Need Insulin? Jabba the Hutt will deliver
My spaceship crashed on this floating island thing. Looking over the edge revealed that there might be ground millions of feet below. It was difficult to tell if my island was connected to the ground beneath it.
As I stood up and turned around I discovered that I wasn’t alone, there was a guy here on the island with me. It wasn’t but a moment before we were dueling. Grappling was more like it. There were no weapons, it was more like hand to hand combat…so yeah, grappling, not dueling.
The grappling stopped as quickly as it started. A box fell out of the sky and I caught it. Opening it revealed boxes of insulin. I looked at the guy I was fighting with and looked back at the box and looked back at him and he says “what? Jabba delivers insulin when you need it”
Low Blood Sugars and Stormtroopers
So, today, I was driving along, and I decide that I’m feeling low. Not to just say that I’m low, but because I was actually feeling that way. For someone who 99.9% of the time feel symptoms, that feeling may have been a good thing. I say may have, because I didn’t actually check my blood to see if I was truly low. That was mistake numero uno.
Mistake numero dos was when I decided that the cure for my low would be a venti chai tea and an orange cranberry scone from Starbucks. This was only a mistake because I was using it to treat a low that I never verified was there and so I didn’t take insulin for any of it because I thought I was low. And so then, 2 hrs later, I was worshipping the porcelain god because I was high. REAL HIGH! 500 to be exact. Nice high number. That number, tells me I wasn’t low when I thought I was low because had I been low, I wouldn’t have gone that high (at least, I don’t think I would’ve, you really never can tell, there’s too many factors to be sure what will happen at any given moment)
And because I was high, I was dehydrated, but because I was vomiting, no water was staying in me. And yet somehow, I was constantly having to pee. Where was that fluid coming from, there was nothing in my belly, and my bladder had to have emptied out the first time I peed. I really don’t understand how that works.
In other news, I was driving home tonight from getting some new running pants which are strangely like spandex but they’re not really spandex that I’m not sure I’ll like them, and it was dark, and I’m sitting on the east side of the street staring at a guy who’s on the west side of the street, well, not a guy, but his car, and it looked like a storm trooper, well, the head of a stormtrooper, which translates to the helmet of a stormtrooper.
I know why TK-421 wasn’t at his post. It’s because he was across the street staring at me. Stormtroopers sure do look larger in real life.
did you know
that today is thursday, which means tomorrow is friday, which means that saturday is my last training ride before El Tour de Tucson.
Thinking Towards A Diabetes Service Dog
One of the things I enjoy about housesitting is the variety of dogs I get to hang out with and go running with. My favorite is a goldendoodle named Brooklyn. She is the most precious dog. She’s lovable and loving, she just wants to be in the presence of people, she’s calm if you take her out and run with her or play with her, and in the backyard she’s as active as can be. And as a bonus, because she’s got poodle in her, she doesn’t bother my allergies and she really doesn’t shed.
She is the kind of dog that I hope I get when I get a service dog that can identify low blood sugars. In the past couple years, I’ve been doing a good deal of research to find out where I can get a service dog for a diabetic for when I move out. Being that I have no idea when my blood sugar is low and it is because of that reason that I have seizures in the middle of the night, a dog that is trained to identify low blood sugars would be a great benefit to me.
While I’ve not had a dog that’s trained to identify low blood sugars, I have had the experience of knowing how obnoxious dogs can be when I am low and they know it. I will never forget the time when I couldn’t get rid of my toy poodle dominic, he refused to leave my side, he was sitting right at my feet when I was sitting and he was right under my feet when I’d get up to walk somewhere. When I deposited him in the other room, he came and scratched at my door. It was annoying. But he knew that my blood sugar was low. And after a good 30 minutes of telling my parents to do something with him, my mom finally told me to check my blood because maybe he was trying to tell me something.
Many people have asked me if I’ve ever thought of a service dog, mainly because it’s having a dog that can detect my lows that will most likely get me over the fear that I’m going to die in the middle of the night because my blood sugar goes low and I don’t wake up and then I have a seizure at which point, I die if no ones there to give me glucagon.
I’ve done some surfing around, and every 6 months or so I do some more surfing around to see if these special dogs are becoming more readily available. I wouldn’t say that they are, but there is one site that always draws me in, and when it becomes time for me to get a diabetes service dog, I’ll most likely go with Heaven Scent Paws
Life for a Child, a Harsh Reality
Before tonight, I’d not heard about the Life for a Child project.
Before tonight, I can’t say that I’d ever thought about diabetes in other countries.
Lolo told me about this video, she got to watch it tonight. It’s not online, but the trailer is. There’s a harsh reality out there that I was oblivious to. I was completely clueless.
The video, follows the journeys of children with type 1 diabetes amid the verdant mountains and swarming streets of Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries. Lolo was telling me that the kids that will walk 4 hrs to go to the doctor, sometimes it takes 6 hours. And while they’re walking, if they go low, they don’t have glucose tabs on them, and sometimes they pass out. They don’t get to test their blood daily, they’re lucky if it gets tested when they go to the doctor, and they’re blindly taking insulin once a day. I say blindly because they don’t know what their sugars are.
I started searching on the web to see what else was out there that I didn’t know. It’s enough to at this moment make me wonder why I ever complain about things like my pump and how I hate it some days. I knew that there was a battle to get pumps and CGM from insurance companies, but my vision of the battle didn’t extend further than the US. I take so much for granted when it comes to my diabetes.
I don’t like what I’m reading in terms of what diabetics in developing countries don’t have. I don’t like these statistics that I didn’t know about.
Did you know that seven out of ten countries with the highest number of people living with diabetes are in the developing world?
Did you know that a person requiring insulin for survival in Zambia will live an average of 11 years; a person in Mali can expect to live for 30 months; in Mozambique a person requiring insulin will be dead within 12 months?
I can go on and on with the “did you knows” which really translate to “Courtney didn’t know”. It’s sad. Real real sad.
Oblivious to D-Blog Day
Before I started blogging about my diabetes, I was oblivious to the blogs of other diabetics. I had no clue that they existed, it wasn’t something that I had ever thought about or searched for. Actually, that’s a lie, I vaguely remember seeingSixUntilMe before I emerged into the Diabetic OC.
Last year, during Diabetes Awareness Month (this month, November) I missed D-Blog Day. This year, I almost missed it again, because I didn’t know about it until today when I started reading blogs this afternoon and saw entries about it.
D-Blog day was created in 2005 by Gina Capone to help unite diabetes bloggers and create awareness about diabetes. This year, I’m not sure what to say, other than there is an extensive array of diabetic bloggers out there and there are some great communities where they all unite and help each other out and band together to bring awareness of this disease.
If you ever want to see what they’re writing, I suggest checking out the headlines at Diabetes Daily (which is one community); TuDiabetes is another community; if you’re a woman with diabetes then DiabetesSisters is worth taking a look at; DiabetesFriends is another one; and there’s also Diabetic Connect.
The stuff that matters
After my attendance at diabetes training camp, I didn’t blog much about the experience that I had because along side realizations about my diabetes were realizations about my athleticism. Athleticism may not be the right word. Realizations isn’t the right word either, it’s more like confirmations. Confirmations of stuff I already knew but didn’t want to deal with. And so, I came back from camp, and filed much of what I had absorbed at camp away deep in my head to be re-visted at a different time.
It was my injured knee that probably had me most irked at camp, it was my injured knee that helped feed the monster in the time after camp, and it was my injured knee that was the first thought I re-visited after camp.
Near the end of September, after a month of not being on my bike, after a month of not running, after a month of being in pain because I’d wake up in the mornings and stretch out my bent leg, I re-visited some of the stuff that happened at camp.
Once I got over the pent up anger that I had after camp that was added to buried anger that existed before camp, I had a moment of clearness. I had a moment where what I wanted to do and the bullheadedness that I would exhibit to make sure that all I wanted to do got done was inexistent. It just wasn’t there. There was a clearness that we can’t see. My mind was wiped clean. There was nothing in it. It was like looking at a perfect sky, with the perfect shade of blue, with no clouds, no smog, no nothing, in fact, it was so clear that if you only had a glimpse at one small part of it, you wouldn’t know what it was.
Clarity. I had that.
In that moment of clarity what I realized is that I was a happy cyclist. I didn’t need anything more. And then I got offered to be on the triathlon team, and that’s when injuries came back from the past to haunt me. At camp I was told to get an MRI, that my January Marathon at Walt Disney World was no longer mine. It was ok at camp. And then I had time to come home and think, and it was very much not ok. I set my mind that I was ok with not running, that I wasn’t going to get an MRI, and that I was going to do the WDW Marathon, I was just going to walk it instead of run it.
It was in that clarity that I realized that fighting to run wasn’t worth it. I’ve had my knee injury since I was 16 and I’ve lived well with it (except in the winters when it gets cold and my knee hurts). I decided that I didn’t need that MRI and that I wouldn’t seek a second opinion. Because when I really thought about it, I didn’t need to run. I’m ok with that, and here’s why: if I got an injury while running that would make it so that I couldn’t cycle, I couldn’t live with that.
Cycling is what rescued me, it’s what gave me a reason to take good care of my diabetes, and I can’t live with not being able to cycle.
All this being said, I’m going to do an experiment on Sunday. There’s an 11k race. I know that I can walk a whole half marathon with no pain, walking isn’t an issue except that it’s not as fast as running. I’m going to see if I can fix that slowness issue. This weekend I’m going to see if it will hurt me if I throw in a little bit of running. I’m going to do 4 minute walks - 1 minute runs and see if I can make it through the 11k. This experiment is important to me because it will determine if I can run just enough to help me complete the WDW Marathon in 7 hours (I’d really hate to be pulled off the course because I couldn’t walk fast enough). But at the first sign of pain, the running will cease. I don’t have time for another injury, they hurt me in more ways than just the injury itself.
It’s that time of year again.
It’s that time of year again. Benefit enrollment time of year at work. I hate this time of year, because we just see how much less we’re going to receive and how much more we’re going to have to pay.
I must admit that I’ve been very very fortunate in the past, I’ve not lost anything as the years have gone by, but I’ve had to pay more and more, but I can justify the cost. I’d pay to be on COBRA the rest of my life if I could keep the benefits I have now, nothing can beat them that I’ve seen, and yeah, it’s costly, but like I said, I can justify the cost, and it’s well worth it.
This year, this year is different though, I’ve got to take into consideration everything. I’ve got to analyze everything. And really, everything isn’t much, I’ve got 2 plans to choose from, a low value and a high value plan. The problem with this is, the high value plan, doesn’t really offer much more than the low value plan and neither plan really benefits me. But I have no choice but to take a plan, COBRA isn’t something that exists forever.
Neither plan pays for DME (durable medical equipment), all my pump supplies are qualified as DME which leaves me up shits creek without a paddle. And the shittiest part of it is, right now, all my DME is 100% covered, I don’t see a bill at all, I don’t even have an inkling of an idea as to what my supplies really cost, I just have a generalized idea of what I’m not going to pay.
Basically, what it comes down to, is 2 choices, and 1 of them I’m not taking.
1) Go back to shots, because all that stuff is covered, syringes and insulin, although the insulin, since it’s a brand name drug, will cost me almost 3 times as much of what I’m paying now with my most excellent insurance. This is the option I’m not taking because I know that if I have to go back to shots, I’m as good as dead, because the shots won’t ever happen, or they’ll happen on a semi regular basis, neither of which is nearly as good as me taking them all the time when necessary. But as I said, that won’t happen. I don’t have the motivation or desire to do that. And they hurt, and when they start hurting, that’s when I stop doing them.
2) Find a new job that has better coverage. I should not have to go job shopping because I need better insurance. I should be able to have a job that I’m happy with, because I’m happy with it, not because I have a chronic disease which costs lots of money (even if I’m not on the pump) and therefore I need sweet ass insurance. What I’m trying to say is that job satisfaction should not be based on my benefits package, it should be based on the joy I have walking into my job on a daily basis. It should be based on walking away from my job at night knowing that I accomplished something that day, that I helped someone that day, that I did something that day.
I don’t like option 1 or 2.
It was probably too good to be true
So, back in July, I was doing a little dance because I had been speedily approved for my constant glucose monitor (CGM). I had to do next to nothing, well, I did write a letter, answered some questions, but beyond that, I did nothing. At least, that’s what it feels like.
It’s been 3 months and a week since I received my 3 month shipment of supplies. 2 weeks ago I got a call about how now every 3 months my doctor will have to provide Edgepark with a prescription and medical records.
Then last week I got a call that I’d be receiving my supplies. And then, a couple days later, I got a call saying that they were still missing my medical records.
Needless to say, I’ve not received my supplies yet…
The Time Change
Me, I’m definitely anything but a morning person. I don’t do mornings. My idea of morning is waking up at noon and eating breakfast, there’s morning. I used to be a night person, had no issues staying up late, but that’s not so much the case anymore, now adays, I’m a go to bed at a decent hour (10-11) and get up late, late, late (no earlier than 8, as late as noon).
At least, that’s how I like things to be. It’s not exactly realistic.
With the time change, things changed this morning. Sunday, I didn’t notice the change because I was in bed at 8 on Saturday night and I didn’t get up until 11:30 10:30. So you see, the time change was really irrelevant because I was asleep for so long anyways.
This morning though, things were different, I awoke at 6:30 and the sun was beating down on me (I have an east facing window). BEATING DOWN ON ME! At 6:30 in the morning. It’s usually dark at that hour. This is where I got affected. It was sunny at 6:30 in the morning. Which meant, instead of my usual 7:30-8:00 work day wake up hour, I was up at 6:30. (By 9 I was ready for a nap).
I don’t like this time change, I like it dark in the morning and light at night, instead, tonight it was getting dark at 5pm and the light in the morning, ugh, it got me up early and then it was dark. The dark, it cuts in on my day time.
The time change. *sigh*