Shoot Up or Put Up

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.

Haute cuisine - French style

You’ll all have noted from her earlier post that that Alison and her hubby are off sailing for a fortnight. Well, not one to be left out, I’m also on holiday for the next six days in the sunny south of France – staying with my folks who live an hour north of Toulouse.

Unlike Alison, I don’t have any queries about my diabetes as I have no intention of doing anything other than sitting the shade, reading The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing and drinking cold white wine from the Loire valley.

So you lot are going to be cruelly abandoned for the next few days. Feel free to use the forum to continue the cheery banter amongst yourselves. Behave yourselves and enjoy!

The husband and I are off on our jollies for a couple of weeks, so I’ll leave you in the slightly scary but very entertaining care of Tim.

We’re going sailing in Greece which should be fabulous. Sailing is always an interesting diabetes challenge. I find I have to plan my insulin alongside the weather forecast. No wind? Increase insulin in preparation for a day of sunbathing and reading. A good breeze blowing? Reduce insulin and get ready to pull those ropes.

Other important questions preying on my mind include:

• What impact will Greek beer have on blood sugars? Last year Croatian beer proved to be marvellous in having very little impact, fingers crossed the Greek stuff is just as good.
• Will we get to the airport without me having a tantrum about how much diabetes junk I have to carry in my hand luggage? I’d say this is very unlikely.
• And the big one. In the next 2 weeks how many times will I catch my pump on a rope and say something rude when the pump swings round and hits me on the knee? Place your bets now ladies and gentleman, the answer will be published upon my return.

Bon voyage!

Scorchio!

Edinburgh is currently suffering from a heat wave. No, really. Honestly it’s true. Sometimes in Scotland the cloud, rain, drizzle and sleet briefly clear to allow through a little bit of sun and occasionally the temperature gets into double figures.

While I’m enjoying the smell of molten tarmac that wafts through my office windows, and at home the gentle scent of burning chicken as my neighbours all rush out to use their badly neglected and rusty barbecue sets, I’m having slight problems with my diabetes.

Generally with a higher body temperature you will, of course, absorb insulin more quickly and so I tend to have a slightly higher frequency of hypos during the summer months. It’s pretty easy to deal with – I just shove in a bit less humalog and everyone’s happy.

It does, however, remind me of the time I went to the sauna. Now, I’m not talking about a seedy “sauna” where people go for “massages”, I’m talking about a very fancy spa and health club in Edinburgh. A few years ago, as a special treat for us, my wife organised a spa afternoon the day before we got married – a chance for the two of us to get away from the relatives for a few hours and chill out before the big day ahead. Absolutely heavenly!

As I went into the spa complex, with its dry and wet saunas, heated seats and outdoor swimming pools (one’s outside on the roof and you can look into people’s offices in the building next door while you paddle about – what fun!) I noticed a small sign warning those with medical problems – such as diabetes – that the spa wasn’t suitable for them. “Danger”, it said in big, red letters.

“What rubbish”, I thought to myself as we relaxed and put another ladle of cold water onto the hot stove. Like every good diabetic, I’d stuck a few tubes of Glucostop gel into my swimming short pockets. Each tube supplies 40g of fast acting glucose and is usually enough to raise you up from the lowest hypo.

However an hour and three Glucostops later my BG was rapidly dropping and I was enjoying the severe hypo symptoms we all know and love. I quickly made my escape, got changed and when Katie met me afterwards in the café I was eating the sugar cubes on the table with the avidity of a horse who’s not afraid of dentists.

But, as always, I recovered quickly and we whisked ourselves off to our wedding rehearsal and we lived to tell the tale. However, since then I’ve always regarded saunas with a massive degree of suspicion mixed with a healthy dollop of sheer terror. So that’s sauna-friendly Finland off my holiday list, but with Scotland so glorious at the minute, who cares?

Since I was diagnosed with diabetes (yay!) a few years ago, I’ve travelled quite a bit on planes. As you’ll all know, insulin hates getting too cold or too hot and therefore keeping our spare supplies in the hold is really out of the question.

Although a normal passenger plane’s hold will be heated to around about five degrees centigrade and is, of course, pressurised – you just don’t know how long your suitcase might stay out on the runway in baking tropical heat / freezing frigid cold (delete as applicable) or how well the throwers (or “baggage handlers” as they’re quaintly known) will treat your case. Katie and I always play a game as we wait for our suitcases to arrive on the carousel called “Which Bit of Suitcase Will Have Been Ripped Off This Time?” A wildly fun game if ever there was.

The long and short of all this is the diabetic has to carry through lots of little vials of clear, sinister-looking liquids through security in their hand luggage. Post 9/11 security has been seriously beefed up on all airlines and airports and so this could be a pain in the butt for us pancreatically-challenged victims.

As an aside, while I’m on the topic of security, I grew up in Belfast in the 1980’s during the tail-end of The Troubles and frequently flew back to England with my brother. I remember the approach up to Belfast’s Aldergrove airport was interrupted by a military checkpoint through which your car’s number plate was typed into the police computer and if you didn’t check out you were whisked aside to be blown up in a controlled explosion, or something.

Once past this you were frisked at the next security point and your bag searched regardless of whether the metal detector bleeped – and all this even before you got into the airport building itself. Security thereafter was, well, pretty damned secure. A nice man from the security services would question each passenger in the departures lounge (I was a school boy at the time, so answered questions like “what do you plan to do during your visit to Northern Ireland?” with a puzzled “uhm, go to school…?”). Finally you would arrive at London Heathrow at an arrivals gate especially reserved for entries from Northern Ireland which was situated miles away from any other gates – presumably to give MI5 a final chance to give you the once over.

So compared to all this I think the security nowadays is pretty straightforward, though I have to confess I prefer it now you don’t have a solder pointing his SA80 semi-automatic carbine at you while I go through security – but, hey, that’s just me.

Anyway, prior to travelling – like any good diabetic – I got a signed letter from my registrar explaining I was pancreatically-challenged, a copy of my latest prescription and prepared myself for questioning and possible full cavity body-searches.

However, I’ve never had the slightest problem with security and have never even had my bag manually searched – this applies to airlines or any of the tourist sights in the USA which had a degree of security. Meanwhile my wife, Katie, frequently gets stopped, frisked and searched as I’m ignored.

I suspect that under the prying x-ray machine my kit just looks like standard diabetic stuff and so it just gets waved through. Maybe I just have an honest face. In any event, that the guards are distracted by my insulin certainly makes it much easier to get my concealed handgun through security. Hurrah!

The more avid and fanatical readers of this lovely blog will have noticed I’ve been away for the last few weeks. I was holidaying with my wife Katie in the marvellous United States of America, which as the more observant will have noted is on a different continent to the one I live in.

Sadly perhaps, modern science tells us that the world is not a flat plane supported by giant mystical elephants but is instead a boring old oblate spheroid. Bah – modern science may have given us insulin but I’d really rather think of the earth as being propped up by the whole giant elephant thing – seriously, how cool would that be? Though I wouldn’t want to be chap that had to deal with their, uhm, droppings.

Anyway, because of this whole oblate spheroid malarkey (what the hell is a oblate spheroid I wonder?) we have yet another thing to torment the honest diabetic – the time zone.

Designed to ensure half the world doesn’t remain in perpetual darkness while the other basks in sunlight during office hours, the time zone can be a real pain in the arse to the travelling diabetic if you use long-acting insulins like lantus.

I tend to put in my lantus at about 7.30pm evening – usually just before I get stuck into the trough of my evening meal and I rarely, if ever, miss it by more than an hour. Like most diabetics who have been lumbered with the pissing evile for more than a year or so, I hardly ever think about it as my internal diabetic-guardian alerts me it’s lantus time; just like my internal plaque-sentinel reminds me to clean my tusks each evening and morning.

Before I went to the USA I asked my diabetic registrar what I should do with the lantus. She sensibly and logically suggested I just keep shoving it in at UK time each day. So in New York I would bung it in at 2.30 (otherwise known as Chinese dentist time (tooth-hurty – geddit! Ha ha ha ha! Sigh…)) and in St Louis at 1.30.

Simple in theory, but surprisingly difficult in practise. It seems my diabetic-guardian remained permanently jet-lagged throughout and refused to remind me that it was lantus time and I therefore was late with quite a few injections, with my wife suddenly remembering three hours later – “shit! Have you done your lantus?” (my wife never swears of course – this is dramatic licence carefully added to this post to increase the thrill factor).

In actual fact, I didn’t really notice any wildly awful effects of such differing injection times, so maybe it didn’t matter all that much after all. But if anyone has any handy time-zone tips let us all know in the box below. And, yes, I know you pump people don’t have these problems.

Oh, finally, you’ll all be thrilled to hear that my internal plaque-sentinel kept my right with the whole oral-hygiene thing throughout.

I love the Internet. I love the fact that it can be used as an interactive broadcast medium that can bring people and communities closer together. I love the way it disseminates information, reducing fear and ignorance – shining the bright light of knowledge into every corner of the earth.

I also love it because it allows me to bore the hell out of hundreds of people by showing them my holiday photos. Yay!

Yes, joyous readers, I’m back from our sojourn to the United States with a whole metric tonne of new articles ready for your reading enjoyment – don’t ever say I’m not good to you.

So once my work backlog of fifteen million emails has been cleared I’ll start posting them up along with Alison’s article goodness. It’s gonna be a summer of diabetes-blogging-bonanza! Rrrrraaaagh!

In the meantime you can content yourself with the lovely new poll system over on the right hand side there. Through the medium of graphs Alison and I will be keeping our collective fingers on the pulse of the diabetes universe through insightful and penetrating questions. Well, either that or we’ll use it for distributing more pointless whimsy.

Tim is still on his hols which means I’m still dreaming about holidays and reminiscing happily about previous travel adventures.The honest one and the shifty one at the Top of the Rock

Tim and Katie are spending some time in New York so I wanted to offer them a bit of advice. When we went to the big apple we decided to go up to the top of the Rockefeller Centre for a view of the city.

Security was understandably tight with bags being x-rayed and people walking through metal detectors. As usual, the husband was virtually strip searched (he must have a shifty look about him). I started to walk through the metal detector when they spotted my pump.

We went through the usual routine. The security guard politely asked me to remove my cell phone. I explained it was an insulin pump. He asked me to “step this way please madam”. I was expecting to be manually searched but he just walked me round the back of the metal detector and waved me through, no metal detector, no search, nothing.

Security check over.

So I then got to stand there for the next 5 minutes while the husband was interrogated and searched. It appears the easiest way to get to the top of the Rockefeller Centre is to be a diabetic with an honest face and a shifty looking husband!

In the immortal words of Sir Cliff Richard OBE:

We’re all going on a summer holiday
No more worries for a week or two
Fun and laughter on a summer holiday
No more worries for me and you
For a week or two

Yes, I’m leaving all you lovely readers to the tender mercies of Alison, while Katie and I disappear off to the United States of America for two-and-a-half week’s holiday.

Among other places I’ll be spending a week in sunny Manhattan. Just remember, my American chums, that if it wasn’t for the British, New York would still be New Amsterdam and you’d all be speaking Dutch. Ha!

Holland is of course a wonderful place and the Dutch a liberal, enlightened and intelligent nation with a cracking selection of beers. So, in reflection, sorry about that New Yorkers – if you’d stuck with the Dutch, life would have been so much better. I apologise.

Anyway, if I’m not shot by airport security for trying to smuggle small capsules of liquid and needles into the country in my hand-luggage and don’t succumb to swine fever, I’ll see you all back here in few weeks. Ta ta!