Olympic* diabetes

Trying to find a copyright-free Olympic-related image is not easy

Hurrah! It’s the start of the Olympics* – that great celebration of sport and stuff that we all know and love. Unless you’re British. Us Brits love to moan and groan about stuff. We’re not happy unless we can have a good old bitch. And we love to bitch about the Olympics.

I for one, however, love the Olympics. I think they’re great for reasons I won’t bore you with here. In fact, the only Olympic thing I don’t like is Olympian Sir Steve Redgrave who once promised to do an interview for your very own soaraway Shoot Up and then didn’t reply when I sent him a list of questions. What a cad, eh?

Anyway, I thought I’d better shoe-horn an article about diabetes into an Olympic theme; so I thought about all those gold medal winning diabetes moments:

• Testing your blood glucose after a difficult meal – a massive buffet, say – and getting a spot on result of 6.0
• Finding your A1C is much improved with little or no extra effort
• Doing a set change and noting your pump has full insulin and full battery. Easy to do but strangely satisfying
• Getting blood glucose results between 5.0 and 7.0 all day – from morning until bedtime
• Explaining to someone the differences between Type One and Type Two and them understanding it first time
• Going for a long bike ride without crashing blood glucose
• Reaching for your BG monitor and finding it isn’t in the other room
• Treating a hypo and finding the next five Fruit Pastilles in the pack are all black ones!

In my experience, much like the Olympics themselves, any one of these great things only seems to happen to me every four years or so. So looking forward to Rio 2016! Huzzah!

* I’ve made lots of references to the Olympic games in this article; as I’m based in the United Kingdom this potentially breaches not one, but two, Acts of Parliament, namely the Olympic Symbol etc (Protection) Act 1995 and the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006. The British Olympic Association also has a trademark for the word mark LONDON 2012 (number 2359105) which it licenses to The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Limited (“LOCOG”). There’s also a European Community trademark (number 3422921) for the word mark LONDON 2012. However, this one is registered by the International Olympic Committee and is, again, used by LOCOG under licence. However my potential misuse of the Olympic terms doesn’t really bother me because I know that those hardworking and talented men and women in LOCOG’s brand protection team have considerably bigger fish to fry at the moment. By the way, well done if you actually read this footnote all the way through.