I work with Veterans and Service Members and I am blessed to call many of them my dear friends. They hold a very special place in my heart. For those of you reading this who have served or are currently serving, thank you for your service and I hope that you enjoyed a nice, relaxing Veterans Day with family and friends.
Truth be told, I haven’t posted as much because I’ve been a little too Negative Nancy and not enough Very Light, No Sugar for my liking. Consider this an apology of sorts. This disease, in my adulthood, has changed me. I miss the carefree kid in high school who was a dorky, yet extroverted, fun-loving person. Nowadays, I don’t know what happened to that girl. I’m still Ally, but on the rough days, I’m Angry Ally.
“Anger is a secondary emotion,” my friend said last week, when we chatted about the typical emotional twenty-something-year-old female stuff.
I have always known that, but the way she said it just stuck with me. She’s right. There’s more depth to my anger. I’m hungry, for starters. On the bad pump days when my blood sugar hovers in the 250s and 300s, I avoid carbs as if they were the Grim Reaper. Sometimes it takes the entire day to recover after a pump problem, and I have just adapted to the growling in my stomach and the hunger pangs lodged in my ribcage.
“You look skinny to me- skinnier than when I last saw you. It’s all of this ketone stuff with the pump, huh?” my nurse asked gently as she tried to identify good insertion sites for the pump.
“No. I’m actually gaining weight from the grad school diet,” I defensively replied, convinced that she was wrong.
That night I stepped on the scale and was surprised to see the 5-pound weight loss. While it is an easy coping mechanism for all of us to laugh it off and say, “Well, maybe ketones bring one positive to the table,” the reality of that statement is that it is not a joke. Losing weight due to ketones is never a good thing. It is your body burning fat for fuel. It is another painful pump site because you’re out of cushioning. It is how diabetic eating disorders can begin, and it is harmful to the body no matter the circumstances leading up to it.
Full disclaimer here: I wholeheartedly intend to eradicate ketones from existence whenever possible, and I would rather gain some pounds than suffer one more day with ketones. But I am mindful of how easily this could escalate into a larger problem. I believe that this is an issue that needs to be discussed more often in the diabetes community, so here is my limited knowledge on the topic and my best effort to get a more open conversation going. If you believe that you may have an issue related to this topic, please know that you are strong and that you owe it to yourself to feel better by getting help.
Beep, beep, beep. Snooze. Ten more minutes. No, eleven. No, thirty-five. Yawn. Working fulltime, grad school at night, and driving to Boston regularly while figuring out the diabetes dilemmas are exhausting in and of themselves. Then, as we all know, diabetes loves to come out to play from dusk to dawn; it’s like a Great White Shark or something. In other words, it is a large nuisance with a ferocious bite. We’ve all been there: Head on the pillow, deep breath, fading into sleep, and then… EEEEEE EEEEEE EEEEEE from the Dexcom on the nightstand. Dexcom is like the loyal dog which never strays from its owner, and I am so thankful to have access to this lifesaving product. (It’s as good a time as any to remind us about #MedicareCoverCGM, right?) But it is just another example of the many ways diabetes disrupts our rest.
Being tired and hungry, for me at least, means that my patience threshold is running on vapors by 10:00 am most mornings, no matter how many very light, no sugar coffees are consumed. Little problems seem like big ones when all you want is pizza for lunch but you know that salad with a few miniscule pieces of chicken is your untimely fate for the day.
Or that one dramatic coworker is going on and on about how much his head cold has negatively impacted his life, and you can barely contain yourself from throwing vocabulary daggers his way- something along the lines of, “I HAVE POKED MYSELF WITH 50 NEEDLES. IN. THE. PAST. THREE. DAYS!!!!!” But you let it slide because you don’t have the energy to fight another battle. But then you feel guilty because you missed a chance to advocate and enlighten the ignorant, damnit! And then you feel like your focus is only about you, when you know full-well that many other people suffer, too. And then you start to live-tweet your emotions, and you worry that you are annoying the heck out of the people in your virtual support team, whether a valid concern or not. And then you feel guilty again. And then your CGM buzzes and you’re still 278 after the second pump change…
I admire the people in the DOC who are open about their emotional struggles with this disease. It takes true guts to be vulnerable to that degree. So, yes, I have a front row seat in the fan club for, well, all of you. It is difficult to come to grips with one’s own emotions at times, but in the long run it provides a healthier mental and physical outcome, if history and science are any indication.
Although being Negative Nancy is not fun, maybe I should also give myself some slack here? Diabetes is a daunting, never-ending job, and those outsiders who say “Laughter is the best medicine” probably haven’t tried to laugh when they have moderate-to-large ketones. It’s just not happening, people. But I can promise to attempt to tap into that whole thing called “perspective” that diabetes gives us a bit more often. We all know that little things aren’t the end of the world because we have already lived through the end of the pancreatic islet cell world. Badasses.
Thanks for putting up with my grumpy tweets. Sometimes it just helps to be heard.
Diabetes Awareness Month is finally here! I’ve stocked up on blue apparel and drafted, re-drafted, deleted, expanded, and re-visited my Facebook status updates, tweets, and so on for World Diabetes Day on November 14. Being new to the diabetes blogosphere/social media arena, I feel the importance of November, and specifically November 14, more so than I may have in the past. This is our day and our month. I’m clearly biased here, but I do not believe that diabetes gets its fair share of attention in society and in the media. Take a gander at my diabetes rant if you want my heated feelings on the matter.
I am truly happy for other organizations and causes that garner lots of fanfare during their designated months and days. Seeing the State House lit up in pink for breast cancer awareness month in October as a simple gesture of solidarity for the cause always puts a smile on my face. My siblings’ delight in dumping ice water all over me for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is a fond memory for our family, and it is also a reminder of those very brave individuals who battle an insidious disease every day.
As human beings, we all suffer. Lots of us have health conditions; others, financial troubles; some, relationship issues; many, a mix of a multitude of things. Connecting as human beings to support one another in our moments of pain and in our moments of triumph against such pain is all part of the human connection. It is time to make that connection happen for diabetes, and the diabetic online community is certainly capable of moving mountains to do this.
There are various creative diabetes awareness efforts going on right now. I am all for anything that supports diabetes in a positive way, and I truly enjoy participating in various efforts when time permits me to do so. However, we are also a bit fragmented as a group- not because we want to be, but because the options are too vast and our passions for advocacy too wide and multifaceted. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It speaks volumes about us as an intuitive, determined community. We are always salivating over new and improved ideas for advocacy.
Rather than making things more complicated and diluting the already-expansive efforts to raise awareness, I’m going to put a simplified twist on an old diabetes advocacy message. We have all seen those posters outlining how many injections, pump site changes, finger pricks, etc. that a diabetic has endured over his or her lifetime. Those posters always knock the wind out of me- no matter how old the person holding up the sign may be. There is a universal truth to these visual aids: One shot is one too many. If we cure diabetes, there will never be another “first shot” of insulin for so many out there whose islet cells may one day rebel. Sadly, as we all know, the shots are sometimes the “easiest” part when it comes to diabetes. Again, #1ShotIs1TooMany.
We can live in a world without diabetes. It is a matter of hard work, advocacy, financing, and research. As the doc, we already know the ropes when it comes to informing others about our daily lives with diabetes. But those who do not live it firsthand- who do not wake up at 3:14 am to change failed pump sites, who do not feel the burn of injecting into scar tissue, who do not wipe their child’s tears during a bad low blood sugar- have perhaps not been exposed to the reality of diabetes.
My tactic is simple: “Shock and awe” is good, occasionally. From a marketing perspective, tease your social media followers a bit. Engage them by throwing out the line and seeing if they will bite. I plan on posting my picture with the blue diabetes awareness circle etched in using the World Diabetes Day app. In Paint or a similar program, I will then write in blue the number of needle pokes I have endured over 23 years as a type 1 diabetic.
As an anxious person, there have been times in my life where I would perform blood glucose tests upwards of 25 times per day, so my number of pokes is quite large, and it is most likely an underestimate. To figure out my number, I scribbled crazy mathematical break-downs to include “hundreds of shots in this timeframe, then switching to the pump during this year, then testing more or less, etc.” The final number- 166,650– is my very best educated guesstimate. What are your numbers? We are all so much more than the daily pokes and prods, but they have also permanently marked us as strong individuals. Let’s celebrate this concept with others, and let’s vow to find a cure so that the next newly-diagnosed person is not sentenced to years of replicating our needle tallies.
When people chomp at the worm on the end of the hook, I will clue them in as to what diabetes is all about. I will explain how it is not caused by cupcakes, how much it pains me to see the worry on my friends’ faces on the bad days, and the other ins and outs of taming a sadistic autoimmune beast every day. Then I will tell them about the good stuff: the #doc, #dsma, the doctors and nurses who have refused to give up, the fact that it is not too late to work towards a cure.
When it comes to advocacy this month, do what works for you; support the message that resonates with your own diabetes struggle. If you hear a diabetes joke at the local ice cream shop, politely inform the misguided comedian that his material is outdated based on modern science. Foster a conversation about diabetes with someone who may be misinterpreting what it means. Wear blue. And wear your heart on your sleeve while doing so.
The last month or so has been a balancing act of sorts made more difficult by the fact that my balancing skills ended decades ago after a few too many tumbles-gone-wrong in kindergarten gymnastics class. Work was stacked up on my desk, and many days I found myself slouched in my chair at lunch, reading feverishly before grad class scheduled for that evening and picking at a salad and a half-eaten salami sandwich. I’d break away for 5 minutes to get a very light, no sugar coffee, but that was the extent of things. Exercise? I don’t have time for that! echoed around the tired spaces of my head.
I kept hearing of the Big Blue Test and shrugging it off as something that I’d like to do one day when life wasn’t a three-ring circus trying to fit four rings of obligations into a tiny amount of time. When Laddie over at Test Guess and Go suggested that I give the Big Blue Test a try, I tucked her words into the back pocket of my mental toolkit for a few minutes, procrastinating yet again when it came to exercising.
I Google-searched Big Blue Test, promising myself to throw in the towel if signing up was even remotely challenging. In hindsight, it was thankfully quite easy to register. Big Blue Test is free; it encourages you to get off your bum and move around; and it fosters a good conversation about diabetes and exercising. It’s a win-win-win-win-win-situation, and you can also encourage others to join in on the fun. You can download the phone app, answer a few questions (whether diabetic or non-diabetic) each time you work out, and $1.00 towards diabetes efforts is granted by the Diabetes Hands Foundation for each exercise log that you make.
I have found that this app holds me more accountable for leaving my desk to stretch my legs for 15 minutes at work. The ten second practice of entering the data into the app makes the process fun and rewarding; watching blood sugars drop from even 220 to 205 in 15 minutes is still a little victory for diabetics versus the diabetes monster. Take that, diabetes!
I may have felt like the world would collapse without me typing up a storm at my computer for 15 minutes prior to the Big Blue Test, but, no surprise here, the world moved along just fine and I was able to enjoy the nice fall weather when taking my weekly walks. Friends have joined me and we have some great diabetes discussions on our walks after I explain the meaning behind the Big Blue Test. Krissy over at Krissy’s Dance and Fitness Studio in Rhode Island is helping out our cause by logging her workouts and asking her clients to do the same. Coworkers have risen to the occasion to keep me company on my strolls through the city.
“So, do you have to take shots?” one walker asked.
“I used to take a lot of shots, but now I have an insulin pump,” I explained, lifting my shirt to show him the “pager” part of the pump.
(Don’t worry, I spared him the dramatic war stories of my insulin pump experiences in recent months for now. Baby steps…)
In all seriousness, though, moments like that help our mission to spread awareness of diabetes. They get people thinking outside of the misguided media portrayal of the disease. They inspire others to stay healthy by working out with us and giving to a great cause in the process. There is all good and no bad by participating in the Big Blue Test, as far as I’m concerned.
Lastly, those walks make these moments quite salvageable:
Nurse, while flipping through my blood glucose logs from the past week: “So, cheese and crackers for dinner almost every night…? And ice cream sometimes? I mean, you did pretty well with your blood sugars, but still…??”
She wasn’t being judgmental, rather, she was rightfully concerned that a fully-nutritious meal definitely wasn’t happening on school nights.
Me: “Yeah, it’s called the ‘grad school special.’ Plus, I ‘worked out’ this week…”
I owe you a detailed description of this week’s meeting with the insulin pump manager and my health care team, but that may have to wait until the weekend. (If running on grad school vapors was a thing, it would definitely be “my thing.” Real life beckons at the moment).
In the meantime, for those of you who reached out to offer help and to commiserate upon reading Broken Record, first of all I want to sincerely thank you again. Your words of encouragement, sharing of the blog post, and overall viewership of that piece really helped to keep me afloat and to work to fix these problems. And you also taught me that if I do not fix the pump problems, that is okay, too. Life will go on, and I will adjust accordingly. Many of you have done so already; thank you for paving the way. I felt your virtual hugs for many days, and that support is something that I will carry in my heart for a long, long time.
Until I can write a lengthier post, I do want to provide updates, especially for those of you who are going through what I am/was with the insulin pump recently. The following are just a few positive things to consider if you are/were in my shoes with the pump:
1.) Try switching insulin types in the pump.
Novolog has made an enormous difference for me. I am not sure why my body/pump decided not to get along with Humalog recently, but it was a very nasty divorce process. There were lots of tears and the neighbors definitely give us weird looks when we walk by now.
Sometimes just testing the waters with something new can give your body and mind the break that they need to re-group. I have witnessed a very positive difference in my blood sugar numbers since the insulin swap-out. And mentally, even if the insulin type switch is solely placebo effect, I will take any positive change at this point.
2.) Bubbles
Novolog has some bubbles, too, but not to the same extent as what I witnessed with the millions of tiny, feisty, stubborn Humalog bubbles. Novolog’s bubbles are bigger and fewer, allowing for the insulin in the reservoir to continue to do its job and to squeak by the bubbles. This is just my experience at this point in time, but so far, so good. More to come in a future blog post…
3.) Ask and you shall receive.
I asked for the doc’s help regarding my issues, and I was blown away by their feedback. I also semi-harassed Medtronic and my health care team to troubleshoot with me, and, to their credit, they heard me out. They set up meetings quickly, they yielded multiple phone calls, they read lengthy emails, and they all agreed that something had to be done. In the past I spent my hours and days wallowing in the idea that “Life might just have to be like this on the pump.” Then I saw many of you living well with diabetes and realized that I was horribly mistaken. You were living with diabetes, and you were doing so gracefully and successfully given the rebellious nature of a major organ. I, on the other hand, was stuck in the mud with my wheels spinning, living without direction in my diabetic journey.
Once I admitted this, acknowledged that what was going on was not okay, and asked for assistance, the burden did not feel so heavy and so lonely. As of today, I am in the “icing my back” stage, rehabbing from carrying the cumbersome load of previous insulin pump issues. But I am standing a little taller, my head is held a little higher, and my heart is definitely bursting for having you all to bear witness to the struggle and to cheer from the sidelines along the road to getting better.
I will forever be humbled by all of the hands in the health care pot that reached in, without hesitation, to help in my time of suffering.
Thank you…
Random middle of the night thoughts, to the tune of Flo Rida’s “Low”:
Shorty got those apple juice dreams,
Snacks are not a cureee,
The whole fridge was eaten by herrr.
Glucose hit the floor,
Next thing you know,
Dexcom flashed low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low…
1.) Get cured of diabetes. Preferrably, like, tomorrow.
2.) Until number 1 happens, drink lots of coffee.
3.) Attempt shorter blog posts so that we all don’t need reading glasses when surfing the web.
4.) Get through the next month of school and then tackle a few issues. There are not enough support options for diabetics in my local area, and that doesn’t sit well with me. The good news is that a few people can get the ball rolling and change that. I plan to be one of those people.
5.) Focus on helping others more. I have been so preoccupied with my own health that I need to maintain perspective that others suffer just as much, if not more. And maybe from things other than diabetes.
6.) Keeping number 5 in mind, stop feeling guilty about it. Accept that maybe it did need to be all about me for a few days because, well, I needed your help with the pump stuff, and you all delivered and then some.
7.) Buy cookies for nurse, pump rep, and doctor before appointment next week. Because heck yes, I’m going to walk into a diabetes clinic with baked goods coated in sprinkles. And heck yes, I’m going to feed the people taking their lunch breaks to troubleshoot problems with me because they are the epitome of what it means to show kindness and consideration in health care delivery.
Good day, folks.
Disclaimer: Before we really dive into things, you should know that this is a lengthy post, and it may not be all rainbows and sunshine. Read at your own risk. I personally hope that you are feeling a bit adventurous as a reader today, though. 🙂
When my mother was in second grade, she was running through the auditorium and accidentally dropped her Bambi record on the ground. It shattered into tiny pieces, and the janitor swept them up and gave them to her in a plastic bag. She walked home sobbing and was heartbroken when gluing the pieces back together did not make the record work again.
If I told that story to a child today, she would laugh in my face and say that my Mom should have used an IPod instead. Fair enough…
Well, I have become a broken record myself. I know it and everyone else knows it. I don’t even want the attention. I just want the simple act of screaming my lungs out when I’m angry, and it usually comes disguised as some sort of social media rant about stupid drivers on the way to work or something else that is irrelevant. I have lost friends over it, and I say this to my doctor all the time: Although diabetes is to blame for many bad moods, at the end of the day, I still have to answer to God and to the people in my life. Diabetes isn’t a good excuse, then. I can still be a respectful human being despite diabetes-induced mood swings and frustrations, and I need to work on this. I’m trying, which has to count for something.
But it is also very difficult to describe to people what stubbornly high blood sugars feel like and what a physical and emotional ass-kicking it is when nothing you do works to solve the problem. This is my reality on many days, and I imagine some of you reading this understand exactly what I mean. I hate to say that this type of suffering has changed me, but in some ways, it has. I am always on edge about how I will prevent and treat these highs, and I don’t remember the last time I just let my guard down and enjoyed the moment- probably because I was nursing a high blood sugar back to health in the background of that moment, with everyone around me remaining oblivious.
Many people have “yessed” me to death in regards to my insulin pump struggles, including family members. “Are you really just going to say ‘I know’?!” I scream on the phone with Mom. I get upset with this response, but I also understand it from a psychological perspective. There is really not much that others can do to help. They are not the ones up all night changing pump sites any more. They do not have to go to work exhausted and seeing spots because of high blood glucose. As much as they try to “get it,” they can’t completely comprehend what it feels like.
Some others have told me to toughen up or that it’s in my head, including fellow diabetics. I have a much more difficult time swallowing humble pie at that point. That advice adds nothing to the equation; it is the same as telling a depressed person to simply be happy. If life were this easy, there would be no depressed people, and there would be no sick diabetics. This is a “cop out” sort of commentary. It is much more beneficial to the friends, patients, coworkers- whoever is struggling- if we assure them that we believe them and that we are hopeful that they will find solutions. Dumbing down the problem by dismissing it as “it’s in your head” only angers that person. And guess what? It’s probably not in his or her head, especially if the person involved is a type 1 diabetic. We know our bodies better than most people do, and we know when something is awry. If you are a type 1 diabetic who has been lucky enough to avoid insulin pump problems, well, please cut us some slack that we have not been as fortunate.
Anyway, this is the blog post that I’ve owed you all. I am BEYOND frustrated. Forgive the length of this post, but I have to get all of the information out there. Bear with me while I go over the details, and then I really, truly need your expert advice, especially before I meet with a pump representative and my nurse for a troubleshooting appointment in two weeks. I pinky promise that if I can ever help you in return, I will do whatever I can to pay it back, or to pay it forward. If you’re participating in the DOC, then I already know that you’re an expert, so please, please chime in here if you can help.
I am 26 now, and I went on a Medtronic MiniMed insulin pump about ten years ago while in high school. It immediately changed my life for the better. No more shooting up insulin doses in the bathroom stalls, no more limiting my food intake, and so much more freedom. As my nurse would say, I had “virgin skin” that had never been pierced by insulin pump sites, and my absorption was great. Once in a blue moon I would experience a technical issue, but this happened twice a year or so. (I understand that an insulin pump is technology and it is not perfect. Although if I could go back in time, I would erase the failed pump site on the one day of my life where I decided to try an iced mocha sugary drink thingy from Dunkin’ Donuts…).
Anyway, while in college, after my body experienced some wear and tear from the pump, I started to have site issues more frequently. On my twentieth birthday, I indulged in a pizza dinner with friends and had some ice cream for dessert, only to discover a bent cannula afterwards and a blood glucose reading of over 500 mg/dL. It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to. I also experienced some severe lows in which the whole world felt like it was falling down around me. I was spooked- by the highs and the lows. I had to figure out a way to stay between the lines- not too high and not too low- easier said than done with type 1 diabetes, as we all know.
According to my doctor, I literally experienced trauma from the “extremes,” the severe highs and the severe lows. This mental trauma has changed my reactions to things, has made me live a hypervigilant life in order to survive. My brain was in fight or flight mode when these adverse situations happened in college. I flew away from carbs. If I ever have a kinked cannula again, at least I won’t make the mistake of eating pizza on top of it (as if anyone knows when they have a kinked cannula). If I eat salad and protein instead, maybe my sugar will be 300 instead of 500 if that happens. And so I lived, for many years. Until my body started to scream that it needed fuel, and it burned fat in place of carbs, and I saw ketones quite often.
I still struggle with working an adequate amount of carbs into my daily diet and with taking a more liberal amount of insulin, but I am trying. I have a phenomenal doctor who doesn’t make me feel stupid about my fears. In fact, she makes me feel brave for showing up at her office to fight those fears. There are some days where we are literally high-fiving and prancing around the room because I ate a half of a sandwich when my sugar was already 250 and I took quadruple the amount of insulin that I would normally take, which is usually still not enough. But it is one giant leap for Ally of Very Light, No Sugar, so we celebrate those moments heartily.
What is making this process even more complicated is the fact that the majority of the time, I experience some sort of problem with my insulin pump and we cannot trust in the delivery mechanism for insulin. So, not only am I petrified of highs and lows, but I am constantly questioning whether the pump works or not.
I want to go on the record and say that I really like Medtronic MiniMed as a company. In my ten years of experience with them, the customer service has been top-notch. If I need a supply, it is at my door within a day or less of placing a phone call. Their phone representatives yield calls at all crazy hours of the night. Their PR team does a great job of answering questions. Angie, in management, has spent hours on the phone helping me investigate my pump issues. I will not forget how she moved me to tears with a simple question a few weeks ago: “If you’re putting the pump site in your back, and you’re already on the thin side… well, doesn’t that hurt you…?” Um, yes. That part of it gets lost in the shuffle when you just want to absorb the medicine going into you, but the human connection was there. She was clearly upset that I was in pain. As was the Medtronic representative at my diabetes clinic who helped me with various sites last year and was a wealth of knowledge regarding all aspects of insulin pumping. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Medtronic doesn’t like bad pump days just like I don’t like them. We are all in this for the greater good of living well with diabetes. Alas, we have to fix these issues, for the sake of my health and for the sake of current and future insulin pumpers who may experience similar issues.
Anyway, I started off with the Quick Set infusion sets years ago, but had to switch off of them due to kinking cannulas. The Silhouettes, which have a larger cannula, worked slightly better, but my sites were so irritated that a nurse, upon seeing a picture of one site in my phone, in no uncertain terms told me that I was never to use them again. I was allergic to some of the material, making absorption of insulin questionable due to the agitated areas.
The Sure T site, which uses a stainless steel needle that inserts into the skin and looks like a thumb tack, has been useful in that it has cut out the kinked cannula problem. Because the needle stays under your skin and you need to be able to disconnect the pump for various activities like showering, there are two attachments to the Sure T. See photo above; disregard “love handles,” please. One long tube connects to the reservoir in the pump. There is a small needle at the end of this tube. This small needle clips into a connector site, which is attached to a smaller tube running down to the needle under the skin. To remove the pump, you detach at the main connector site. I have had a few bizarre occurrences where the sites were snapped together but insulin was pooling at the connection instead of going through the smaller tube and into my body through the needle, causing me to spike high ketones. Medtronic promptly replaced all of those lot numbers for me and is investigating the issue.
I am also relatively thin, so it is hard to find areas with enough fat for the sites. I never used to experience much pain with site changes, but now I feel significant shooting pains, sometimes lasting for days and making me nauseous. My health care team has retired my stomach for sites to give it time to heal. I sometimes use my sides and have experimented with the lower back but have not had great results so far. Upper butt works okay but tends to be quite painful.
I feel like I have seen the whole spectrum: from pain-free, easy site changes years ago to painful, troublesome sites in recent times. I know that I am not crazy, that I am experiencing problems that are really disrupting my quality of life. With each bad site change, I am often on the couch chasing ketones away all day and taking manual injections on top of changing out problematic pump sites. It is no way to spend one’s mid-twenties on a weekly basis, and I want this to change so desperately that I am willing to try pretty much anything.
I would like to continue pumping because of the fine-tuning that the pump allows. I can take my mini-bolus at the beginning of dinner and bolus more ten minutes later if I go back for seconds. I can tweak my overnight basal rates, etc. While I do not remember seeing ketones often with multiple daily injections (MDIs), I do not like the thought that once that insulin is in you, it’s there for the day. And if you need to bolus, it is a bigger deal to get the dose right on the first try so that you do not have to take more shots later on. Socially, it is simpler for me to press a few buttons on a pump while in grad class late at night than it is to go to the bathroom to take a shot.
My final issue is not with the pump itself, but with the insulin. I have used a pump for years; there are usually a few pesky bubbles which can be flicked away and forgotten about. But lately, it’s like the insulin is feisty before it even gets inside the reservoir. See photo above. Millions of tiny bubbles shoot around my Humalog bottle. I have tried new orders of Humalog, attempted using different bottles, etc. Nothing changes the presence of these bubbles. When I fill the reservoir, I flick out the big bubbles, but usually a few tiny culprits hang out by the top of the reservoir and refuse to move. Over time, they expand, blocking proper insulin delivery or causing some air, instead of insulin, to be delivered. My sugars will run high for hours until I figure out the issue. I recently gave Novolog a try, but the first two attempts yielded big bubbles as well and my sugars were high for days. It is as if the bubbles compromise the efficacy of the insulin, and it is so not cool.
As noted earlier, I am meeting with my nurse and a Medtronic representative in a few weeks to go over all of this and to walk through the process with them to see if we can identify the issues. In the meantime, I ask for your prayers and your advice. Some of you have reached out to me about the bubbles and you have made me feel so much better in knowing that I am not a lunatic, although I truly wish that none of us had to suffer through these circumstances. A lot of times people are quick to blame the user. Maybe there is user error? If so, I’m willing to admit it and move on. I just want to feel healthy again and to regain the quality of life that the pump originally afforded to me.
I apologize for the broken record-ness, but I am fighting for my health here. It is disheartening when you are making big strides in your diabetes management to tackle your fears, yet something as simple as a few air bubbles is wreaking havoc on your control. I am incredibly concerned about the toll that this is taking on me physically and mentally, and about the burden it is placing on my family and friends who want to help but don’t know how. Perhaps you hold the answer, DOC. In fact, I’m sure you do. What works for you?
My coworkers and I are hamming it up for Blue Fridays. And no, that isn’t Sean Connery, but Manny could definitely pass for him! Hands off, ladies!
My friends spotted Manny in blue this morning and excitedly told me to take his picture.
“What’s this all about?” he asked.
I explained how we wear blue to support diabetes awareness on Fridays, and how November is our month. Everyone within ear’s reach of the conversation thought that it was a great idea. It is nice to see their enthusiasm for a good cause, and I am blessed to work with such supportive coworkers who I consider close friends at this point.
I am hoping to organize a “Wear Blue for Diabetes Awareness” day at work during November. If possible, I would like to email a list of a few pertinent diabetes facts out to the office so that people may understand the differences between the various types of diabetes and the need for more research. Finally, I want to personally pledge to donate $1.00 towards diabetes-related projects for each person who wears blue on the designated “blue day.” It may not be much, but it is better than nothing. And if people stop and really think about what it means to live in a world with diabetes, then the purpose of wearing blue and uniting to support diabetics has been accomplished in its own small way here and now.
Any creative ideas of which projects to consider? I have my own personal favorites, but I would like to learn more about any and all good diabetes research/treatment/advocacy going on, and I will take all suggestions into consideration.
Hope you all have a fantastic, healthy weekend! Stay classy, DOC!
Alright, if you haven’t noticed by now, I always need to add a “few” words, but this is my attempt at copying the “Wordless Wednesdays” posts that I’ve seen on some other blogs out there:
Gearing up for Diabetes Awareness Month in November. I have a feeling the DOC is going to make some noise next month, and rightfully so…
Very Light, No Sugar 