When I first heard of circadian rhythms I thought they were an electronic pop band from Manchester.
I then went on to imagine that they had a string of modestly successful hits during the late eighties and early nineties but split after irreconcilable creative differences opened up between the lead singer and the bass player who founded the band in the first place. After years of acrimony over unpaid royalists the members of the band (aside from the drummer, who died after a drugs overdose in 1997) reformed and had a successful reunion tour and an appearance on Later with Jools Holland.
It turns out, however, that my assumptions were wrong.
When I was first diagnosed with diabetes I was taught all about carbohydrate counting and adjusting the amount of insulin I stuck in compared to the amount of carbs I stuffed down my gullet. It all seemed pretty logical to me. So off I went, carefully weighing my cereal in the morning and looking up the carbohydrate content of my pasta in the evening.
With Joan, my diabetic nurse, we worked out that 1 unit per 8 ¾ grams of carbohydrate was good for me. I don’t think it was actually that amount but I remember it was something equally impossible to workout without a handy Cray supercomputer around.Even with my methodical carb counting I still couldn’t get stable levels. In the morning I was far too high and in the evening I was just about right, but tending towards lows. How annoying. At first I thought I wasn’t being accurate enough, so I weighed and measured with aerospace tolerances of accuracy. Orange juice measured out to the nearest picolitre (whatever a picolitre is) and allowing for ;