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”

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.

Last year, my idea of telling peeps about World Diabetes Day was to say that diabetes doesn’t just effect us one day a year, but every day of the year. I’m looking at that meager post about the inaugural World Diabetes Day wondering what the heck I was thinking. To be honest, I have no clue.

Up until a few days ago, my world of diabetes didn’t extend far beyond me, and when it did extend beyond me, it didn’t extend beyond the boundaries of the US. My world of diabetes was basically me, and the crap we deal with when it comes to insurance companies and trying to get pumps and continuous glucose monitoring systems.

Somehow, what I didn’t realize, was that there was a world of people with diabetes outside of my “world” that are lucky if they even have access to insulin, they’re lucky if they can check their blood, they’re lucky if they can get to the doctor.

Here are some of the staggering statistics that hit me the hardest that I’ve recently become aware of. On this World Diabetes Day, to me, it truly is about the world.

• Diabetes is increasing faster in the world’s developing economies than in developed countries. Seven out of ten countries with the highest number of people living with diabetes are in the developing world. With an estimated 35 million people with diabetes, India has the world’s largest diabetes population.




• In developing countries, less than half of people with diabetes are diagnosed.




• 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’d like to share a few sites that I’ve become aware of that tell a lot more than I can put here about diabetes in different countries:

World Diabetes Foundation

International Diabetes Federation (who has an awesome documentary entitled “Life for a child” that will help open eyes to what’s going on in 3rd world countries)

World Health Organization

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

It was a good run for me. And when I say run, realize what I mean is walk/run, with more walking than running. This was my “see if i can run” run. I’ve not run since my injury that happened in August. But I have done a lot of walking.

When it was time to go everyone started running and so I started running but then I remembered that running at the start wasn’t part of the plan so I slowed to a walk. I knew right then that I wasn’t going to be able to stick to my plan. The plan was to do 4 minutes of walking / 1 minute of running cycles. That immediately went out the window when I started running at the sound of “GO!”

I did good though and I’m happy with how I did. I walked and ran in moderation and I negatively split my times every 2 miles. 1 would be fast, 1 would be not as fast. This run gave me the confidence that I needed to be sure that I can finish the Walt Disney World Marathon in the 7 hours that they’re giving us to do it. And that’s something I knew I couldn’t do just by walking.

Another thing that was cool about this race was how I ignored my diabetes. I didn’t get up 3 hours before race time to eat, I didn’t get up 2 hours before race time to reduce my insulin, I didn’t check my blood at all while I was out there. And it was all bliss. I had my meter, my GU, I had my sensor on, I had all I needed and I ignored it all and it was a truly good feeling and I didn’t go low while I was out there. I’d like to have more races like this one.

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.

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.

When I got my blisters I was told that if I continued to ignore the allure of the sexy toe socks that certain peeps couldn’t be responsible for what happens…that the sexy toe socks really work and that I needed to come to the dark side.

I kindof did some googling after that and decided that sexy toe socks were in my future but I never went and got a pair. Something about toe socks was just wrong.

Today, I stepped to the dark side, I bought a pair. I bought a pair of sexy toe socks. I got them in black, so they’re slimming My toes are skinny lookin’

I wore them around tonight, just to kindof test drive them, they felt way weird, and then I put my shoes on and they were wonderful. And so I like my sexy toe socks, but only when my shoes are on.

The one complaint I have right now is that I don’t like my socks to be seen when I’m wearing my running shoes and the shortest I could get in the store was mini-crew. But mini-crew is still too much sock for me.

The real test will happen tomorrow morning for my 11k walk. We’ll see if I blister or not…

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.