D-Blog Week: Diabetes Thankfulness

Diabetes Blog Week 2014 is coming to an end and I can't help but feel like it's gone super fast.  They say that happens when you're having fun!  With my University exams starting next week, I thought the past few days would have been pretty stressful as I attempt to learn and memorise an entire semester's worth of content.  However, thanks to the DOC, my week has been anything but.  To summarise why the past 7 days have been so special for me, here are some of favourite things from this D-Blog Week:

• I have smiled, giggled and even had a lump in my throat trying to swallow my own tears, as I've read posts from all of the wonderful bloggers who have taken part this year.  The best part is that I haven't even read them all yet and I've got even more to look forward to!

• Every participant in D-Blog Week reads the same prompt daily, yet each person's post is completely different!  D-Blog Week highlights our similarities and differences - this diversity, for me, makes the DOC an exciting and beautiful thing to be a part of.

• I know I talk about this a lot, but I love how D-Blog Week allows me to be creative.  The themes for each post encourage me to think and write about aspects of my diabetes I may not normally give much thought to, or inspire me to do it in a completely different way.

• This year, Friday's 'Diabetes Life Hacks' prompt was so helpful for me.  Other blogger's hints and tips about the things that make their lives with diabetes easier, reinforced to me how some little things can make such a huge difference!  There were definitely a few 'I wish I'd known about that years ago!' moments, but I know now thanks to you guys :)

• Karen Graffeo.  Not only has she brought Diabetes Blog Week to the Diabetes Online Community for 5 years and writes posts that are a treat to read, but she also reads other's posts, comments on them and gives so much encouragement to so many people.  Thank you for bringing us together!

• Finally, it means so much to me how, every year, D-Blog Week gives me the boost I need to pay more attention to my diabetes.  Sometimes we all need to turn the page and start afresh.  Diabetes Blog Week, for me, is like putting new batteries into my life with type 1, and pressing the 'reset' button.  Well, you know you're ready for a new start when you clear out all of the used, bloody test strips from your kit-bag...

(Is it bad that I think this is actually quite good going?! Haha)

I hope there will be plenty of annual D-Blog Weeks to come, as they make me thankful.  Thankful for the internet, thankful for my health, thankful for my life and, would you believe it, thankful for my diabetes.  Without it, I might not know some of the wonderful people in my life who I have met through the DOC.  It's amazing how something negative can bring about so much positivity, and I have you magical people to thank for that!

D-Blog Week: Saturday Snapshot Of My D-Heaven

For as long as I can remember, I've struggled with very high morning blood sugars.  This has had a huge impact on my daily life, because waking up feeling sick, with a headache and a dry mouth means that you never start your day feeling like the best version of yourself.  As my bedtime blood sugar levels were always stable, and mid-night hypos had also been ruled out, there was speculation about whether the Dawn Phenomenon (the Somogyi Effect) was the cause of my morning highs.  However, my doctors were pretty sure that there was something else having an effect on them.

Maybe it was a hormone thing which has started to settle now I'm out of my teenage years, maybe it's a miracle...I don't know!  But what I do know is that for the past couple of months, my morning blood sugars have been good.  I can't pretend I have even the tiniest hint of a clue as to why, because I haven't changed anything about my diabetes management.  Still, I couldn't be happier as I can now wake up and actually feel ready to start my day!  There still seem to be 'anomaly mornings', but at least it's the high blood sugars that are now the odd-ones-out.

My Saturday Snapshot is my blood sugar level from this morning...

...I couldn't wish for a better way to start my weekend! :)

D-Blog Week: The Little Book Of Carb-Counting Tricks

For a long time, I put up a lot of barriers towards carb counting.  When I was diagnosed with diabetes 18 years ago, my parents and I weren't taught about the importance of knowing how much carbohydrate you're eating, and how much insulin to take for it.  Instead of altering how much insulin I'd inject depending on what I was eating, I had set doses for each meal and that was that.  It was only when I was about 15 years old that I was encouraged by my doctors to attend a DAFNE course but, as far as I saw it, there was no need - I thought everything was just fine the way I'd been doing it.

Thankfully, I eventually realised that carbohydrate counting not only made a lot of sense, but it's also essential to balanced blood-sugar levels.  My lifestyle, and the amount of food I'd eat, would change significantly from day-to-day and administering the same amount of insulin, regardless of whether I was eating one piece of toast or a whole plate-full of pasta, was a recipe for disaster.

When I finally started to learn how to carb count and began to realise which foods had carbohydrate in them (it had never occurred to me that a lot of meat products like sausages and burgers are packed with bread-crumbs!), it took me quite a long time before I had the hang of it.  The book 'Carbs & Cals'  acted as a bit of a lifeline for me during this time.  Each page has photos of different portion sizes for so many different carb-containing foods, and it tells you how many grams of carbohydrate are in each one - it is genius!  

Although I either weigh my carby food, or look at the nutritional information on the back of packets to know how much insulin to give myself, I still find Carbs & Cals really useful.  When I go out for a meal, when I can't find out the weight myself, I know that I can flick through the book and compare the portion size to the photos on the pages.  I've also found that, nowadays, I don't even need to carry the book with me as I know instantly what 60g of pasta, or 70g of rice looks like on my plate, because I've seen it so many times in Carbs & Cals.

So if I could give one tip that makes life with diabetes easier (aside from not wearing all-in-one clothing, after my injecting difficulty when wearing my floral playsuit a few weeks back [read here]), it would be to buy a copy of Carbs & Cals.  You'll never be left guesstimating again!

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: What Brings Me Down & What Keeps Me Up

Today, the theme for Diabetes Blog Week posts is 'what brings me down'.  Talking about the moments, days and, for some, weeks when diabetes is making you want to scream, cry or hide away is really important.

During the majority of my teenage years, I went through a lot of times when I would completely ignore my diabetes and never talk about it.  There would be many meals eaten which I wouldn't give any insulin for and my body would be flooded with ketones.  There were whole days when I wouldn't test my blood sugars at all.  At one point, my HbA1c hit 12%.  I wasn't in contact with anyone else with type 1 diabetes, and I attempted to deal with that by pretending that I didn't have it either.

Things only began to change when I started blogging 3 years ago and I attended a DAFNE course.  I finally felt like I was surrounded by others who understood exactly what I was going through.  Most of the time nowadays, the reasons why I'm irritated by diabetes are because I'm putting all my effort into looking after myself, and sometimes what I see on my glucose meter doesn't reflect that.  For me, however, this is a better result than the exhaustion and illness I suffered when I paid no attention to my diabetes at all.  At least now, when I'm feeling down about it, it shows that I care about my health.

There are numerous aspects of diabetes that get to me, for example like when I'm covered in bruises from injections, or my blood sugars seem to make no sense at all.  There will probably always be times when diabetes will try to get the better of me but, when it does, I know where to come.  So thank you to the Diabetes Online Community - you have been crucial to my physical and mental health.  Because of you guys, I know that whatever aspect of diabetes is bringing me down, I'm not alone. 

:)

D-Blog Week: The Positive Diabetes Poem

The prompt for today's post is to write a poem about diabetes.  In 2012 I wrote a poem for the 'Health Activist Writer's Month Challenge' called Bad Diabetes Day, which I loved writing!  I'm always excited about opportunities to do something a bit creative and different, so I really enjoyed writing this one too:

The Positive Diabetes Poem

As a little girl I'd never tell,

That I had type 1 D.

I was worried what people might say,

And what they would think of me.

Did her parents feed her too much sugar?

Did she used to be fat?

I was embarrassed of my diabetes,

Didn't want to answer questions like that.

I just wanted to be normal,

Eat whatever I liked for tea,

Not have to think about my blood sugars,

Be injection and blood test free.

But as I got older I realised,

No one can be blamed.

I didn't 'make' myself diabetic,

I shouldn't feel ashamed.

Sometimes bad things happen,

But they make you who you are.

Focusing on the positives

Can get you really far!

Now when I inject in public,

Where other people might be sat,

I remind myself I have diabetes,

And there's nothing wrong with that!

D-Blog Week: Change The World

Diabetes Blog Week 2014 is here!  This is my fourth year of taking part and it's fair to say that if there's one thing that diabetes does make me excited about, it's this!  Thank you to Karen Graffeo at Bitter~Sweet for the opportunity to do this every year.  I'm currently in the latter stages of revising for my first year university exams, but the real test will be finding out how to tear myself away from reading all of the wonderful D-Related posts over the next 7 days.

The topic for the first post of D-Blog Week is to share something that we're passionate about.  I'm completely with my friend Vicki from Vicki's Notebook on this one.  I have a fire in my heart for a lot of causes and the right for all people with diabetes to have access to the insulin, test strips, needles and technology they need is one of the ones at the very top.  It sounds pretty awful now I think about it, but it wasn't something I remembering thinking about until last year when I received this tweet on Twitter:

I took a look at the website for Marjorie's Fund and my outlook on my own diabetes changed significantly.  Marjorie was born in Uganda and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was 3 years old - the same age that I received my diagnosis.  She died when she was just 29 years old from kidney failure, caused by her diabetes.  She wasn't much older than I am now when she passed away, yet Marjorie was considered to be 'one of the lucky ones'.

Although diabetes can be awful for anyone who has to live with it, reading about the lack of resources and care available to those with type 1 in other parts of the world definitely made me feel very blessed.  I have entire drawers packed with needles, test strips, ketone sticks, spare injection pens and old glucose monitors and a whole compartment in the fridge full of insulin cartridges.  Other people with diabetes, like Marjorie, are battling to stay alive and living on as little as one insulin injection a day, if that.

However, the amount of medication a person has for any health condition should not be about luck.  A person with type 1 diabetes needs insulin, test strips, glucose monitors and diabetes education.  They have the right to those resources, irrespective of what part of the world they live in.  This is why organisations like Marjorie's Fund are so important - they help to give people the life they have a right to. 

R.I.P Marjorie