first



2 weeks = 28 needles



Tonight is my last injection with my first insulin pen.  One down, infinity to go!  They're good for 2 weeks in use, so tomorrow morning I start with a brand new one.  Now every time I report to Eric on my numbers, we share a look that says "it's working".  I'm too superstitious to say it out loud, but some days I feel like doing a dance.  A booty dance.  Starting out on an insulin injection twice a day has drastically brought my blood sugar down, and it seems like my pancreas is keeping up fine at mealtimes - for now.

It's all going according to plan.  Muah-ha-ha.

But man, these lows?  Killer.  The first 60-something was alarming enough, but every lunch since then has started out in the 50s.  My first instinct is to eat everything in sight, including free-for-all breakroom food.  Number 1 sign I'm low: if I am drawn to some shit whose origins can't be confirmed.  I scarfed down 4 unmarked cookies yesterday before I stopped to question what flavor they even were.  Brown flavor?  I'm still not sure.

Do I eat lunch earlier?  Do I sneak away for a snack break?  Do I stay away from breakroom food? <-- yes on that one.

Luckily, after a while of consistent lunch-lows, I've become a lot more tuned into my sugar.  Work is an easy place to tell right away if I'm low because there's some fine motor skills involved in my job.
The first tell-tale for me is if I can't use a pipette without making a mess: it's time to eat. 

2nd: If I can't put my reagents back in their little stadium seats on the first try, it's time to eat.

3rd:  If I start hallucinating at work, it's time to eat.


Don't mind him.  That's just Winston.

sweets for my sweet

Happy Valentine's Day!  A day to celebrate your sweetie, or better yet: a time to celebrate sweets.  Chocolates, lollipops, conversation hearts (who actually eats those?), jelly beans, truffles...

Wait, what am I talking about?  My days of plowing through a bag of holiday-shaped Reese's are over. <--those are my favorite

I can't resist baking at holidays, though.  I found a recipe for strawberry cookies with pink cream cheese frosting and SPRINKLES! that screamed Hallmark holiday.  They were super delicious and Eric-approved.  In fact, he thanked me for making HIM Valentine's cookies.  Whoops.  I didn't have the heart to tell him I baked them to take to work. 

So I didn't tell him.  I just snuck off to work with them this morning and left him one lonely cookie on the counter.  I'm such a sweetheart :)

I can't just bake things to have at the house anymore - I'd eat them all!  Literally.  I have absolutely no will power.  That means my coworkers have the wonderful benefit now of eating all my baked goods (is that a good thing?).  I may even feel some random acts of kindess coming on...

low and lower

I had my first insulin-related low yesterday at work.  It's seriously a crazy feeling.  I ate breakfast and then worked through til lunch like always.  I was feeling off well before my usual lunchtime, but being a creature of habit I pushed myself until noon.  Then I got caught up in work and pushed myself a half hour longer.  By the time I was taking off my lab coat, my blood sugar was down to 61.  It was one of those numbers you read on the glucose meter and think "yep, that's about right". 

I was told in our education class that people on a low may act like they're drunk.  That's because brain function is impaired if the brain isn't getting enough sugar.  I was surprised to find out the two feelings are so similiar.  I could sense that my walk wasn't right; I was swaying and lurching with only the thought of food keeping me moving forward instead of falling over.  It was the kind of trip where you get where you're going and then stop to think "how did I get here?".  I picked the hightop cafe table for my lunch, which was a bad idea.  I was afraid I was going to slide right off it.  A booth would have been a much more comfortable place to pass out, for sure.  I couldn't even eat right: shaky hands + terrible depth perception meant that I kept missing my mouth and knocking food off my fork.  I felt like the only shot at maintaining any dignity was to shoot dirty looks at the surgical girls nearby who would surely judge my inability to eat food.

So yea, being hypoglycemic is a lot like being drunk.  The difference is that being hypo sucks and being drunk is pretty enjoyable.

And that's not to say I'm a huge drinker.  I turned 21 my senior year of college and barely touched any alcohol while I was on campus.  I was that girl who didn't want to hit up the liquor store for her underage friends.  I was such a baby.  In fact, I only have one good drinking story and one bad drinking story.  The bad one I save for my husband and my BFF (one of them will surely blackmail me one day).

The good one comes from an out-of-town wedding (don't they all?). The groom's dad - a sweetheart, by the way - got me happy on wine over the course of the reception. Afterwards we joined the wedding party at a bar downtown.  It just so happened to be St. Patrick's Day weekend AND conference tourney time for NCAA basketball, and I got plowed cheering on the local team.  Mixed in with the green beer was an Irish car bomb: that business tastes like dirty Starbucks in case you don't know.  By the time we made it to our hotel I was lucky to be upright, as some of our party had passed out in the cargo area of my car.  Eric was the DD as usual, so I was surprised that sober he didn't see a red flag waving over my white girl wasted walk to our hotel room.  Not even past the lobby, I tripped and faceplanted.  Hard.  Turns out hotel floors are concrete underneath really cheap carpet.  I heard a crunch in my nose and  contemplated falling asleep facedown outside a stranger's room.  In fact, the only reason I got up was because I heard a pizza delivery guy ask Eric if I was ok and I couldn't be THAT girl.  So I ran to my room (drunk running feels like flying); Eric reassured the pizza guy and followed.  One look at me had him holding back laughter: I had an immediate goose egg on my forehead.  I alternated between sloppy drunk tears and maniacal laughter as I fell into bed. 

We had a 10 hour drive back home the next day and I spent much of it stealing glances at my purple knotty face in the side-view mirror.  The bridge of my nose had also bruised up nicely.  The wonder of it all was my hands.  They showed no bruising, no soreness, nothing.  I took this to mean that I was so gone I hadn't even employed your #1 face saving mechanism: bracing your fall with your hands. 

I tried to cover my battle wounds with makeup, but I hadn't been back at work 5 minutes before my coworker/BFF asked "what happened to your face?".  Bitch.  I'm pretty sure she spent the rest of the day asking me about my "trip" to Kentucky.  I would have done the same. 

Being that we work in a lab, I wear latex gloves all day.  Here's where it gets weird: by the end of the night, pulling gloves off over and over had bruises rising to the surface on my palms.  Taking off a glove was like giving my hand a hicky.  When it was time to clock out, by hands were purple from my wrist to my fingertips.  It was disturbing, but it proved that I must have tried, however ineffectually, to save myself from the fall. 

Keep reading because this story is relevant.  I mean, not to be "the diabetes girl", but it is.

I'm only good at testing my sugar on two fingers: my left middle and left ring.  My right hand probably has some good bleeders but I'm not ambidextrous to the point where I can use the lancet/meter with my left hand.  In fact, my left hand is just about useless.  I'm pretty sure God only gave it to me so I don't look lopsided.  Anyway, this means those two fingers get pricked and milked all the time.  Over the past couple days I could tell my middle finger was getting really sore from all the abuse.  So I start pulling my gloves off at work and wouldn't you know: my whole fingetip was purple.  From the knuckle to the nail. 

Many lessons are to be learned from this chain of events: don't work when you can eat, don't rely on one testing finger, and don't drink anything with a theme name. 

the skinny

Weight is something most girls are conscious of, usually because they're looking to get rid of some.  For that reason alone, I hate to complain about losing weight. 

In my adult life, I was smallest right before my wedding at 115 pounds.  I thought it was a combination of stress and the desire to look good in a wedding dress, but in reality I looked sickly.  Turns out, I WAS sick - with raging thyroid disease. 

Controlling my thyroid hormones got my weight back in check, and then eating like a newlywed (it's a thing, ask every newlywed ever) piled weight back on - up to 130.

Over the 2012 calendar year I dropped 11 pounds.  This time, I owed it to diet, exercise, thyroid recurrence, and dun-dun-DUN diabetes.

In January alone I lost 6 more pounds, bringing me down to 113. 

I say that to say this: I am crazy small right now.  Not like a "hey girl, have you lost weight?" kind of way...more like a "have you heard if Katherine's sick?" kind of way.  My favorite soft, stretchy Gap jeans are now my "fat pants" and I'm wearing jeans from high school.  Only difference is I was heavier in high school and I had dat azz.  My scrub pants are falling off - and if you can't keep pants tied up around your waist with a drawstring, you have a problem.  Maybe saddest of all, I've lost noticeable weight in my -ahem- chest, which didn't have that much to give. 

The difference between now-me and pre-wedding-me is confidence.  I've got muscle this time around - like muscle you can actually see.  That's saying a lot for a girl whose family used to pick on her "spaghetti arms". 

So rather than focus on how much weight I'm losing, I'm excited to go shopping.  <--a girl can always turn it around.  This will be the summer of short shorts.  Maybe even a bikini.  A friend told me my wakeboarding song can still be "Baby Got Back" should I want to finally try wakeboarding at the lake.  I also bought a pair of teal skinny jeans at Loft Outlet, something I couldn't wear 17 pounds ago.  The plus is, they were only $19.99 so I won't feel bad if Iput weight back on (or teal skinny jeans go out of style).

Of course, the nurse at Dr. O's office pointed out a problem of being too skinny: while we were doing a test injection, I pulled up my shirt and asked where on my belly I could poke.  She sighed in the way only soft Southern grandmas can, and said "honey, you hardly have enough fat on you to pinch."

I just pretend I'm Honey Boo Boo when it comes time for my injection.

why can't my honeymoon be in the tropics?

Yesterday I met my diabetes specialist, Dr. O.  He reminds me of a friend's dad, so there's a win for the trust side.  That's normal, right?

It was my lunchtime when I checked in, and I hadn't eaten in 4+ hours.  My blood sugar was 65 so I got to drink an apple juice and sit in the exam room where I waited for close to an hour.  I was in the throes of hypoglycemia and talking out of my ass (Eric came along - I wasn't talking to myself).  I made some joke about eating TWO cheeseburgers (?) and lost it, but luckily sobered up before meeting the doc.  Am I the only one who gets wacky nervous at doctors' offices?

Dr. O was very reassuring right from the get-go and even offered to take me on as a thyroid patient as well, so I don't have to pay separate $50 specialist copays. I guess that's the good thing about having two endocrine disorders - one doctor can treat them simultaneously. 

He described my situation as the "honeymoon phase".  Basically my pancreas is still making some insulin but eventually my islet cells will be completely destroyed.  There's no telling how long before that happens - it could be weeks, months, a couple years.  I mean, I've been married for three years and still feel like we're on a honeymoon :) Aww, I know right?

That being the case, Dr. O started me on a basal insulin injection.  This will serve as the background insulin that a healthy pancreas is able to put out constantly.  For now, my pancreas should be working enough to secrete meal-time insulin.  The goal is that the injection will help take some of the strain off my poor dying pancreas and (hopefully) prolong its function a little longer.  If I'm on the honeymoon, this first injection is like marriage counseling before the divorce. 

carb counting

Going to diabetes education class really opened our eyes up to just how many carbs we take in each day.  We've both been holding ourselves to carb limits and our meals have been winners this week on that front.

The least gourmet but most exciting meal has been grilled cheese and chicken noodle soup. Ok, I'm just mostly tickled about this one.  One sandwich and 1 bowl of soup topped out at 3 carbs.  Grilled cheese is one of my favorite foods; in fact, I survived on it exclusively from 2006-2008. 

I mean, even good dining hall food is still dining hall food...

reassurance

On Wednesday Eric and I went to an all-day diabetes education class through a local hospital (that just happens to be where I work).  It actually made me feel better on a few counts. 

First, though, can we talk about hospital registration?  Wouldn't you know that B had a large McCafe iced frappe something or other AND a cupcake calendar at her desk?

I'll get that bitch some sweets.  Bitches love sweets.

Anyway, back to class.

We covered the basics of the disease process, complications, medications, mental health, exercise, and diet. 

We'll call our main instructor "R".  When she was diagnosed as a type 2 diabetic, R chose to use insulin therapy over medication.  Number 1 reassurance.  She's been doing this (successfully) for over a decade and lives an active lifestyle.  While insulin is the only treatment option for type 1 diabetics, I think there's a stigma that goes along with insulin, like it's a last resort/end-of-the-road kind of thing.  That someone would choose insulin when others have no choice was incomprehensible to me at first, but actually makes sense: it's able to give the tightest control on your blood sugar and can therefore make you feel like you have more freedom. 

Of the 5 patients in attendance, my A1C was the best-controlled.  Number 2 reassurance.  I've felt like a failure with my diet and exercise choices because that number was high.  Come to find out there are people walking around with an A1C TWICE AS HIGH as mine. 

The number 3 reassurance comes from the support of my husband.  The carb counting exercise was fun (and eye-opening...have you ever measured out a serving size of cereal? do it right now) but it was overwhelming to picture the rest of my life thinking about carbohydrates.  I hated biochem, remember?  But Eric faithfully insists that we'll do this together.  I feel horrible knowing he'll be restricted because of me, but he reminded me that's a two-way street.  I know that if we both make a diligent effort to be healthy, we'll be better off in the long run.  Especially since we plan on being married for like, a hundred more years.

All in all, the class was very informative.  This program offers monthly follow-up classes that focus on specific subjects, and just knowing that the support staff are right in my building and only a phone call away is reassurance #4. 

I've never been one to keep (correction: make) healthy New Years resolutions, but in this case I don't think I have a choice.  BUT I feel more peace of mind right now than I have this past year. 

I got this.