One year already

Huh, would you look at that- according to my blog post history, turns out that today, one year ago, i started using an insulin pump...
i *knew* there was legitimate reason for me to be craving a cupcake this afternoon! Darn, should've gone with my gut (pun?).
Instead, sans cupcake, this anniversary (pumpaversary?) was marked by me making a rookie-mistake: i inserted a new infusion set without pulling those little tabs off the sticky part. Doh. Trying to pull those guys off while trying to keep the needle stable and stuck in your skin is no small challenge!

Ok, some quick thoughts on a year of pumping...
-I love love love my insulin pump.
-Seeing how much i can fine tune my doses- basal and bolus- makes me realise probably just how bad my control must have been on MDI. And has me thinking, seriously, how does anyone manage to manage diabetes properly on MDI? Unless you just stick to a robot- type of routine??
-Not that everything is perfect with a pump all of a sardine. It's still diabetes. It still throws curve balls. For the most part, i still feel like a rookie at the whole thing. There's still a lot to work out, and rework out. And adjust. Again and again. The cool part? It's so much easier to do that with a pump..
-I have yet to do a round of proper basal testing. It's kinda a factor of time. And kinda a factor that, every few weeks/ months, my routine, (the season), and with it stress levels and food habits, seem to change. And with it, my insulin needs change. So i don't really see the point in the whole fasting schlep for now. I just adjust as i go along until i find a pattern that works.. Until i need to adjust again. (did i mention how easy pumping makes it to adjust dosing and stuff?)
-I'm still working out what to do with the pump during excercise. Like running, and dance class. (and sand boarding, and kayaking- stories yet to be told). It does sometimes make me wish for a waterproof pump to be available here...
-I'm till trying to work out what to do with the pump when i wear a skirt or dress.
i'm still working out good spots for infusion sets and cgm sensors. I'm kinda small , so real estate is a litlle limited. Plus, to be honest, the needles do still make me kinda nervous. So it takes me a while to psych myself up to trying a new spot. I'm working on it..
-On the topic of sensors: as much as i love my pump, one thing that i thing has made the hugest (is that a word?) difference to how i try manage my diabetes has to be the cgm (i've got the medtronic veo with integrated cgm, so this still counts as being about pumping). Holy cupcakes, batman! i love having the real-time in context information. No it's not perfect. But it helps. I have yet to go anywhere near any sort of software that will help me analyse trends or anything, but in the day-to-day, meal-to-meal, moment-to-moment-ness of this disease, the cgm is awesome. Seriously.
-On the topic of batman... I seriuously can't wait to see the dark knight rises! *excite*
-ok, so that had nothing to do with pumping
-I'm sad i didn't get a cupcake... (still not really about pumping?)
-After a year of pumping (ok, only 9 months with the veo pump, but still) i have yet to name it. My cgm transmitter has a name (joe, if you're wondering). But i have yet to think of something suitable for the pump. Any suggestions?



My sleek and sexy (in a bulky, pump-y kinda way), black, yet to be named, Veo. Always by my side/in my pocket/tucked into some random item of clothing...

Missing stuff. Like teeth..

So... I've missed some opportunities to go backbacking, and to visit some friends far away. I missed D-blog week (which made me sad). And, apparently, the one year mark from me starting this threadbare blog (blogaversary?) (which i'm ok with). I very nearly missed mother's and father's day, and some friends' birthdays.. No wait, i missed a few of those too. Most recently, i missed an opportunity to go to cape town for a few days. And lately i've been missing a friend who moved to london earlier this year (but that's a different kind of miss).

All of those are just noticable chunks of life, which stubbornly carries on when you're frantically trying to meet deadlines and finish work. Me, i finally finished up experiments (ok, i may have just decided to stop, and stubbornly refused to do any more.. In a hopefully nice and respectful kind of way..) wrote for a month and a half and finished the first draft of my thesis/ dissertation. I'm still not sure what i'm meant to call it- it's the 150 page-long culmination of the past two years of lab work and research (literally blood, sweat and tears), but i'm only getting an MSc out of it (i would feel slightly cheated about this, but i'm mostly just relieved to be coming to the end of this process). It's not over yet- i still have much work to do (my supervisors collectively chewed it up and spat it out gave me a lot of feed back, comments and corrections on the first draft), but this is the end stage of the work. A stage that i at one point seriously didn't think i'd ever get to, so i'm grateful even as i sit re-writing entire sections.

You can miss a lot of life when you're stuck behind a computer for a month and a half. Health stuff, however, carries on. Diabetes isn't a fan of being ignored for even a day. Let alone over a month. I adjusted basals, i tried to exercise kind of regularly, i made an effort to eat real food, as opposed to student-style junk food. Thinking back over it (logging is not my strong point), i think i did mostly ok.
And i still had to make doctor's appointments. I had an HbA1C test, which was ok, and other tests, which were not so ok, and worthy of a whole other blog post.
I had an opthamologist check-up. My first one since 2008, he was keen to point out to me. Woops. I clearly still have appointments to catch up on since my freak out last year. Thankfully, grace abounds and all is fine in the eye department. Phew.
Then there's the physiotherapy i've been going for this past week- somehow while spending most of my time seated behind my desk, i've managed to cultivate an adductor injury, which i'm finally getting sorted out. (is it just me who, when describing all my medical adventures to non-diabetes ppl, starts to feel a little like a hypochondriac? especially when i have normal ppl stuff on top of diabetes stuff? Can't i just have one?)
My latest health adventure? I managed to pull off the crown of a wisdom tooth yesteday while flossing (that's nearly as gross, but strangely not as painful, as it sounds.) i'll keep the further gorey details to myself, but i'm minus a wisdom tooth, drugged up on antibiotics and painkillers, and consigned to a liquid diet for a few days (yup, that's just great for controlling blood sugars).

Way to make a weekend- soups and yohurt and thesis corrections, in between myprodol naps.

dark romantic

In the spirit of finishing those experiments I mentioned last time, I've spent about 25 hours working on our lab's fluorescent microscope in the past week. Besides the obvious operating-the-microscope part, this also involves sitting in a specially cooled, 3x3 meter room, with walls painted black and no light bar that which the microscope itself throws at my sample on the stage, and a dim computer screen that I view the images on.  Spend enough time in the bat-cave that is the microscope room, and it's easy enough to go a little bat-nuts, especially in the moments (I've had many, many such moments) where stuff just doesn't want to work. That said, I love this microscope, lasers and all (in my science-warped head,  she's my baby), and this room can be as much a sanctuary as a mad-house.

I woke up this morning frustrated and exhausted- in the past 72 hours, just as I've decided to finally get round to basal testing, my blood sugar's gone bats on me. I've been chasing lows, I spike a little, I plummet back down low, I spike a lot, i level out, i plummet again... on and on it goes. add to that my CGM alarms that kept going off all night last night, convinced that I was dying, when this really was the one time I was level and in range.well, until i went low again as my alarm went off this morning...

suffice it to say I was in a dark mood when i got to the lab this morning. As I opened up the microscope room, surveying the quiet, the gloom, the little blinking lights on the monitors and boxes- there was a heavy, velvet peace in the air. As if the electronic darkness spoke to me, welcomed me into the sanctuary.
"hello, darkness, my old friend"
but a heavy darkness, not Art Garfunkel's, as melodic as his is. no, this darkness is deeper than that. And so today I share with you an old favourite, and the soundtrack to my refuge in the microscope room this morning.

The music, like an old friend, lifts my spirit a little, sparks some life in my gloom. My mood may still be dark, I may still be stuck in this dark bat-cave sanctuary for a while, my body may still be stuck on the glucocoaster. but i have hope and i seek patience. my sugars will level out. this work will finish.

It may still be dark where I am. So today, I'm calling myself a dark romantic. And I wait for the light.



[hat tip to the Awakening, by the way. An old favourite SA goth band, and owners of the music in the video and link]

oh, hey...

Oh, hey, blog... you look kinda familiar... I know you from somewhere, right? Oh,
wait, you’re my blog? my sorely neglected blog. ah. Right. Sorry… *awkward
silence*… It’s just that, I’ve been busy and swamped… Doing what? Well, half
killing myself trying to finished my experiments for my thesis mostly… what’s
that?... Oh, no... No, I’m not done yet. Hopefully, I’ll be done with the experiments
by easter. (Or maybe just after)(never mind that I’ve been say ‘hopefully I’ll be
done with experiments <sometime in the next few weeks> since Christmas.
Stupid experiments. Stupid OCD and needing to have everything nicely wrapped
up)… yes, then I still have to write the actual thesis… Well, I’ve got the first
two chapters, kinda, more or less… I’ve kinda hit a brick wall with that, some
scientific writer’s block. I’m kind of a little bored with it, ok??... yes, I may have
been procrastinating a little bit… well, I’ve done a bit of traveling the last few
months... no, not that much, just more than you would expect of someone who’s
meant to be finishing a MSc… sure, I’ll show you some pictures sometime…

Hey, you know what? You’ve actually kinda been on my mind lately. Yup, just
the other day (last Friday, to be precise), it was a year since the medical aid freak out. I know, crazy, huh? A year since something snapped, a year since the
proverbial ball started rolling, in the direction on medical aid changes, insulin
pumping, CGMing, discovering the DOC, and even starting you blog, sorry
state that you’re in. I may have remained primarily a lurker in the DOC, but
nonetheless, much has changed, much has improved.. strange, huh?

Huh, a whole year...Only a year…

*awkward silence… groping for something to talk about...*

so…

*grasp on small talk flails wildly, looking for a topic that won’t leave me rambling
to my blog for the next hour or so…*

um...

*...and closes on--- nothing*

ok… well, I should get going, need to get back to what I was doing, and, uh,
stuff. But hey, we should stay in touch. Yeah, I’ll totally stop by for a longer chat
sometime. Soon, soon. And I’ll bring photo’s. I really do have lots of photos. Ok,
cool to see you again.
Bye...

An update: Decision made, and the Perfect gift for a Geek

It's about time I updated my blog.
I've been trying for a while now, but I never seem to be able to sit down and bash out a whole post the way I want, and to be able to share everything I want that's on my mind. That pesky thing called time, crazy schedules, and that thing about falling asleep at my desk when i finally squeeze in a moment to try write, after I've gotten through all the other stuff I need to do that day, have made blogging a bit tricky for me lately..
So here's me trying out a new strategy to see if it works: shorter posts, probably less depth and detail (aargh. But I like details :/)ok, fewer details, and I'm gonna try bash them out in brief moments that I have in the middle of everything else. Like this post, written while sitting in the tissue culture lab, waiting for the centrifuge to finish spinning so I can carry on with the next step of washing my supervisor's blood, and then waiting for reagents to thaw  ( enough detail? Maybe just enough to be cryptic ;P ) it helps that I get to do this on my brand spanking new and oh so pretty and shiny iPad :)

So, some brief things ( a list!...type thing.. Does two points count as a list?)

1) I'm a  huge huge geek. I'm a lab geek, an art/ photography/ anything visual geek, a book geek, and a science and techno geek. So it shouldn't be too hard to picture the huge geeky smile I had one my face the whole of Friday evening (and the whole weekend, and whenever I think about it, like now) when I was given a beautifully sleek and sexy black iPad2, preloaded with a bunch of useful and awesome science apps, journal readers and lab -assistant apps, photography and photojournalism apps, reading apps, and some health and diabetes apps. And some web comic apps, because what's a geek without xkcd? This is such such such an awesome gift, I'm instantly attached to it and working out how to integrate it into my daily workings, to feed my productivity, and my geeky brain. I love it. And the amazingly thoughtful, supportive and *ahem* spontaneous geek who gave it to me :)

2) Decision made: I've chosen my pump. Actually I chose it three weeks ago, but y'know (see above comment on lack of time to keep thins blog updated). So, after trying out the accucheck spirit pump, and the glucometer/remote/bolus calculator for the combo pump for a few weeks (the big "NOT FOR HUMAN USE" on the combo pump they lent me was a bit of a deterrent for actually using the whole combo pump system), I was able to test drive the medtronic veo pump (only the pump, not the sensors, so no cgms or lgs for me to try) for about a month. I do still want to post a detailed comparison between the two systems, mostly because my admittedly not-so- in-depth googling sessions weren't able to turn anything recent or with the information I wanted. In the meantime I'll just say that as pretty as the remote for the combo pump is, the fact that the veo offers the cgms integrated with it kinda made this one a no- brainer for me. Add in the fact that i also get the security of low glucose suspend, and that I actually just like the menus and set up for the medtronic pump, and, well, I'm going with the veo. Woop! I'm excited :)
2.2?) My medical aid continues to amaze me. The only paperwork I've had to deal with has been one form for medtronic, with my medical aid details, my a dress and what colour our pump I want, and a form to the postal pharmacy with my details. No letters,  no justifications or motivations, no requests for payment, nothing. And they're covering everything! Ok, well, not everything- i have a copayment of 4% for the pump and transmitter *gasp*, and they're covering the infusion sets and sensors each month. Compared to the paper trail I had to run through just to get my old medical aid to cover half my insulin?  This is awesome.

I've got an appointment for this Friday morning to get my pump and the cgm sensors and transmitter set up. We get the elite sensors here, much to my relief. I curious/ nervous/ excited to see how cgm goes.