Shoot Up or Put Up

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Even more selfless diabetes travel research

26 June, 2012 in Living with diabetes, travel

Wearing multiple layers to hike on a glacier means you needn’t worry about where to hide your pump. Actually finding your pump amongst the layers is a completely different challenge.

As I continue to dedicate myself selflessly to the diabetes research agenda, I have just completed another research field trip. This time I investigated the impact of travel on diabetes in the Canadian Rockies and Alaska. Key learnings include:

• When you’re wearing thermal underwear, two layers of clothes, waterproofs and a life jacket while sitting in a kayak with a cover over you so you can’t access anything below your ribs, finding somewhere to keep your pump so you can actually reach it is a bit of a pain. The solution involves sticking it in your cleavage (which is also where you’re storing your binoculars to keep them to hand but out of the rain) and unzipping your life jacket when you need to access it. Brighter diabetics would remember to take longer pump tubing with them to avoid the need for contortionist type activity simply to bolus.

• Cameras can survive a glucogel/pocket explosion, but brighter diabetics would keep the two things in separate pockets in future.

• Altitude cures diabetes. When driving the Icefields Parkway at an altitude of around 6,500 ft, despite doing more driving than walking, I needed minimal insulin and maximum fruit pastilles. Thankfully the husband was driving or it would have taken us weeks if we’d have had to stop for every low.

• Pumps will always bring amusement to any dining situation. As I bolused while chatting with a lovely couple from New York, one of them said to me, with a straight face “Oh, are you charging that?”. I love the idea that I might have a power socket in my belly button through which I can charge all my electronic devices!

Tags: travel 9 Comments »

by Tim

The Security Sweepstake

18 April, 2012 in travel

An Airbus A319-111 in easyJet livery and needless pictorial filler

Tomorrow I’m flying to France. (To clarify for the benefit of our many pedantic readers, technically I’m not going to be the one doing the flying, I’ll be sitting on an aircraft (probably an Airbus A320) which will be the one doing the flying. I have a few talents but the ability to soar through the air (unless thrown from a cliff) is not one of them).

Anyway, pedantry aside, I’ll be flying to France from Edinburgh via Bristol and then back again on Monday. This means going through four sets of airport security in as many days. Therefore I’m organising a minor security sweepstake. A massive prize* will be awarded to anyone who guesses how many times I will be stopped by security as a result of carrying a tonne of the usual diabetes paraphernalia.

It really does vary. Most of the time I wander through security with nary a glance from the people behind the scanners, despite being loaded down with sharps and mysterious bottles of clear liquid. Either they see diabetic kit everyday and just ignore my stuff as they know exactly what it is, or security at British airports is really lax. I’m never quite sure which it is – hopefully the former.

However, there have been other times I’ve been stopped and searched, had my pump swabbed ad suspicious questions asked. Needless to say I don’t really mind. Compared to flying to Belfast in the 1980′s (which I did as an ‘unaccompanied minor’) security nowadays is lovely. I have happy memories of being interviewed each and every time I flew the Heathrow / Aldergrove route by Special Branch (they did this to every passenger to Belfast – it wasn’t just me) and being asked the reason for my visit, who I was staying with, etc. Given I was a ten year old school boy I’m still not sure what threat I posed. But there we are.

I’ve only been stopped once at Edinburgh, most times at Bristol airport and never at Toulouse so the sweepstake is wide open. Let betting commence!

* there isn’t actually a prize.

Tags: flying, security, travel 9 Comments »

by Alison

Diabetes and holidays – more selfless research

5 April, 2011 in travel

: Pretty Majorcan mountain

I’m back! Although from the looks of things you’ve been getting along quite nicely with Tim while I’ve been away. I’ve never seen so many comments, it’s fantastic!

I’ve been hiking in Majorca with the husband for a week. I’m assured that the pain in my thighs is due to too many hills rather than an unexpected diabetes complication so hopefully the aches will subside shortly and just fond memories will remain.

I’m thinking up a scheme where diabetics should be able to reclaim the VAT on holidays as they aren’t actually holidays, they’re health education programmes where you learn to cope with your diabetes in a foreign environment. Because of this, I need to document what I’ve learnt on my holiday to prove it was of genuine medical benefit. Previous sailing trips have been instructive, and I believe my learnings about the relationship between leopard tracking and hypos will one day be given the recognition they so truly deserve. So bear with me while I document the insights I gained about diabetes in the Majorcan mountains.

Sorry to start on a bit of a downer but…

Diabetes can be a complete bitch. While this certainly isn’t news, there are times when it’s sometimes a bit more of a bitch than others. Like when you have breakfast, then – because Spanish bus drivers seem to need a fag break every 10 minutes and not one single German ever has their money ready to pay the driver when they get on the bus - it takes much longer than planned to get a bus to where you want to start your walk. By which time you’re 17 because you’d reduced your basal and only bolused for half of breakfast because you’re planning to spend the day trekking up hills and would rather do it without the hypos. So now you’re grumbling about diabetes to your beleaguered husband halfway up a beautiful Majorican mountain rather than just enjoying the view. Eventually you climb enough hills and it all settles down and you end the walk as a 7, without having inhaled dangerous quantities of fruit pastilles. Nothing dramatic, just bloody irritating, arghh!

On a happier note…

Dear oranges...I'm sorry, not all of your juice is evil

Proper fresh orange juice isn’t evil. I avoid fresh orange juice because to me, it’s just rocket fuel in a carton. Even if I bolus 3 hours early and am virtually hypo by the time I drink it, I can guarantee the spike from carton orange juice will be stratospheric. Where we were walking, the orange trees were laden with fruit and the hotel had a nifty little juicer thingy where you could squeeze your own orange juice. It looked too tasty to resist so I approached cautiously with a fully loaded pump. And the gracious diabetes gods smiled down and every day I squeezed my own orange juice, bolused just a little more than I would for 2 oranges and rose gently and controllably without any jet propelled assistance. I apologise wholeheartedly to orange juice, I have regularly cursed you and besmirched your name as the root of all diabetes evil. It appears the stuff sold in supermarkets in cardboard containers is your evil twin. The real stuff straight from the orange is really jolly nice.

And finally…

Segways - so much fun there must be a diabetes link somewhere

Segways are an essential diabetes tool (this may be slightly untrue).

If my diabetic-holiday-VAT-reclaim scheme doesn’t come to fruition, my next campaign will be for all diabetics to be given access to a free Segway. Even I am struggling to think of a pseudo-legitimate reason why this should be the case, but we had such a good time haring round Palma on them for a couple of hours, I find it hard to believe there isn’t some form of health benefit to be derived from the uplift in spirits they provide.

Does anyone else have any important holiday based diabetes learning that we can use to develop the case for VAT free holidays for the pancreatically challenged?

Tags: holidays, travel 19 Comments »

by Alison

Things I learned on holiday

26 August, 2010 in travel

I’m back. Sorry it’s been a while, there’s been a lot going on and I have shamefully neglected the blog. I did have a lovely holiday though, sailing on the Turkish coast. As ever, I learnt a few new (and not so new) pearls of wisdom about holidays with diabetes:

Lots of boats

Diabetes junk and I will never get along. No matter how many times I travel, I still get irritated by the amount of diabetes junk I have to carry. It seems doubly irritating when I realise not only is my hand luggage weighed down by diabetes junk, but I’m also carrying round a redundant organ in the shape of a pancreas that isn’t pulling it’s weight
Insulin pumps survive a dunking in sea water perfectly well when you accidentally fall out of a dinghy whilst trying to get back onto your boat. A quick rinse in fresh water and it was good as new.
I get a bit scared when a storm blows up, we’re still an hour away from where we want to get to and the waves are crashing over the boat. At this point, as you head downstairs to pull out the life jackets and harnesses, it’s not ideal for the boat to plunge down a wave and bounce you across the boat, catching your pump tubing as you fly and ripping out your infusion set. Once the husband was securely harnessed to the wheel I decided an hour without insulin would be preferable to trying to change an infusion set at sea in a gale. And no, the super quick infusion set removal didn’t hurt at all, but the bruise from crashing into the side of the boat was very impressive.
Sods law will always prevail. It’s 8am, we’re in a lovely little Turkish harbour. I’m in the cabin with my diabetes junk spread all over the place as I change my infusion set. The husband is on the loo. At that point I hear a lot of shouting as people try to tell us that some idiot has managed to pull up our anchor as they were leaving. Ten minutes later, all would have been fine. But no, all hell has to break loose when Captain Pugwash is on the loo and the crew is playing at being a pancreas.
Other sailors will always think your pump is some interesting boat gadget they’ve not seen before and will be hugely disappointed to learn it’s a life support system for the pancreatically challenged rather than a super dooper at sea navigation aid.
And finally, no matter how securely you clip the pump to your bikini bottoms, on a fortnight’s holiday on a boat you will catch the damn thing on a rope at least twice and kneecap yourself.

Other than that though, the diabetes was pretty plain sailing.

Tags: travel 14 Comments »