Quiet – personified?
Avid readers of your soaraway Shoot Up will be disappointed to hear that I’ve suffered from no major diabetic disasters in the last few weeks.
No, nothing much has happened. I’ve suffered no major hypos, no major hypers, no problems with injections, no problems with blindness or creeping neuropathy leading to limbs rotting off and leaving me with only suppurating stumps.
In fact, the majority of my BG readings for the past few weeks have been in the mid single-digits despite doing a tonne of strenuous DIY, gardening, as well as dealing with all the general trials and tribulations of everyday life. I suspect that now that I’ve said this the “curse of the pancreas” will strike and I’ll have a fortnight of highs and lows, the graph of which will look like a cross section of an insane engineer’s frenzied roller-coaster.
That minor point aside, I’m therefore going to use this article to celebrate the dullness of just getting it right, something which a sizeable majority of us do every day. Go us!
Fickle bunch us pancreatically challenged persons… Damned for when go all hay wire and damned when we got it spot on..
Well done for just, getting it right.. Yay! 🙂
@mikeinspain – definitely damned when we get it right. It perversely amuses me when people are “told off” by their doctor for having too low an A1C. *sigh* you cannae win!
What did it feel like to told off for having a A1C that was to low? I yet to experience this often forgotten phenomenon! 🙂
@Tim – If you win with one, you lose with another – last HbA1C I had the consultant said ‘great, coming down nicely!’ followed by a week later by my GP’s practice nurse saying ‘Oh, thats way too high. You need to sort that out.’ (It was 7.2, by the way. I am studiously ignoring what the practise nurse says from now on.)
I agree Annette. I would certainly value the comments made by a DSN/Consultant over a Practice Nurse. I think that it is great for a Practice Nurse to deal with Diabetes but would imagine that the majority of patients will have Type 2 and the information/training involved is not really gonna be up to scratch now a days. IMHO!
At least DSN’s have actually made it a career choice to work with diabetes..
Lovely. I once gave in to the letters from my GP to come and see the local nurse. Must have been bored one morning. Well, just before she tickled my feet, she really told me off for 8.1 mmols on her finger prick test.
I tried to explain that I just had breakfast 15 mins before; no luck. Haven’t been back since.
@mikeinspain @annette – I’ve never actually been told off for having too low an A1C (my lowest, for reference, was 6.0%). For a start, I’d like to see someone try to tell me off 🙂
yeah I have tried on many occasions without success. But they say if at first you don’t succeed, try again.
@katie – I’ve told you before, beloved wife, that you are the only person I’m truly frightened of 😉
@mikeinspain – I agree, lots of practice nurses and indeed GPs are too generalist to know anything useful about diabetes. Which is fair enough – it’s not their job to specialise in diabetes (if it was they would be DSNs)!
@Tim, @mikeinspain – I’ve always been lucky in that I’ve ended up with GPs who are the local specialists in diabetes, but the practice nurses have been something else. Its not that I mind they don’t have the specialist knowledge – no-one can know everything [but see below] – but the fact that they think they do! [I still remember a DSN, back in the days when they weren’t called that, telling me that I probably knew more than they did. I was about 18, so of course I agreed with her – this was when I did know everything 🙂 ]
An HbA1c of 7.2 sounds pretty good to me, but then, I haven’t got a clue what a ‘normal’ HbA1c should be. Mine was 7.2 the on the last test, but on the test before it was 10.something, and my DSN was lavish in her praise of the reduced level. Somehow, I can’t see her telling me off for it being too low, but stranger things have happened at sea… 😉
Diabetes UK, he say A1C should be under 6.5. I just manage that as someone who borders on obsessive compulsion, so hmm…
http://diabetes.org.uk/Guide-to-diabetes/Treatment__your_health/Monitoring/Blood_glucose/Glycated_haemoglobin_HbA1c_and_fructosamine/
Bugger! That takes today’s Mars Bar off the menu… 😉