The annual toe tickle

I went for my annual diabetic toe tickle last week. This follows a similar routine every year. I walk in, the chiropodist does a double take and says “Oh, hello, they’re normally a lot older than you!”. I take this to mean he doesn’t see too many sprightly type 1’s. I also dread the day that he doesn’t say that when he sees me, that’s when I’ll know old age has arrived.

The torture commences with the vibrating tuning fork on the toe. At which point I shriek and the chiropodist says he normally asks people if they can feel that, but he guesses by my outburst that I can. He then brings a bit of reality into play by telling me that the man he had in before me couldn’t feel anything when he did that. That’s quite a terrifying thought, it really wasn’t a gentle touch, it was like a hundred mice tickling the end of my toe and running up my leg. To not be able to feel that because of the broken pancreas is quite a scary thought.

Once my heart rate had returned to normal following the foot vibration excitement, I tried not to be ticklish while we did the “If I poke here can you feel it” routine. Thankfully, my feet remain ticklish as ever and are confirmed as still being attached to the end of my legs and working for another year.

As the foot man sorted his paperwork at the end, he asked the standard “How is your diabetes” question and I resisted giving some of my fantasy answers because he was a nice man and I didn’t want to scare him. Then he asked how my diabetes was treated. I told him I had a pump and his face lit up. Apparently he went to a meeting the other day where a professor from the local teaching hospital was talking about some fancy new diabetes treatment that might be available soon. I feigned interest. Conversations that start like this normally end up with me being cured by eating curried lentils and cucumber whilst standing on my head twice a day or some such rubbish. But no oh great cynical one, it turns out the fancy new tech is a pump with something called a continuous glucose monitor attached! I said, oh yes, they’re great, I’ve got one. Mr foot man said “oh no, these are very new, you wear a sensor under your skin and it transmits your glucose levels to your pump”. There was nothing for it, I whipped up my top and showed him my sensor. He said “That’s it!” I said, “I know, I’ve had it for 4 years, it’s marvellous”.

What I didn’t tell him was that the professor he was talking about was the one who tried to tell my PCT four years ago that CGM was no good, despite never having used it on a patient himself. It’s nice to know he’s changed his mind eventually!