Tim on holiday and rowing (very, very badly) on the River Avon

Panic over! I’m back! The mighty wheels of diabetes blogging can slowly start turning again now that I’m back from my holiday and I can safely fire up WordPress and pollute the Internet with putrescent drivel about diabetes.

As we all know, holidays can sometimes be difficult with the ‘betes. Odd meals at odd times, different schedules, more booze, larger meals, smaller meals, more exercise, less exercise and so on and so on. This article could therefore be a long moan about things that went wrong and how my diabetes ruined my holiday.

But – I’m very sorry to report – it’s not. I rarely gave it a thought. Diabetes blogs rarely have enough moaning and I’m sorry to not add to that worthy canon with a dismal diatribe of despond (I will, however, not hesitate to add to the canon of awful alliteration).

This was actually my first holiday with the pump and I’ve had nearly nine months to master it. I think it’s the mastering-it thing that’s the important bit. After all, pumps or any kit are just lumps of very expensive plastic if you can’t work the damned things and tailor them to your needs.

Anyway, the pump helped me to get my balance just right. For example, I was really pleased when Katie and I went out for a pub lunch made up of baguette, chips and cider (we’re just so classy!) followed by an eight mile section of the Cotswold Way path.

On injections this would have been a nightmare. Great reservoirs of Lantus would have been swimming about trying to do their worst and injections would have been a metaphoric and literal pain. But with the careful(ish) use of temporary basals, duals wave boluses and so on I started at a happy 6ish and ended on a happy 7ish. Good work!

This merry pattern carried on through the whole holiday, with only one minor hypo in the entire fortnight; which is considerably better than I manage the rest of the time. Even when we met up with my esteemed co-writer Alison and her hubby Geoff for dinner (they happened to be long-weekending near us) my blood glucose behaved itself. Avid readers will recall that whenever Alison and I meet up one or other of us will have a catastrophic hypo or embarrassing hyper. This is why we try to not meet up very often.

So was all this good control down to great technology and wonderful training from my DSNs, helping me to manage my ‘betes? That may have been a contributory factor. But, as always with diabetes, I think a great chunk of it came down to a big, fat dollup of luck!