Diabetes and holidays – more selfless research

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?