D-Blog Week: The Tasty Treat Hypo-Treatment

As I wrote yesterday about the main thing that keeps me smiling through a bad diabetes day, I've decided to pick the 'Diabetes Dream Device' wildcard today.  As we know, hypos are horrible.  They can make you shake, give you headaches, make your lips and tongue numb and make you seem like a completely different person.  Maybe it would be easier to deal with if treating hypos was easy, but unfortunately that's not necessarily the case!

There are lots of misconceptions about the correct and most efficient way to treat a hypoglycaemic attack.  It's not just about eating anything with sugar in.  There are lots of foods with high sugar content, but the amount of fat and other ingredients in them significantly slows down how fast our bodies absorb the sugar to bring our blood sugars back up.  Also measuring how much sugar you have to eat to make your blood sugars rise, but not go too far and end up at the other end of the scale, is pretty much an art in itself.

I don't only hate hypos because of how awful they make me feel, but also because of how much I dislike the types of food and drink that makes the best treatment for them.  When my blood sugars are low, I can't help but crave all the food that wouldn't be a very fast solution in an emergency.  The most useful existing treatments like drinks like Lucozade are ones that I don't like the taste of, and glucose tablets only make my mouth feel like a desert.  Instead, all I want to eat or drink when I'm having a hypo is chocolate and milkshakes and other sugary, yet very fatty, treats that would take a lot longer for the sugar to take effect.

This is why my diabetes dream device would be the 'Tasty Treat Hypo-Treatment'!  You would have a small electronic device into which you would input how many grams of fast-acting sugar you require to bring your blood sugars up to the desired level.  You would then choose whichever food you fancied and the device would transmit the sugar to the food.  This would take the place of any existing sugar or fat that was already in it.  Then you can enjoy a very yummy hypo-treatment that gets into your system quickly, and not have to suffer a raging high-peak later in the day...ta-daaaaa!

Okay, so there are definitely a few practical issues as it could never actually be made but still...I can dream, right!? :)

D-Blog Week: D-Thanks Fairy Does Diabetes!

I've opted for the wild card prompt of 'design your dream diabetes device' today, simply for an opportunity to bring back an old favourite of mine.  The first year I participated in D-Blog Week, and actually exactly 2 years ago today, I chose to use a wild card and wrote a story called 'Weeping Daisy and The D-Thanks Fairy'.  Since then, good old D-Thanks Fairy has made a couple of other appearances on Diabetic Dais and so I thought it would be a shame for her not to show her face again this year.

She used to be a whisper of encouragement in times of need but, as of now, D-Thanks Fairy is so much more!  When you are low, she sprinkles her magic dust on you and your blood sugars rise to them to a perfect level without a peak.  When you are high or you've just eaten a meal, she injects your insulin for you with super-soft needles so they never leave a mark (she may be only small, but she's wondrously strong!)  She never forgets to pick up your prescriptions for you and when you are about to run out of insulin in your cartridge, she senses it on the tips of her wings and flies to the fridge to bring you a new one.  She's an expert carbohydrate counter and she knows everything there is to know about diabetes, so you never need to see a clinician again if you don't want to - just ask her!

She lives inside your glucometer and some people think she answers to the name of 'NOT AGAIN!', but she doesn't really.  More often than not, she appears when she hears you say this because she knows it's when you need her most.  Her real name is D-Thanks Fairy and she's called this because she makes you thankful for the important things, like life itself.