Diabetes Blog Week, Day 3 - Diabetes Bloopers

I haven’t been diagnosed that long, just about three years now, and am glad to say that I have been able to manage my diabetes well without any real disasters or howlers. When I was first diagnosed I remember getting home from the hospital and going through my cupboards, clearing out everything I thought I could no longer eat – honey, sugar, biscuits, treacle, puddings, ice cream, chocolate – I remember being surprised at how much stuff I had that was now forbidden to me, especially since I had never considered myself to have a particularly sweet tooth.

As time went on though, and I learned more about carbohydrate and things like the glycaemic index and glycaemic loading diet, I realised that I shouldn’t deny myself the occasional treat. Happily, weight was never an issue for me, and I quickly got back into my running, so could afford extra calories when the whim took me. I learned that nothing was forbidden to me, as long as it was in moderation, and taking care to consume ‘fast’ sugar items as part of a meal so I would lower the overall GI and have less of a spike in blood sugar levels.

However, sooner or later every person with diabetes will encounter someone who isn’t diabetic, yet knows far more than you about what is and what isn’t allowed. Obviously, in their minds, anything sweet will probably kill you almost instantly, so they take it upon themselves to safeguard your welfare by issuing horrified warnings should you absent-mindedly raise a slice of cake to your mouth. Before your lips can close around the moist and heavenly delicacy, their stern insistence that ‘you shouldn’t be eating that!’ suddenly hits home and you realise how close you came to an almost certain early demise. Thank goodness for the Diabetes Police!

My goodness! How stupid! I’ve been such a fool!
I’m embarrassed and my face has turned red!
How could I have forgotten the One Golden Rule?
I must have gone out of my head!

Of course! You’re correct! Why couldn’t I see
That the cake that I almost consumed
Represented such danger, for it’s poison to me!
Oh forgive me! May I leave the room?

I feel such an idiot, my head hangs in shame,
For the consequences might have been so severe,
If I woke from the coma, then who would they blame?
All due to my ignorance, I fear!

Oh thanks for your warning, so grateful to you!
I am blessed by the interest you take!
If it wasn’t for you, I may not have pulled through
My mistake in digesting that cake!

D-Day, that’s D for Diagnosis!

Today marks the second anniversary of my diabetes diagnosis. Hard to believe that it has already been two years! I can still remember that first day and night in the hospital, first in the Resus room, then after about three hours I was moved to intensive care. In the middle of the night I was then moved to a side room in a general ward, and early the following day onto the ward itself – four beds in 24 hours! I felt absolutely dreadful when I arrived. My blood sugar was 37 mmol/l and my HbA1c was 11.8. On admission I weighed 116 pounds. Now, two years on I weigh a planet-shaking (for me!) 170 pounds!

I left the hospital on 11 different drugs, plus insulin – now I am on only two drugs. I tend to forget that my insulin is also part of my medication whenever I am asked as it seems so fundamental to my condition The other meds are things I could probably do without and still get by, but I know I wouldn’t last long without my insulin.

I did some checking on my blood glucose meter software to find out how things have gone over the past year. On the whole, I think I have been very lucky and have managed to keep fairly tight control of my levels. Out of a total of 2,119 fingerprick tests (my poor fingers!), I have had 482 above range – about 21%. A lot of those would have been tests taken after meals and before exercise, when I would expect to be above range, as many non-diabetics might also be. The margins haven’t been that great, with just the very rare excursion into double figures. My highest reading during the year was 16.2 mmol/l.

As for the lows, I’ve had surprisingly few. OK, 106 might sound like a lot of occasions for your blood sugar to drop so low that you suddenly transform into a sweating, shaking, panicking idiot, but I probably used to do that on occasion before diabetes! In fact, it only accounts for 5% of all my tests in the year. Looking a bit closer, I can see that I have only had two hypos in the past thirty days, so I think that my control is steadily improving. Overall, the average BG level over those 2,000+ tests is 5.93 mmol/l. I’ve been sticking lancets in my fingers on average 5.8 times a day – which again has actually dropped to below 5 times a day over the past month. I think I have been testing less mainly because I have injured my knee and not been able to go out running.

Got myself a nice big cake to celebrate, and a bucket of insulin on standby! This bad boy has got a total of 200 grams of carbohydrate and 90 grams of fat! Slurp!!!!

Diabetic Jam!

There’s a myth about diabetes that you can’t eat sugar. Like many myths, this has some basis, in that previously it was thought that sugar, and sugar alone, was the ‘cause’ of diabetes and was therefore some kind of poison as far as people with the condition were concerned. Now we know that this isn’t the case. True, it is important to eat a healthy, balanced diet, and that means that we shouldn’t be continually stuffing ourselves with sweets and cakes – but that is true for non-diabetic people too. Sugar, like any carbohydrate, will affect blood glucose levels, causing them to rise. If combined with other food though, for example, by eating a piece of cake or ice cream after a main meal, the effect on the levels is reduced by slowing the conversion of the sugar to glucose in the blood.

Some companies produce so-called ‘diabetic’ food, in which the sugar content has been replaced by artificial sweeteners called ‘polyols’. OK, no sugar – but these foods still contain carbohydrate, so need to be considered when administering insulin doses, for example. Moreover, the polyols can have a rather unfortunate laxative side-effect in some people, which makes them unsuitable in any form of diet! Diabetes UK and most healthcare workers will recommend that you do not eat ‘diabetic’ products, as they have no nutritional benefits over ‘ordinary’ foodstuffs, and are generally considerably more expensive, so really it is about time that such things were removed from the shelves. A market for them probably only persists because well-meaning friends and relatives of people with diabetes buy them as ‘treats’, or uninformed or newly-diagnosed people with diabetes buy them thinking that the normal versions are taboo.

Ah! You’re diabetic? Well, don’t worry my dear,
We’ve got all sorts of goodies that are suitable here!
There’s diabetic chocolate and diabetic cake,
And diabetic jam – took me ages to make!

And diabetic sweets in all sorts of flavours –
For someone like you they’re heavenly saviours!
So don’t feel deprived, they’re especially for you!
I’ve heard sugar would kill you – is that really true?

Now you might find the sweeteners are rather emetic,
But you’ll just have to suffer since you’re diabetic…
I should also mention they cost twice the price
Of ordinary sweet stuff, but don’t taste as nice…

What’s that? You’re declining? Well how can that be?
But you can't eat normally, like people like me!
You can? Well, my goodness, I’ve learned something new!
My business is finished, and no thanks to you!