Mission impossible?

Last weekend I had the pleasure of going along to my brother’s stag weekend in sunny Bournemouth in advance of his impending nuptials.

As well packing comedy antlers, Hawaiian shirts and inflatable sheep (I didn’t really, I actually wore a nice shirt and brown corduroy jacket) I also had to consider the diabetic aspects of such a weekend. Thinking about them made me feel like I was being given a mission impossible.

Features included:

Travel by air – the joys of airport security. Would I be strip-searched by angry security guards? No, as always, this wasn’t a problem with nary a glance at my vials of clear liquids, sharp things and deadly electronic equipment (oh, okay, a pump).

Indian restaurant and beer – carb overload on the first evening. I love a good curry with a beer or three and this particular evening was no exception with me eating my own bodyweight in pakoras, rice, popadoms and nam bread.

This was accompanied by a lot of carborific Indian beer and a spirited but ultimately pointless argument over which was the better city – London or Manhattan. If you’re interested (which I strongly suspect you’re not) I plumped for Manhattan as it has steam coming up from manhole covers. Woo!

While my blood glucose temporarily soared into the high teens shortly after the meal, the trusty dual-wave bolus eventually took care of it all and I was back to normal (blood glucose-wise) by bedtime.

It’s a Knockout – the next day saw us transported to a field to compete with other stag and hen parties in a giant It’s a Knockout competition. For those not in know, It’s a Knockout was a rather odd program from the 80’s in which grown adults threw wet sponges at each other and ran around obstacle courses in giant foam suits. I tell you, they don’t make telly like they used to. Thank God.

Anyway, exercise was involved and this was nicely taken care of by temporarily reducing my basals down by 50% or so. For the wetter and foamier games I simply took my pump off and gave it someone to look after with the instructions “guard this with your life as I need it to live!”

Drinking and dancing – after competing in a field for a few hours (our lot, “Team Awesome”, came somewhere towards the bottom of the leaderboard I’m afraid to report) we repaired to the bar, ate food and went dancing in a cheesy club. Cunningly I spat my sambuca shots out into nearby plant pots and stayed on the vodka, soda water and lime all evening – so no carb problems there.

My dancing style is, uhm, somewhat exuberant so my throwing shapes in the church of dance helped to burn off the carbs from our earlier meal. And I eventually returned to the hotel at 4am with a BG of 7.5. Good work!

So there we have it. With a modicum of thought, a bit of planning and the flexibility of the pump I got through a diabetically-difficult weekend without a scratch.

The same can’t be said, however, for the groom – who was last seen handcuffed and naked on the milk train to Aberdeen.