BUM PANCREAS MOMENT #79657435205

Every day has those moments, doesn't it?

After 33 years of being a Type 1 diabetic, every day usually has several moments. Or more.

Today's turned out to be this: that moment you're hypo (low blood sugar) so you neck a bit of sugar (for me these days, that's usually dates, rather than jelly babies) to bring you back into the land of the living.

Then you've got Rita (my blood glucose meter, paired as a handset with Humph, my insulin pump) shrieking and clanging her "ooh, look at me with my smartphone ringtones" fifteen minutes later, nagging you to retest, before you've had chance to recover or wash your pin-cushion fingertips after the sugar-fix imput!

So then, Rita all like:

"Oh, my stars! You're 17.8! Hyper alert!"

even though you're still hypo and drunkenly trying to type an explanation on her miniscule internal keyboard:

"Not hyper - just sugary fingertips after hypo" just so Reet won't record it as a true record and dob you in wrongly to the endocrinologist at the next diabetic review!

That!

As you were!

Humph the insulin pump and Rita the glucose meter,
when they were new and Rita was still
wearing her glam screen  protector!

PUMP ASSAULT AND BATTERY LIFE

Don't panic! Don't panic, pumper! Oh, wait...you weren't panicking, were you?

What a daft and daffy crazy world we live in.

Received an email from my insulin pump manufacturer today. About the insulin pump I've had connected to my Type 1 body for the last ten months, replacing the pump I wore for several years before that. Humph, he's called. Humph the pump, and the blood glucose meter/handset Humph's paired with is Rita. Rita the Meter. I know, I know. I'm a fine one to talk about it being a crazy world.

It's just that this email, with all that red lettering, alarmist klaxons blaring, sirens shrilling, kind of got my heart hammering. Before I had chance to read it, that is.

Was I in mortal danger of imminent pump-tastrophe? Was Humph starting to interfere with the gravitational pull of the Moon? Was Rita's Bluetooth deflecting the flight-paths of aircraft passing overhead and threatening national security? Was some emergency menacing my health or the state of the nation? Not quite.

The email's just telling me, in over-the-top watch-my-lips detail, that I can - *drum roll*- extend my battery life. How? By using only lithium AAA batteries of a certain brand. The very batteries that are the only ones available from the pump company. The only ones they issue with the rest of the pump supplies like cartridges and cannulas.

So I climbed back down off the ceiling, took off my tin hat and got back to what I was doing before my inbox exploded with scarlet scaremongery.

Of course, as an insulin pumper I need to understand the risk of dodgy batteries. Their sudden failure might well put my life at risk. But it's a bit late to tell me after such a long time. Plus, this is the same advice given by the company when the pump was first "fitted" at the hospital. Nothing to see here.

A single battery lasts me anywhere between 32-37 days before I notice any deterioration in performance. I usually change it when Humph and/or Rita start nagging me that battery charge has fallen to 85 or 90%. Any longer and I'm likely to realise my blood sugars are inching up towards double figures (in UK mmol/L) until the penny drops that I've forgotten I need to change the battery. Not recommended, but common sense wins the day. Rita's battery's rechargeable, flattering her self-image as a kind of tardy budget smartphone with added buffering while she calculates bolus amounts. Maybe one day Humph can go a bit more green as well!

In the body of the email, I discover that in spite of purporting to want to help me maximise battery life, they insist in bold that:

It is vital to change the lithium battery every 2 weeks, regardless of the battery indicator.

So I'm supposed to discard the battery, then, when it's only half exhausted.

I'm supposed to waste, not maximise, these non-rechargeable resources.

What's the point of the sophisticated battery indicator in the first place?

The battery indicator was the one thing I was most delighted about with this pump. The previous one, my first, didn't have that. It was all guess work, and no terror-alert emails back then, either!

What was I saying about it being a crazy world? Humph and Rita wholeheartedly agree!

BMI - Blooming Mental Imagery

After 3 months I've shed the 3 and a half stones(about 22 kg) I had put on pound by pound after I collapsed with ME/CFS in October 2005. 

I voluntarily attended a diabetes type 1 half day course on "Carbohydrate Counting and Insulin Adjustment", a kind of mini "DAFNE (Dose Adjustment for Normal Eating)  at my local hospital. It was as if, in between the plastic fruit and veg and the toe-curling insights into the hopelessness of diabetic "control" for the last 25 years, someone had finally handed me the keys to the kingdom.

I came home and never looked back. No more hurried falsifying of my glucose test results  before attending diabetic clinic. No more mad swings up and down between giggling hypo and treacle swimming hyperglycaemia. No more looking in the mirror and seeing this michelin tyre imprisoned woman I no longer recognised as me.

My long acting basal insulin, that I previously thought as useless as injecting water, was reduced from 60+ units each day to only 18, split morning and evening. My bolus dose before meals that had been an erratic 24-12-18 is now, according to my personal insulin-to-carb-ratio (ICR), just 2 units per 10g carbs consumed. Instead of constantly battling to eat enough carbs and sugar to prevent myself falling into hypoglycaemia, I now eat much less carb without actually "low-carbing". That means between 2-5 units at breakfast, depending on whether I've eaten fruit or a serving of muesli. My new high-tech kitchen scales are a positive joy to help me work out instantly what I'll need to inject. Lunch, if I'm having a vegetable stir fry with some protein like my favourite oily fish, seafood or soya, can mean no insulin at all, as the tyrant carbohydrate doesn' demand it! I never feel hungry between meals, so I'm blessed by not craving snacks, so evening meal, of fruit, crackers, hummous, soup or whatever, only needs up to 8 units max, or, for a treat, unbattered cod with 125g chips on a Friday from our unbelievably excellent local chippie! Then that's 10 units (2 units for each of the 5 carb portions in those chips).

A former chocoholic, I can still completely acknowledge and understand the cravings and binges that haunted me since childhood. But now I can have one square of my favourite choc when my sugar dips into hypo (I rarely get hypo symptoms till I'm dithering about at 1.7!) instead of caving in to the compulsion to finish the lot. My glucose levels and insulin levels are now generally in the range a non-diabetic would enjoy, apart from the usual "unexplained" monthly hormonal dips when my woman's bod throws a wobbly. Same time as those carb cravings and sugar fantasies kick in worst, no coincidence! But with less insulin and less sugary "compensation", the peaks and troughs are much better ironed out now.

So now it's charity shop crawls to buy some smaller sized clothing (luckily I still have some smaller sizes from before I put on the weight through illness.) I tracked my weight loss smugly on one of those online "tickers" you can link to your homepage, and labelled mine "Getting me back from M.E".

So that's the diabetes "Big D" caged and warmly patted on the head for me, after a quarter of a century.  Just the ME to put back in the box now, and believe me, I've got it in my curvilicious sights!