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.