Monthly Archives: May 2007
A routine thanks.
May 29
Back down to two humans in the house.
Greg’s brother finished up student teaching a couple weeks ago and is headed back to the area where he finished up his college years. He deserves some special mention here because we’re so happy and excited for him! It was a long, difficult road to getting his degree, but he’s done.
***
We established a couple routines while D was here that I hope we can continue. Laundry/chores one weekend, grocery shopping/relaxing the other. Rinse, repeat. Cleaning up the kitchen after dinner and doing dishes most nights (because it really doesn’t take that much time).
Routines when it comes to necessary evils chores make a hectic life easier to navigate.
***
p.s. I never got to thank D properly for the cleaning he did while we were in Hawaii. It was an extremely pleasant surprise to come home to the clean house I tried to make happen before we left. Thank you!
Sunday cat blogging.
May 27
OH, to be young and small again!
(Perl and Athena, sometime in the summer of 2000.)
Risk analysis, part 2.
May 23
Avandia must work for some people. It must not create new problems for ALL type 2 diabetes patients who have taken it. I have to believe it. But for some, it creates problems they never had before taking it. High blood pressure, abnormal lipids, macular edema. One could argue that those problems may have been developing over time and that Avandia was not the cause – just a coincidence that it happened at the same time as the introduction of Avandia.
I am not sure what to think. Even as someone who has yet to progress to oral medications, I have done extensive research on the different options. They all seem to have either nasty short-term side effects and/or safety concerns for the long-term. Insulin seems more natural, less dangerous to me. (Then again, I have the unique type 2 experience of seeing type 1 up close.)
Risk analysis.
May 21
For those not in the know, Avandia has been linked to increased risk of heart attack and of death due to heart problems. It’s disturbing, given that type 2 diabetes already increases the risk of heart disease.
Reaction to the news about Avandia around the ‘net:
Avandia may contribute to heart problems, but not all drugs in the same class of type 2 diabetes drugs may have the same problem, seen at Medviews.
Or maybe Actos will be next, according to Jenny at Diabetes Update.
A LJ pal reacts to the Avandia news.
Me? It makes me sad and angry. More big pharmaceutical companies making money off the increased rate of type 2 diabetes with meds that may harm, not help. Sigh.
Sunday cat blogging.
May 20
Kahlua, you can’t see the TV from that angle, no matter how much you crane your neck.
Love.
May 14
I fell in love with my husband for many reasons.
His eyes.
His way of not taking life too seriously. (Because I take life a little too seriously most of the time.)
His touch.
His intelligence.
What hardly made me blink was his diabetes. Perhaps I was slightly hesitant in the beginning because of the classmates with type 1 I’d known over the years. I witnessed a good friend’s hypoglycemic seizures on a couple occasions in elementary school and there was the high school classmate found dead in bed a year following graduation after letting hyperglycemia spin out of control.
I soon realized that Greg seemed to have a good handle on things – living alone in dorm rooms and college apartments, travelling back and forth between Chicago (college) and Colorado (home) 3-4 times a year by himself with his trusty Subaru. The first “bad low” I experienced with him was after we’d been living together for over a year.
If I had said at the beginning, no way am I going to date Greg because of his health condition, I would have missed out on a wonderful man who treats me well despite my anxiety issues. (And what if he had said he’d never be with someone who has panic attacks? That would have sucked.)
Yeah, that hypoglycemic seizure in the middle of a grocery store threw us both for a loop and these past few months with his rising A1C have been frustrating. But without him, it would have been harder to deal with my own diabetes diagnosis.
Sunday cat blogging.
May 13
IM IN UR HOUSE
DRINKIN UR WINE
Won’t get fooled again.
May 12
Drowning in negativity does not help me. It does not help my type 2 diabetes, it does not help my anxiety and subsequent depression issues. As a result, it also does not help my husband’s type 1 diabetes when he knows that my physical and/or emotional health become compromised. And then an endless loop of negativity begins between us.
Yes, there are challenges with diabetes and there are challenges with anxiety. There are challenges with career choices and with everyday life. And yes, I know that life can sometimes be downright crappy because I have experienced that over the past several months. It was easy to fall back into an old destructive pattern of feeling sorry for myself. Kneejerk reactions came back into style because I was drowning in negativity.
I cannot lose sight of the fact that when I think positively and act positively, challenges seem easier to navigate. Sometimes it means surrounding one’s self with positive people and positive thoughts, all while knowing life isn’t perfect and that yes, bad things still happen.
If I can’t take care of myself and think positively, I know I’m not doing anyone else any good either.
The return of Sunday cat blogging.
May 6
They left for an entire week to go to a place called “Hawaii”. Now they’ve been reliving the week through pictures on the computers. (The monitors make great places to sleep – who cares if they’re hard!)
We missed them and cursed them for leaving, even though that other human (who doesn’t let us in his room) was around to feed us and make our litter boxes look pretty.
I couldn’t stay mad for long, only a couple hours:
Love,
Kari-cat
A very special guest post.
May 5
I asked Greg to write about what he likes about multiple daily injections and what his fears about an insulin pump are. I aske him this because I’ve had the question “has he considered a pump?” in my comments more than once. So, here he is, with his sense of humor throughout…
MDI’s are Multiple Daily Injections. I take probably a total of 6 or 7 a day. I figure this puts me somewhere around 40 to 50 THOUSAND in my life, after having had Type 1 Diabetes for over 21 years. Why choose this over the pump? Good question….
I guess my main objection is that both the pump and MDI’s suffer from the same affliction: stupidity. Whether you have injections or a pump, they’re not smart enough to know ‘oh, hey, your blood sugar is high, I better increase my activity’ or ‘oh, hey, your blood sugar is low, better lay off my activity’. Continuous glucose monitoring isn’t to the stage where it needs to be yet to really provide the kind of feedback to a pump that would allow it to be a useful tool over injections. What I really want is something that knows what my blood sugar is going to do before I have to do anything about it, or can tell me exactly what I need to do about it. Trying to match dosages to keep sugars in range is an art or science that even after 21 years I haven’t quite mastered.
The appeal of the pump is that technically, I’d be a cyborg, part man, part machine. That would rule. But I think the pump requires more administration than MDI’s, and I loathe administration. I’d love to do the Schwarzenegger/Terminator bit, I’ll be back but I’m not sure an insulin pump would give me superhuman abilities or futuristic weapons. Part of it is also just reluctance to change on my part. I’ve been on MDI’s for 21 years, and they’ve worked OK for me, generally. Plus they leave cool bruises which are like battle scars. Not sure if the pump does this….
The recent trip to Hawaii was an interesting experience, as it highlighted what might be an advantage for the pump: no need to do silly timing adjustments when you travel more than a few hours into a different time zone. I generally take my Lantus (long acting) at about 8:30am and 11pm. But when you go to Hawaii, those translate to 4:30am and 7pm, and I’m generally not awake at the former time. So you have to make some sort of timing or dosage adjustment in order to compensate. It’s a pain, but the number of times I’ve traveled more than two hours of time zone away from the One True Timezone, MOUNTAIN STANDARD/DAYLIGHT TIME, in the last 10 years, I can count on three fingers, so it’s not a huge disadvantage.
Overall, the pump is interesting, but I don’t see the advantages outweighing the additional administration and needing to tend to the infusion site (I’ve heard horror stories about clogging and problems at the site) to really give it more appeal than MDI’s. If pumps can be hooked up to reliable and accurate glucose monitoring equipment in the future that can offer correct dosage changes, based on whatever I choose to do or eat, even if I have to enter them manually, I may change my opinion….
