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.

pre-doctor's appointment... excitement?

I have my appointment with my diabetes doctor tomorrow. I’d call her my endo, but she’s not, she’s a GP with special interest in Diabetes. I guess I should find an endocrinologist at some stage, but they’re in a little short supply in my city. And really, for now, the GP with special interest (lets call her Dr S) works- I like her, she’s got a load of experience, a good rep, and a really well equipped practice. Anyway, I digress.

I’m always nervous before doctor appointments (ok, not for my normal colds-and-fu GP, just all other doctors). Especially with diabetes, I’m nervous about what the doc has to say, if I get good news or bad, if I get a telling off for doing a bad job, or encouragement for trying. And then, there are the blood tests. It’s not the test that scares me (needles aren’t really a thing when you’re sticking one into yourself up to 12 times a day). It’s the results that make me nervous. The waiting for them, and finally getting them forwarded from the doctor.

I haven’t had my HbA1c checked since I last saw Dr S. That was august last year. Yes, I know that that’s way too long ago to have had my check up. The thing is, besides being lazy and broke, when I’m struggling to see any difference in my BG control, I struggle to motivate myself to spend time and money on an appointment where I’ll probably be told the same things, get the same blood test results, and feel even more useless about my diabetes management. Hence, I put off making this appointment until two months ago.

But this time, it feels like it could be different. Even though I’m not sure if there has been much change in my BGs since last year, I have to remind myself that stuff has been falling into place more for me; I have been putting at least a little bit more work into this disease. It still feels like my sugars are all over the place, but maybe, just maybe, I’ll see the effect of my efforts in my HbA1c. Hey, even a little drop would be encouraging.

The bigger thing about this appointment for me is that, for once, I’m actually excited about it. I’m still fostering my recently-acquired raging will to take this stupid diabetes on. The past month, especially, has seen me gathering information about what’s out there in diabetes developments land, and what is actually going on with my own diabetes. I may not have a pattern worked out yet, but I have the data. And a whole lot of questions about it- what can be changed, how to tackle different trends that crop up every so often, and what the heck to do when what should normally work doesn’t seem to work at all.

PLUS, I’m super excited to chat to Dr S about me getting an insulin pump and CGMS. She’s been asking for years if she can put me on a pump yet. For mostly financial reasons (my family doesn’t have much spare cash for such expensive equipment, and there was no chance this side of eternity that my (now old) medical aid was going to cover it), plus a fair amount of hard-headed stupidity for my part, a pump was never really a possibility. That’s changed- my new medical aid was selected specifically because they have a history of paying for these things. This might actually happen, and I’m so super stoked. It’s probably going to take a few months to make this a reality, but at least tomorrow I get to pull Dr S on board with this plan, and hopefully get the ball rolling so this can happen as soon as possible.

Excitement J