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]

Something Snapped

Since finally starting this blog last week, I’ve been itching for a chance to get writing. I have a huge urge to just blurt out everything in my head before I lose the thoughts, or get cold feet. But the days have been long and full this week, keeping me in the lab, or in meetings, and just generally busy with work stuff (and today, some weekend stuff), and hence away from this blog. Technically, I should be working on image-processing right now… nah, it can wait a while…

Last week I mentioned that I have stories that need telling. The tricky part for me is to work out where to start, and how to tell them, and how to say what needs to be said, without telling you my whole life story (or at least not all in one go).  I know that this this post needs to be about where I stand with diabetes now. I guess part of this is some sort of continuation of “introducing myself”. Knowing where I am and where I’ve been gives readers a context within which to read future writings.  But this post is also largely me wanting to mark where I am now, to place some stones beside this diabetes path to show the point where stuff changed. I want to document it, first for myself, and then to publish it, so that I cannot ignore it. And hopefully so that people will hold me accountable to it, and help me with it.

[I’ve written and rewritten this piece at least three times trying to work out what I want to say, and how I want to say it. Its been tending towards a long rambling  “life-story” type piece, complete with awkward childhood, D-parent-child tension, stupid student days and self-pity. Exactly what I keep trying to avoid.

So here’s another attempt, I’ll try to keep this one short(er) and simpl(er).]

Diabetes has been a part of my life since I was three years old. That’s 21 years. I’ll spare you the childhood memories and anecdotes. Not that they’re not there; I have a bunch of thoughts and memories that have been dredged up from the muds of time. But I’ll keep them for other posts.

I’ve spent a large portion of these 21 years treating diabetes like an unwelcome and inconsiderate house-guest. Sure, I’d do the minimum for it- finger sticks and insulin shots, just to keep it going, because, well, that keeps me going.  But other than that diabetes has not been allowed any significant place in my life. Diabetes has been relegated to the back room, where I would appreciate it if it stayed, quiet and unobtrusive. The problem is it seldom stays there- it sneaks up on me with lows, and jumps out screaming highs, and invades quiet moments with threats of the future. My version of blood glucose “control” can sometimes look like a crazy ping-pong game, and all I want to do is keep the numbers bouncing around between the two slightly-broader-than-medically-suggested limits, so that I can get on with my life. Because I have refused to let diabetes get in the way of me doing what I want to do, eating what I want to eat, when I want it, going where I want to go, and basically just rampaging through life on whatever mission of mine I am on at that point in time. 

Try as I might- and there have been times when I really, really have tried- I just haven’t been able to find and keep the motivation and discipline to tame this guest of mine. Even though I’ve known its bad, known its stupid and foolish, known that it will inevitably catch up with me (sheez, I’ve studied biochemistry, I know how this story goes), I haven’t been able to get myself to do anything other than lock up the guilt and depression in the back and keep doing the bare minimum while I blunder blindly on, with this guest of mine tagging along.

Two months ago, something snapped. It was during another painful and frustrating phone call with my medical aid. During this call I finally realized just how badly I was being ripped-off by them. And I lost it. Not while I was on the phone, just in my head… Ok, and in real life, once I’d put the phone down. This stuff is a story for another post all on its own, but the point is that in the losing it, in the freaking out, in making the decision to look for a new medical aid- one that would actually pay for stuff, maybe even *gasp* pay for an insulin pump- something happened. When whatever it was that snapped, snapped, something else clicked into place. As I started looking around at all the different medical aid options, and treatment options, trying to match them up, and as I came across more and more material about diabetes, suddenly it felt like I finally “got” how this thing was meant to work. No, I didn’t miraculously work out how to perfectly stabilize my blood sugars. But it felt like for the first time, I actually understood how the mess of all the different aspects of this disease and its control are meant to fit together. Yes, I know I’d studied it before, and do technically “know” all the biology.  But suddenly I “got it”. I don’t know how else to put it, it just suddenly clicked in my brain. And with it, and because of it, because I finally “got it”, another thing clicked into place-- a sudden raging will and focus to get this darn disease under control.

These aren’t the first things that clicked. I think over the past year or so, some of the pieces have been slowly settling into place in my head. I’d been wanting to try tackle this diabetes, I just hadn’t known where to start. With a lot of support and encouragement, and the odd kick in the butt, from my rather awesome boyfriend, I started taking dance classes again in august last year, for the first time in 5 years. I also started running in between the classes. The exercise had a huge impact on my BGs- I suddenly had a whole lot of hypos to deal with! It was a good start. I took myself off to my diabetes doctor and had all the blood work done, for the first time in two years. I went back to the dietician and relearned carb counting.  All this has helped- carb counting makes bolusing for meals less like a shot in the dark (mind the pun). The exercise is another weapon against blood sugar, and one that I’ve seen become more effective the more I use it.  But I’ve still been struggling. I’ll be the first to admit that my efforts are still inconsistent, and sometimes it feels like nothing works anyway.

But since the medical aid freak-out, since what ever snapped, snapped and what ever clicked, clicked, I have a raging will, and a mild obsession, to get whatever I need, and do whatever I can, to make this work. Somehow, by waging war on my medical aid (yes, I do promise to post about this in more detail another time), my clicking-snapping mind made the leap and now I’m waging war on my diabetes too. I’ve changed medical aid. I’ve done my research. I desperately want an insulin pump and a CGMS (now to just get my doctor and medical aid to agree to it). I’m testing my blood sugar near-compulsively.  I’m even logging my numbers and shots and meals (ok, not every day, I’m still working on this one. But hey, it’s a start right?)! I’m trying to look at different parts of my control- different times of day, different meals, different activities, etc, as little science experiments (no, I haven’t read Ginger’s book, sorry. I do freely confess to getting the idea from the title of it though). Heck, I work in a lab. I do experiments all the time. If that’s what it takes to work this disease out, I can do experiments! (This also technically changes the horrible log-book into a lab book, filled with all sorts of scientific data and notes. And this appeals to my nerdy side and makes it more bearable :) )

This is war. No more creepy-house-guest diabetes.  As much as I wish it wasn’t so, I know diabetes holds rights to a permanent position in my life. And by waging this war, I’ve up-graded it to a more prominent and visible space, where it occupies more of my time and thoughts. But it can stay there only with my permission, as a controlled and subdued medical condition, not some lurking terror of the future that I’m constantly aware is trailing right behind me.

Whatever it takes. It's war.

This time, this is going to happen.

a minor rant

a rather full and busy weekend, including a fun run/walk, family birthday brunch, shopping, meals out, late nights, late night movies with popcorn et al, and some thesis proof-reading. and, in all that, relatively stable bg's- besides one nearly-low, and a random high of 13 (mmol) late last night. Cue today: maybe it was the unusually early start, maybe it was sleep yet-to-be-caught-up-on, the experiment planning, or the, um, way the wind wind was blowing? either way, three lows (two before lunch) and ensuing rebound highs, tell me that i've been riding the glucoaster. and i'd like to get off now please. unimpressed. i'm gonna blame it on monday and go get some sleep now.