Tag: diabetes blog

My Involuntary Hiatus from the CGM

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Currently, I’m on a break from my CGM for an unknown length of time.

This temporary split wasn’t mutual; rather, it was due to a series of coincidences that occurred much to my chagrin. The short version of the story is that my CGM transmitter died a week earlier than I had anticipated. I thought it would be pointless to order a replacement since I was expecting the new Dexcom G6 to arrive at my house before the transmitter expired. When I learned there was a delay that would cause me to wait a little while longer, I realized I didn’t have much of a choice to go ahead and order a replacement G5 transmitter. After all, it was fly blind without my CGM for just a few days versus the possibility of missing out on that data for weeks.

fullsizeoutput_75dThe choice was obvious, and as I write this, my G5 replacement transmitter is on its way to me.

Though there’s comfort in that fact, I feel weird not having my CGM data available to me. It’s kind of nice to be wearing one less medical device on my body, but that’s really the only benefit of being without my CGM. The information it provides to me is invaluable, and an involuntary break from it makes me feel uneasy. I’m constantly reminding myself that I managed diabetes just fine for the first 15 years I had it without a CGM’s aid, which does offer a small amount of comfort. But it also reminds me how important the CGM has become in my daily care choices. Twenty-four hour, real-time updates of my blood sugar help me live a life less interrupted by my diabetes, something that’s extremely difficult to give up after 20 relentless years of dealing with it.

You really don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone – even if it is only for a short period of time.

I’ll make the most of this situation. It will at least help me get in tune with my body’s signals when my blood sugar is high or low, which is definitely not a bad thing. And it makes me appreciate something that not every person with diabetes is lucky enough to have access to: serving as a humbling reminder of my fortunate circumstances.

How Raising a Puppy is Like Dealing with Diabetes

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“Aw, she’s so cute! What’s her name? What kind of dog is she?” The woman stooped down to the ground to take a closer look at Clarence, my 12-week old Shetland Sheepdog – who is a boy.

I patiently answered her questions, knowing she wasn’t really paying attention. After all, she was totally distracted by my adorable little pup.

The man who accompanied her – undoubtedly her partner – was chattier. He looked at me, almost condescendingly, and said something about how this must be my first dog.

Nonplussed, I said, “Actually, this is my family’s third Sheltie. The last time we had a puppy like Clarence here, I was practically a baby myself.”

“Well, you know, I noticed that you’re buying puppy pads. You really shouldn’t do that if you want to get your dog housebroken, it’ll only encourage it to go indoors.” If I thought he was bordering on condescending before, he was definitely laying it on thick now.

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I hastily responded by telling him how the puppy chow that Clarence is eating is salty, and the high salt intake results in frequent puppy puddles in the kitchen. It’s virtually impossible to ensure that Clarence is outside every single time that he has to pee, so the puppy pads have been a huge help. I trailed off, wondering why I had felt the need to provide this stranger with an explanation that wouldn’t matter to him.

The man shrugged, clearly unimpressed by this answer, and walked away.

Upon reflection, this mildly irritating encounter turned into a bit of a metaphor for what life with diabetes is like. People you don’t know bombard you with questions about it. You answer as best as you can, hoping that your replies help these inquisitive folks understand diabetes better than they did before. But this ray of hope is quickly dimmed when the questioners run out of things to ask and begin to tell you how you should manage your diabetes. It’s baffling when it happens because you didn’t ask for advice, but you somehow get an earful of it every damn time.

So I guess in this way, diabetes is a little like raising a puppy. There will be highs and lows, good days and bad days. And unsolicited advice will be dished to you by strangers, even though nobody knows your diabetes – or your dog – the way that you do.

Instagram vs. Reality

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What does Instagram vs. reality mean?

It’s best explained using pictures. Take the following, for instance:

Beautiful, perfect Instagram
Cold, hard reality

The first image is basically the ideal Dexcom graph. It depicts steady, on-target blood sugars for hours.

It makes the image next to it look that much uglier. The second picture shows blood sugar that rose rapidly over a short amount of time and flattened out at a level so high that it exceeds the Dexcom maximum number.

Instagram: The social networking site that promotes flawlessness. You scroll through a feed and see images that convey society’s notions around perfection. And it’s annoying. The rational part of you knows that, surely, the stunning blonde swimsuit model on your feed probably has cellulite, only you never see it because it’s airbrushed and filtered away. That’s why it’s equally unrealistic to share nothing but the “perfect” blood sugars with the diabetes community. Diabetes is FAR from being sunshine-y and unicorn-y all the time.

The reality: Diabetes is up-and-down, mentally and physically. It’s not always going to behave the way you want it to, even if you’re doing all the right things and trying your best. That’s why I like sharing the good and the bad – it makes the victories that much sweeter, and the less-than-triumphant moments more educational.

So This Just Happened…

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Whoa! It’s incredibly surreal to see myself on Dexcom’s Instagram feed, but there I am! Shout out to my T1D buddies who messaged me the day this appeared and made me feel like a rock star!

Glamour shots aside, this quote really does capture how I feel about Dexcom. It’s truly one of the most powerful tools in my diabetes care kit. In addition to helping me improve my blood sugars by giving me crucial data, my CGM also provides me peace of mind because it does a lot of extra work for me – saving me a lot of time and energy.

This just makes me even more excited to get my hands on the Dexcom G6, which is bound to make life with diabetes even easier! I have the feeling that I’ll get one sooner rather than later…

Memory Monday: That Time I Created a Diabetes Lesson Plan for Middle School Students (Part 2)

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One Monday per month, I’ll take a trip down memory lane and reflect on how much diabetes technology, education, and stigma has changed over the years. Remember when…

This is a continuation of last month’s Memory Monday, in which I reflected on what it was like to work on a diabetes-oriented community action project when I was a freshman in high school. There were two main components to my project: running a School Walk for Diabetes, and educating a group of middle school students on type one diabetes.

Ugh, the thought of presenting to a group of middle school kids horrifies me now, but I guess I wasn’t so afraid at the time – you know, because I was a cooler, older, more sophisticated 14 year old lecturing the immature 12-year-old children.

*I’ll pause to allow you a moment (or several) to laugh at that mildly ludicrous notion.*

The easiest part of prepping to talk to the students was devising a lesson plan. My project partner and I put together a beautiful slideshow (complete with Comic Sans font, how professional) that we would use in the first half of the presentation. During the second half, I would show the students all of my medical equipment and demonstrate things like priming an insulin pen and testing my blood sugar. We also provided students with examples of healthy snacks for a person with diabetes and when to eat them. The formal presentation would end with us giving students the chance to ask questions.

Sounds pretty neatly put together for just a couple of freshmen, right?

Turns out, it really did go over well with the students! There were a couple technical difficulties (blast those LCD projectors), but my partner and I knew our presentation like the back of our hands, so nothing deterred us from accomplishing the goal of our lesson plan: for the students to have a greater knowledge of diabetes.

We felt like our hard work was worth it when we received completed evaluation cards from the students. We’d asked them to tell us: 1) The best part of our lesson, 2) The worst part, 3) Rate it on a scale of 1-5 (1 being worst; 5 best), and 4) Write one fact about diabetes they learned. Our average rating wound up being 4.2, which made us feel like rock stars! All these years later, I still have some of the best comment cards preserved in a binder about my project:

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Personally, I really love how one student thought that diabetes is spelled “diabedes”. And I’m amused by how another student didn’t seem overly crazy about the PowerPoint (it must’ve been that damn Comic Sans font that ruined it).

But joking aside, this whole project still resonates with me ten years later because I think it marked the beginning of my passion for diabetes advocacy. It was one of the first times that I willingly shared my diabetes with others and let a real conversation take place about it with no holds barred.

 

Favorite Things Friday: Tabs2Go Cases

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One Friday per month, I’ll write about my favorite diabetes products. These items make the cut because they’re functional, fashionable, or fun – but usually, all three at once!

Traditionally, I’ve toted glucose tablets around in a tube. My tube of tabs travels with me everywhere, because lows can be unpredictable and it’s always wise to be prepared. Though the contents of the tube have quite literally saved my life countless times, said tube is bulky. It takes up room in my diabetes kit. The tube is awkward to carry around when I go jogging, and more often than not winds up getting tucked away in my sports bra – not the most comfortable feeling.

But then a little, square, plastic container came into my world and changed how I carry around glucose tablets.

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See that bright blue object attached to my purse? That’s a Tabs2Go case! It holds four glucose tablets at a time, the perfect amount to bring me back up from a low blood sugar. What I love most about it is that it’s dual purpose: It’s a case for tabs as well as a keychain. This means I can attach and detach it from my various key fobs, lanyards, and bags with ease, and as I please. I can tuck the case into my pocket without it creating an unsightly lump, and it stows away discreetly just about anywhere.

I have to give a shout out to Scott Bissinger, who created Tabs2Go and kindly supplied me with two of my own when I met him at the TypeOneNation Summit in Boston last month. Innovative products like this help to make the lives of people with diabetes a little easier, which makes me grateful.

Plus, I have to point out the fact that these cases are customizable. See the metallic embellishments I added to mine? Diabetes products that are functional and can be personalized are the real winners in my book!

“I’ll Have a Regular Soda, Please.”

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A funny thing about life with diabetes is that new experiences occur all the time. For example, this was a first for me the other day: ordering a regular soda at a restaurant instead of a diet.

Why was this necessary? I chalk it up to a few different factors that affected my blood sugar: 1) I did strength training earlier in the day, which can make me go low several hours after the fact. 2) I ignored the diagonal down arrow that had appeared on my CGM, because I really didn’t think I’d end up below 100 mg/dL before dinner. 3) It took a long time for our dinner to come out, and I’d made the rookie mistake of bolusing soon after ordering the food. 4) I also think I miscalculated the carbs in my dinner – I’m used to ordering this particular dish, a cajun chicken salad, with a beer or two. But since I gave up alcohol for Lent (more on this in an upcoming blog post), I wasn’t getting the extra carbs from the beer, which I forgot to take into account.

So yeah, in hindsight, I could’ve seen the low blood sugar coming. But I just didn’t anticipate some of these occurrences, such as our food coming out late. This particular restaurant is usually timely, but since it was a Saturday evening and the bar was rapidly filling up, I should’ve connected the dots.

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Diet Coke has a special place in my part, but in a hypoglycemic emergency, it just won’t cut it.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda. There was nothing I could do about my rapidly dropping blood sugar, unless I bit the bullet and ordered a regular soda. Shoving my diet root beer to the side, I flagged down my semi-bemused bartender and asked for a regular Pepsi, trying to ignore the fact that he was joking about how “diet just wouldn’t do it for me any longer, eh”.

If only he knew that the circumstances required sugar, stat.

It only took him about 60 seconds to deliver the Pepsi, but it felt like a long time. My CGM alerted me to an urgent low and things around me were a little fuzzy. I was trying to engage in conversation with my companions, who knew that I was going low, but maybe weren’t aware of how quickly I was going down due to my determination to appear normal.

Once my Pepsi arrived, I gulped down several sips and sighed with relief as my dinner appeared soon after. I wolfed down every last bit of it within 15 minutes, taking breaks only to drink a little more soda. I knew I needed to control how much I drank, because I didn’t want to end up sky high later on in the night.

Fortunately, my blood sugar was coming back up to normal within no time, and I actually didn’t even go higher than 172 mg/dL for the remainder of the night. A huge win, all things considered. Even though it was a somewhat scary experience, I’m glad I did what I needed to in order to take proper care of myself…even if that meant drinking regular soda, which was actually pretty gross. How do people actually enjoy that saccharine sludge?!

How I Learned the Importance of Carb Counting

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One recent evening, I was rummaging through the kitchen pantry and noticed a bag of “veggie stix” stashed away, waiting to get opened. The sight of the bag instantly brought back memories of a time I was blatantly irresponsible with my carb counting and insulin dosing…

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…It was my junior year of college. I had plans to meet with a friend for dinner at seven o’clock. While that’s a standard suppertime for many people, it was kind of late for me. So that explains why I decided to treat myself to a snack a couple hours before it was time to go, just to hold me until I had my meal. My snack of choice? A bag of veggie stix just like these were sitting in the kitchen of my on-campus apartment. I thought I’d help myself to a few, believing (naively) that I had enough self control to know when to stop shoveling them down my gullet. That’s right, instead of doing the right thing and counting out a bunch before stowing the bag away, I was blindly consuming handful after handful without dosing for a single stick.

I can’t even use the defense that these veggie stix are strangely addicting – they really are, they taste a little like those potato sticks that used to come in cans – because I knew what I was doing wasn’t good for me. I just didn’t care. I had munched my way through half of the bag when it dawned on me that it would probably be smart to stop myself from eating more. I rolled up the bag, returned to my room, and did some homework until it was time to meet with my gal pal.

Little did I know that my blood sugar was rising to potentially dangerous levels.

I didn’t find out how high I was – over 400 mg/dL – until I reached the sandwich shop and had a plate full of chicken pesto carb-y goodness waiting to be consumed. My face must’ve shown my shock, because my friend asked me if I was alright. I quickly explained to her my mistake, and took an extra large bolus to cover my food and correct my blood sugar. Once that was done, I somehow managed to stop panicking long enough to enjoy the dinner with my friend, even though I couldn’t eat a bite of mine until an hour or so after injecting my insulin.

Although it sucked to go through this, I’m kind of glad that it happened because I learned a major lesson from it: ALWAYS count my carbs. It doesn’t matter if I WANT to be lazy or pretend that my diabetes doesn’t exist, I HAVE to hold myself accountable. It may be mentally draining and a bit of a nuisance, but it’s my own health here. It’s up to me, and me alone, to manage it.

And by the way, I did just help myself to the above bag of veggie stix. I had exactly 24 pieces, which equals exactly 5.4 grams of carbohydrates – a much smaller amount than what I ate that one night five years ago.

How to Change an OmniPod

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I decided to do something a little different and take video of how to change an OmniPod. Rest assured, though, that it does not take 22 seconds – it’s more like a seven-minute process.

Some things you’ll notice about my process:

  1. I fill my syringe with insulin and set it aside before deactivating my old pod. This simply means that I wear the old pod a little bit longer so there’s less of an interruption in time that I go without insulin.
  2. I use a pen to smack bubbles out of the syringe. Air bubbles will inevitably develop when drawing insulin out of a vial, so I find that gently hitting the sides of the syringe with a pen is the most effective way to get rid of the pesky air pockets.
  3. I prep my site with an alcohol swab, followed by a skin-tac wipe. The alcohol merely cleans the site, whereas the skin-tac makes the pod adhere to my skin better and longer.
  4. The new pod activates best when it is adjacent to my PDM. I always place my new pod to the right of my PDM. This helps the PDM register the new pod.
  5. It doesn’t actually hurt when I rip off an old pod. Not sure if you detected my dramatic facial expressing, but I was just yukking it up for the camera. It truly doesn’t hurt, especially if you just remove it in one swift motion.

So that’s it, the full process boiled down into 22 measly seconds. I admit that I kind of had fun making this video, even though the sight of myself sans make-up is semi-horrifying. But give me a break, I was on my way to a Pilates class! And let’s be real, diabetes isn’t always glamorous.

My Diabetes and My Dog: Do they Mix?

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Clarence the puppy came home last week! I’m loving getting to know him. It’s beyond adorable to watch him explore his new environment, but it’s also a lot of work.

I knew that he might affect my diabetes, but I figured it would mainly be in positive ways: He’d help keep me active and console me when I was feeling down about it. But there’s also a couple of drawbacks. I confess that instead of my blood sugars being my number one priority, it’s Clarence that takes precedence.

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This little dude is my whole world right now.

It’s not like I’m completely forgetting to take care of my diabetes, or that it’s far from my thoughts. It’s more that I let things go a little longer, that I push the limits a smidgen. For instance, my first full day with him, I woke up and tested my blood sugar but did not test again until the evening. I was trusting my Dexcom readings as I got better acquainted with the puppy. And I tended to graze on food all day long instead of sitting down for real meals. In fact, dinner that first night was almost comical. My T1D mom and I ate a lukewarm meal over the course of about 40 minutes while we took turns taking Clarence outside. We were so concerned with getting him to do his business that we didn’t really care about feeding ourselves in a timely manner.

I know that it’s just a transitional phase, though. Clarence will get adjusted to his new home in due time and we’ll get used to a new routine tailored to suit both our needs and his needs.

And in case you’re wondering, I think Clarence is forming a general awareness of my diabetes. When we were playing on the floor, he walked around me and sniffed at the pod I was wearing on my lower back. He’s a bit mouthy (part of being a puppy), so I was worried he might try to nip at it. Instead, he backed away and picked up one of his toys.

Attaboy, Clarence – he’s a smart cookie.