Do I fail now?

When I was diagnosed, I got my A1C down into the 5's really quickly. I've always been a perfectionist. But perfectionism has its down side. I had no leeway. I'd go low at the drop of a hat. I started to lose my hypo awareness, and that is a lifesaver. What's the point of living with no complications if I go from a hypo in the middle of the night?

So I started to back off. Luckily for me, my hypo awareness comes back as easily as it goes. My A1C went up a little, still in the 5's. My wild blood sugar swings and severe lows stablized a bit.

Then, after a few scary lows in the middle of the night, I vowed that I would pay out of pocket for sensors. I love my sensor. I love the feeling that I have a fall-back, that I know how my blood sugar is trending.

My sensor has also allowed me to be aggressive with corrections, to eat more normally (within reason), and to exercise in a planned and well-structured way. It's also raised my A1C to 6, for the last 9 months.

People with type 1 are supposed to keep an A1C under 7 to reduce the risk of complications. The mid-5's are considered too low by many doctors - unless you're able to do this without a lot of major lows. I am very insulin-sensitive, and stress, hormones and exercise mess with my blood sugar a lot. It's hard to achieve the mid-5's with few lows.

So I've worked with the sensor to shift my blood sugar up a little, to reduce extreme lows and highs. Standard deviation of your blood sugar is almost as important as your A1C, apparently. The smaller the swings, the better.

On the sensor, I swing less but I have a higher average. And I don't like it. In the 5's I felt so perfect, like I'd figured it all out and would have diabetes beat. At 6, I feel like one of many imperfect people, even though I know it's more healthy and my doctors commend me on my excellent control.

I guess that my inner perfectionist from high school - the gal who got straight A's - she hasn't been banished after all. I'll continue to be sensible and work on stablizing blood sugar, but dang...wouldn't I like to see those 5's again.

Icky ick ick ick

I am getting so sick of jellybeans. Use the dratted things to tweak my blood sugar when I'm out and about. They keep well, work almost instantly, and they don't taste that bad.

But boy, I am sick of them. And I can't bear to think of the percentage of my daily caloric intake that is ... jellybeans. Organic food. Free-range food. Local food and ... jellybeans.

I've switched to organic raisins for a while, but they travel poorly and for some reason, they just don't work fast enough for me. I've tried dates, raisins, juice as alternatives. Only sugary candy has ever seemed to work, and jellybeans are a somewhat tasty and cheap sugary candy. But blech.

Juice works, but those little tetra packs are expensive. And I can't stand the garbage/recycling I am creating.

I'm not willing to give up the freedom to choose to go for a spontaneous walk, so here I am, eating jellybeans with the best of them.


Blech.

The little movie that could

Love, love, love this youtube video. I'm archiving it here so that I can finally delete it from my inbox. Stick with it until the end.

Oh, and...

Can I just mention that hearing my three-year-old take her toy pump, push buttons, and say that she is giving herself insulin somewhat creeps me out?

I know that she's grown up with this, but I wish that insulin was not a word in her vocabulary.

Swimming and other scares

I made the night of the lifeguard last Tuesday night.
No, I didn't nearly drown or anything. Just mentioned to her as I left that I am going to be swimming every Tuesday night and that I have type 1 diabetes. I think that I saw her Tuesday nights go down the tubes. Ah, well.

Overall, swimming is working. I'm able to sneak out after dd is asleep, remove my pump, check BG, get into swimsuit, drive 10 minutes, swim for 45, wash, rinse, and do everything backwards.

My main barrier to swimming was the fact that my bleeping pump is not waterproof. I don't want to leave it in the pool locker. It looks like a nice little device for someone to steal. I don't particularly enjoy leaving it on my bag on the pool deck, either. So I leave it at home.

The only reason I can do this is because my insulin from dinner is still working, so there's no chance of my going extremely high while I'm at the pool. It's when I get home that I'm apt to hit 200+. So I've been bolusing with a needle right after I get out. When I get home, BG is already heading down.

Except that the other night I whipped out the needle a bit too quickly, just as someone walked into the room. I wandered into the change room to do my shot.

Yeah, I know, I should proudly wave my needle about and shout "I have diabetes! Hear me roar!" above the din in the pool. But honestly, the prospect of explaining said needle at 10 pm when I'm trying to get home to bed and to my kid is just too much to want to deal with.

Everyone Else

I don't want to be like everyone else.

This in response to a comment on an email list I'm on - are type 1 diabetic folks like everyone else? The point was that people with type 1 are NOT like everyone else - they may have kidney disease, poor eyesight, mental difficulties from blood sugar excursions.

I think that this is an important response to the "people with diseases and disabilities are just like all of the normal people" argument. Of course I'm a normal person. I parent my child, I go to work, I make food, I eat food, I agonize over personal relationships, I attempt to balance my accounts and still have some treats in my life.

Yes, I will likely run into diabetes-related complications that make my life more complex. I do now. When I have to sit down on the floor of the library with my daughter and read books because I'll fall over if I stand up, that's a complication of diabetes right there. And when she yells at me to get up because she doesn't want to sit there - and I explain that we have to wait - and everyone looks at me like I'm a nut - that's a complication right there too. And when I need to say that we can't go for an unplanned walk right after breakfast because she said that she didn't want to and I've already taken my insulin - that's another complication.

But I digress entirely. Ranty rant rant.

What I meant to say was that having diabetes has made me recognize that complications ARE normal. Most people I know have complications. One had breast cancer, another has MS. Another is a caregiver for a spouse, another has a spouse who's left the family struggling. All of these things make our lives more challenging and more complex.

Complications are a huge part of most peoples' lives. Sure, some of us might live charmed lives. But as we grow older, our health and our family situation and our lives in general tend to create situations that can be mentally and physically painful.

So despite the fact that I don't want to be a normal person, I am. Complexity is normal, and type 1 diabetes is just one part of the complexity is my life. I accept that, as I accept that others have their own complications - and I hope that they support me through mine as I try to support them through theirs.

Eye Spy

My daughter was making a pretend bed the other day, and she made sure that she laid out her jellybeans. We cosleep, and yes...there are jellybeans beside my bed.

Other exciting goodies beside the bed include:
* Said jellybeans, for middle of the night lows.
* Extra glasses that I wear at night so I can see my pump
* Xylitol gum, just in case I can't brush after jellybeans
* Toothbrush and paste
* Extra pump battery and pump site and alcohol wipes, for middle of the night site failures.
* Flashlight, so I can change my pump site in the middle of the night without getting up.
* Test kit (finger poker and metre) so I can cross-check with my sensor or calibrate it at night.

Fun times! A bedside table is definitely on the want list.

Midnight (ok, 3 am) madness

I'm turning into the person who turns off her alarm clock, rolls over, and forgets about going to work until 10 am.

Except that's what I'm doing with my pump alarms.

My sensor settings are set quite tight, so I deal with a fair number of alarms during the day. At night, when I hear the alarm I wake up, I deal with my blood sugar, I go back to sleep. At least I think I do.

What sometimes happens is that I wake up, I fall back to sleep and I DREAM that I've dealt with my blood sugar. Then I wake up low.

Yikes!

In an effort to outsmart my sleeping self, I now wear tight shirts to bed, stick the pump under the shoulder part of the shirt, and voila - annoying pump alarming next to my ear to wake me up.

Except last night, my site came out as I slept. Without a sensor, I would have woken up vomiting and in DKA. Fun all around. With the sensor, I finally woke to my blood sugar creeping up. Luckily, the site had only been out for about an hour - according to my blood sugar records.

This has never happened before. I suspect that while I vigorously returned the heavy covers to dd, my pump slipped from my shirt and I threw it over dd. She moved, and the site pulled out.

Or did it?

Other option: I knew that I needed to change my site this morning. I set out everything to do it before I went to sleep, so I would remember in the morning (today was a busy day). Could I have possible tried to change my site in my sleep...and woken to a site removed?

Yikes.

Ok, I'm switching my site-changing time to right before dinner. Next step in my plan to outwit myself.

Eyeballs from outer space

I rarely feel like a freak because of my diabetes. Not that people don't notice the pump - they just think it's a pager/mp3 player with a cool cord.

But dd is in preschool now, and as a parent in a participation preschool, they needed my medical info too.

So what will happen if you have a problem with your diabetes?

Well, I don't know. I have never been so out of it that I've passed out...or couldn't help myself. But if I sit and stare at the wall for a while or fall to the floor, um...check to see if I respond, then call 911.

That's what's on the preschool wall chart. Might sit and stare at wall. And everyone gets to see it all of the time. Freakity freak freak.

Of course, I might just sit and stare at the wall on a tired day, just to see what everyone does. Grin.

Things I've been thinking about

Ok, so maybe I do need to blog after all.

Things I have been working on:
Actually hearing the bleeping (literally bleeping) sensor when I'm asleep. If I can't hear the low alarm, what's the point of the sensor system?

If my pump is in my pocket or in the bed, there is NO WAY I can hear it.

Now I sleep on my back with the pump tucked into a shirt, close to my shoulder and close to my ear. It still catches the signal from the sensor on my thigh, but it's close enough to my ear that I can hear it at night.

The weird things we do.

On another note:
Yesterday dd and I were playing "hospital" in the front area. Well, I was unwillingly being forced into playing hospital, more like it.

Her pump broke.

You see, I've always told dd that she has a pump inside her. My pump inside me doesn't work, so I have a pump outside me.

So she had to go to the hospital and have a poke, and then we decided that she needed a pump outside her. Much was made of the potential colour of the pump, and she finally decided that if it couldn't be green or red it was going to be purple.

And so goes our odd world we've created.

Pizza - will it come back to bite me?

Corny, corny.

After three years of random acts of pizza and regret, I think...I hope...that I may have learned how to live with pizza at dinner time.

This summer, we visited friends and got pizza for dinner. It was GOOD pizza. I can't eat 1 slice of good pizza. That is pizza torture. I have to eat at least two slices, maybe three. But I am afraid. Afraid of the evils of the low blood sugar right after eating, afraid of the great sneaky rise in blood sugar in the wee hours of the morning.

My official sources tell me that pizza slices have 25-35 carbs per slices. That is hooey. So I bolused 40-50 grams per slices, with a grand total of 150 grams of carbs for the meal. Ack!

I usually divide my dinner insulin 50/50 over three hours in a dual wave bolus. This is one of the reasons I need a pump - to make sure I don't go crushingly low right after dinner.

So for pizza, I divided it by 35/65 over four hours, corrected a little at two hours, and sailed through the night with a minor correction at 3 am.

Repeatable?

I did repeat it once again over the summer, to similar success. Now, 150g of carbs is still a whack-o-carbs to be going to bed on. I wouldn't do it without my sensor to guide me and warn me to pending lows. But it did work - twice - and I am considering eating pizza again.

Now ain't that a radical thought?

Lonely, so lonely

Yep, my blog was lonely for a good long time. In fact, I abandoned it. But popular demand (ok, two people asking) has led to the rebirth of the blog. I don't promise any wildly great writing, though, ok?

So the marathon went...slowly! Don't ask. It was wet, it was cold, it was very wet and very cold. But people who do slow marathons are oh so cool. I chatted with a lot of people, including one woman from Iceland who said that Team Diabetes folk always inspire her. According to her, we're real people who run, not good runners, but just people. Who run. Yep, that's me.

Finishing the marathon - I was elated, but sadly my finishing pics don't show that. I didn't see the camera until it was too late. My favourite one was taken in my sexy garbage bag (rain gear) with dd. She missed my finish - she'd been waiting for 20 minutes for me, and she needed to pee. Sigh. After the marathon we partied hard for two hours on the streets, going around to all of the different artsy culture night street events. Then we collapsed, very, very tired.

So now I'm back. I did the Coho Run in September in a rather decent time for me, 1:22 for 14 km. I've slacked off the last couple of weeks, and I need to get those long runs in on the weekends. I'm attempting to work biking and swimming into the program, but the swimming freaks me out. I love, love, love swimming. I have to take off my pump to do it, though, and that makes me a tad neurotic. And the only time I can swim is after dd is asleep, which means that I swim while dinner time insulin is still in my system. Which means that I am going to have to drink a bleeping great lot of juice just to go for a swim, then get neurotic that I'm still going to go low. Loads of fun. Wonder why I am less than motivated.

My current thought: eggs for dinner. Every Tuesday we will eat low carb omlettes. Then I will have almost no insulin going on from dinner, and so I will have to drink less juice, and life will be happpppppeeeeee. Right? Hmmmmmm.

See, no one should have invited me back to this here blogosphere again. Ranty ranty rant.

Grin.

Good night.