There are lots of people on social media doing their bit for diabetes awareness, and this is fantastic. However, raising awareness seems to be a big buzzword these days, but what does that really mean, and how do we raise awareness of something effectively? Should I do it by sharing a random image on my Facebook feed that doesn’t tell any of my friends anything at all? Or should I use my social media to share information?
In this post, I will provide a short summary of the information revealed from parliamentary question responses on how many people in Ireland use insulin pumps, what clinics provide them as a treatment option and how many new pump starts are done each year.
My diabetes diagnosis shattered my confidence in my ability to take care of myself, and my plan quickly became to just get through the rest of the term, move home for the summer to my previous summer job and figure the rest out over the summer. Adjusting to my new normal of living with diabetes began while I was still in hospital, or did it?
I realised last year that in all the blog posts I’d done these last 13 years, I have never shared my diagnosis story, so here it goes. My diabetes diagnosis is not unique; many of my friends with diabetes share similar experiences; however, some people end up very ill and may have spent time in intensive care units in hospitals. Thankfully this was not the case for me, but I did feel like I was dying.
The purpose of the document is to provide an estimate of the number of people who are using HSE-funded Flash and CGMs in Ireland and to prompt a discussion around access equality. I believe we need to talk about how fair it is that so many are approved for HSE funding and why some people are still being made to pay.
Many, many thanks,
Grainne
Thankfully, the upbeat days are many and the drag days are not so many.
On a family day out I was reminded that even on good days, type 1 diabetes can be an uninvited & unwanted guest. Our family (me, hubby + 2 children) were on holiday and visited the Zoo. We got as far as the entrance and ticket desk and already I feel it. Yes, the first hypo (lack of glucose in the blood and therefore lack of fuel for my body) of the day.
We were standing in line, there was nowhere to sit. I decided that I would just hold on til we got inside the entrance to check and treat. It was only a suspicion and I could have been just tired. While standing in line, aware of my suspected hypo, and entertaining children, I was thinking about getting inside the entrance and finding a spot to sit, test and treat.
Thankfully, we weren't that long in the line and we needed the bathrooms immediately. Sure enough, diabetes was making it's impact on our day. But, I contained it successfully. It was a mild hypo that I could treat quickly and continue with our day, I had tested while my people were in the bathroom, so the rest of the family didn't have to take a 10-minute break before we started our Zoo adventure and were unaware of it's existence.
As we continued with our day, my blood sugars were on the low-side (not hypo) at lunch which made me a bit grizzly but everyone was as hungry as I was and it was taking FORever to find a bench or picnic table (Dublin Zoo!!!!). My blood sugars continued to behave with some intermittent glucose tablet top ups, just to be sure.
However, I realised how easily my diabetes could've been more than just annoying during our day out. It could have hijacked it. And everyday that treat looms over my head. I'm so grateful that my mental disposition is one where I find it easy to focus on positives, have determination, be defiant and down right stubborn that I will live well with type 1 diabetes.
I attended the Children with Diabetes/Friends for Life UK conference in Windsor, England last weekend.
One whole weekend jam-packed of type 1 diabetes. A weekend of being surround by people & children with diabetes whose names I have no idea of but I felt like they are my friends. A weekend organised to make life less difficult for everybody. The organisers made sure that all the food provided to us came with carb content information.
Imagine eating at a restaurant where you didn't need to guess so much!
However, from the time I left my house on Friday morning until the time I arrived back to my house on Sunday evening I only had one blood glucose test under 7mmols!!!! The whole weekend my readings were low teens to mid teens. How ironic!
I wasn't too worried about it though because I knew as it was only two days, that I was doing a lot of sitting around yapping. I would try and fix them as best I could but I was far more focused on having fun and making the most of having soooo much support & education every where I looked.
I promise to post more about the conference as soon as my children go back to school because I'm bursting to talk and talk and talk about it. (anyone who knows me will obviously know that that is nothing new:-)
I have started to bring my pump into the shower with me rather than disconnect from it for reasons that are worthy of another post. The other morning, my shower was a challenge because the tubing was a little shorter than I was used to. I really couldn't move very much without tugging the tubing. When I was almost finished I just happened to move a little too far and pulled the pump off the shelf, my hand went to protect the cannula from pulling out and my pump swung and thwacked me, right on the ankle bone.
I'm a teeth-gritter & deep breather when it comes to pain but when the unexpected and full force of this metal box hit me, I yelled. My husband was concerned enough to ask me what happened but not concerned enough to get out of bed and check, so thankfully no panic caused there;-)
Anyway, I thought I should "warn" people about the force & impact a pump can have when swung from it's tubing. (This post is to be taken lightly and reflects how ordinary my life is when I post about taking a shower).
When the Vibe arrived it was so shiny and scratch free. I did leave it in the box for a couple of days:-) Until I heard that it was going to take 5 weeks for the Animas trainer to get over from the UK and for both myself and my Diabetes Nurse Specialist to all be available on the same day.
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| The Vibe is the top one. |
That broke me! I decided to fire up the Vibe and see what was different. This first difference was "blinding". I put both my pumps side by side and the screen on my old pump was barely visible. That did it for me! I decided if there wasn't too much difference between the two pumps I was going to disconnect my old one and connect to the Vibe.
Here I was, thinking that I couldn't read the screen because of the sun or maybe, just maybe, my eyesight was going. I could have had the new insulin pump aaaggeeesss ago if I'd only known.
Well, I hooked myself up the there are only a couple of minor differences, other that the major one of being compatible with the Dexcom Continuous Glucose Monitoring system. One is when you use the bolus wizards that it automatically dials up the dose that it has come up with, you can still change the dose and you still have to select OK to deliver the dose. This feature does make me happy, even if I still haven't gotten used to it (after 5 weeks).
The advice I got when I was 'encouraged" to skim a few kilos off was to exercise, exercise and more exercise. In fairness, the staff at the clinic I was attending at that time were not very well educated in diabetes and I was not given access to a dietitian or any further advice.
I needed to lose my second baby weight that was still hanging around 5 years later. I started with the exercise and worked out how to adapt my insulin to my body's needs around that. For me, a 30 minute brisk walk, 5 days a week, took a couple of weeks to get the adjustment right. Initially, my body just wanted to have hypos but by the end of the second week I had mastered the insulin to eliminate them. I did this for more than a year and I felt great but I was not losing any weight.
I have since learnt that exercise burns glucose before it burns fat. So it makes sense that a person with type 1 will never get to the stage where you will burn fat by exercising. Exercise also lowers blood glucose and that, in most cases, leads to taking in more glucose to replace what your body has used up. So here you are! In a Vicious circle!
But exercise will make you body more efficient. It will help you control your blood glucose and help you tone up the flab but I don't see how it can help a person with Type 1 lose weight.
So even though I had toned my muscles and gotten fitter I did not lose weight by exercising.
Next phase of weight loss: reduce food intake. I have always kept a food diary and this was handy when I needed to examine what I was eating and where I could shave the calories (namely carbohydrate and fat).
I was already on low fat everything for many years but I did need to look at the fat in my meats and other proteins. And of course, see if I could switch my current carbohydrates for better ones and therefore reduce my carb intake overall.
The two most significant changes I made were switching to porridge for breakfast and from two slices of bread in a sandwich to one or rye crackers. And a third change was to load up on vegetables and bring in more fruit.
It worked! I started to fit comfortable into my clothes again and I felt better about myself.
Weight loss is never easy, for anyone, if it was we'd all be skinny, but for us type 1's it feels like two steps forward and one step back all the time. But for me the knowledge about how to do it and making informed choices really helped me get out of the mental roundabout.
