24.8 on the meter, a gallon of water, a bucket of insulin and back to sleep.

I woke up the next morning with a headache and a tongue not even wet enough to lick a stamp. Still hovering around the 20 mark, I had another bucket of insulin and went off to see the Terracotta Warriors.  Disconcertingly I could also feel at least 21 of the 22 dumplings sitting heavily at the bottom of my stomach.

This went on for 2 days. That’s how long it seems to take to digest 22 Chinese dumplings and get blood sugar levels back down to normal.

A Chinese dumpling banquet was definitely a once in a lifetime experience, I’d never be stupid enough to repeat it.