Rss Feed

  1. Enough is enough (is enough, is enough)

    Tuesday, 6 October 2009

    It's 21:00. I'm stewarding a show at work. I'm having my second hypo of the day. I have had enough.

    ENOUGH, I tell you.

    I'm just having one of those days, but I have had enough of this stupid disease and the way it plays with my mind and my emotions. I have had enough of chewing on glucose tabs, and getting close to tears when my GP's repeat prescription service messes up my test strips AGAIN. I have had enough of not being able to fathom out WHY I can't think straight, and why I'm completely drained of energy.

    And the thing is, that I think you can empathise, you can be completely supportive, and I am SO thankful that so many people in my life are, that I can't even begin to express it properly. But if you've not experienced this, you still can't fully appreciate it.

    I may often think otherwise, but I am a reasonably intelligent and capable person. I hate that this can render me totally unable to function, and carry out my job properly. I have had it with this stupid disease.

    Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

    Posted by Becky at 21:01 | Labels: , , , , , | 0 comments |

  2. Monday, 21 September 2009

    Come Tuesday, I'm doing a carbohydrate-counting course. So, in the lead up to that, I'm having to keep a food diary. I hate doing it. I don't like recording everything I eat. That's that really.

    Had a horribly confusing hypo earlier. I had no warning signs that I usually have, and I was down in the low 2's. I did 4 tests, all of which confirmed this, but since I wasn't shaking, I came to the conclusion that my meter was broken, and that the logical conclusion was to try and get some control solution tomorrow. Makes perfect sense, obviously.

    Posted by Becky at 00:02 | Labels: , , , , | 0 comments |

  3. Making yourself visible

    Wednesday, 16 September 2009

    It's no secret (since I've mentioned it on here before), that I like reading Kerri Sparling's blog, Six Until Me. And over there, Kerri is blogging, like so many people out there in the online community, for Invisible Illness Awareness Week. Now, I've been wanting to do my part, and raise my voice, but what to say has been hard to come up with. And I think Kerri said it best, when she pointed out that, if you were to look at me, or take a picture, you wouldn't think there was anything wrong with me. You'd have to look hard.

    So, because it might be hard to see, here are my signs.

    I wear a medical ID bracelet. (And yes, that picture is actually the stock photo off the website for my actual bracelet) As they go, it's actually rather nice. I was totally resistant to getting one at all, because I didn't want to 'flaunt' my diabetes. I wanted it to be invisible. But, I could hear in the tone of my Mum's voice, and sometimes from the things she flat-out said to me, that she was worried about me going hypo somewhere on my way home from a late night rehearsal of from stewarding, so on, so on. So it was mainly to appease her that I bought it. It's not so bad, I suppose.

    If you look at the sides of my fingertips, they're covered in tiny marks from testing. This, I really hate. And laughably, as I just finished writing that sentence, my meter starts bleeping at me, telling me to test. 3.2mmol (58 mg/dl). Bring on the apple juice. I thought I'd felt a little shaky. But there you go. That's the point. I'm sat in the room with my flatmate, and because I'm not at the stage where my shaking is more than an inward feeling or slight tremor of my hands, there is absolutely no way of telling that there's anything wrong. Even knowing me, and knowing my diabetes the best out of my friends and family, there's really no way he could tell.

    Recently, I've been trying to compose facebook messages to two friends of mine. One who I'm close with despite having not known her that long, and then another who I lived with and was super close with at university. The first I don't see often because she's over in America. The other, I haven't seen in nearly three years. Now, when they ask you 'what's new with you?', what am I supposed to say? Diabetes is obviously my big news, but how do you drop it into casual conversation? With people I haven't spoken to in a while, like a lot of my old uni friends, it's turning into my rather big elephant in the corner. And bless these friends, they're not ignoring the elephant, for their part, they don't even know that it's there. I can't do a big facebook announcement. I'm not going to call them all individually and tell them, I'm not going to email them just to tell them these things. It's not what you do.

    I went to see doctors, and went in and out of hospital without mentioning this to a lot of my friends. My circle of friends who I see daily through work, and my friend Nick and his partner (who I am unbelievably close to, but lives the other end of the country. So we stay in touch mostly by phone, facebook and now Skype) were the only people who I told. In heading up for 5 months, I've only made one facebook status update relating to diabetes. And even then it was vague. I'm not ashamed of this. I haven't done anything wrong. But why would my friends on facebook care about my HbA1c, when I'm hypo, etc, etc?

    This last weekend, I took part in a fundraising event with my work. It was a 24-hour Improthon, where there was non-stop improvised theatre for 24 hours. I did 13 out of those 24 hours, from 4am-5pm. I took injections whilst I was there, I tested my BS, I treated a hypo (dammit!). I had a few odd looks from some other people taking part. Mainly because some of these were people that I had either taught as a youth theatre leader, or had otherwise known for years. And they'd never seen me do these things before.

    But how do I bring it up?

    If they ask me a question, I'll answer, but how do you make something that is completely invisible, visible?

    Well, diabetes is a chronic illness with currently no cure. I guess I've got time to try and figure it out.

    And as a move forward, I may just make a facebook status to let people know that I'm blogging for Invisible Illness Week. Maybe some of them are just as invisible, and would like to be seen. Who knows?

    xx

    Posted by Becky at 22:54 | Labels: , , , , , , , , | 0 comments |

  4. Dream a little dream of me...

    Sunday, 30 August 2009

    I think everyone has dreams. I don't think you're really human if you don't. I know I dream. But it seems to me that, so often our dreams seem completely unattainable. I think back on the many, many things I've said to myself that I want to achieve over the years. So many of them seem utterly ridiculous now. For years and years, I've wanted to be an actress. And guess what? I've done it. So that's one box ticked. It may not have been for a particularly great company, or very long lasting, but I did it.

    But, before that, I had a dream that I quite frequently pretend that I never had. It's one that a lot of little girls have at about the age of 5 or 6 I think. I wanted to be a dancer. Quite badly. I went to ballet classes, as a lot of girls do. Actually, if memory serves me, I had a chiropodist who 'strongly recommended' that I went. I had a curvature of the foot that meant I didn't really walk in a straight line, and he thought that would help. And I did ballet classes for a couple of years, and then started tap. Then I stopped. And for the life of me, I can't remember why. I think it was getting too expensive. But over the years, I've done various dancing classes. I did modern dance, where I remember my mum bargaining with me, that I could only go if I had school dinners, which we got for free. Otherwise we couldn't afford it. Now, I did this for a while, and did a few exams and earned a few rosettes even. But again, I stopped. Again, I think I knew it was getting too expensive to carry on.

    After that, when I had my own pocket money, I took up line dancing. It was pretty fashionable at the time, and I was actually good. I won a regional trophy against people I was pretty sure would wipe the floor with me. I passed lots of exams with extremely respectable marks. I had a bash at choreography, and it actually led me to meet the closest thing I've ever had to a boyfriend (but let's leave my miserable excuse of a love life out of it, hey?). But again, I stopped.

    I was a fat kid. I got thrown out of the school dance production auditions because I was too fat. This sounds like something I'm making up, I know. But I swear it's true. I got through to the last audition, only for the head of dance to tell me 'You're too big. You won't keep up with the rest of the cast.' and ask me to leave. And I didn't really dance any more after that. Sure I did a few workshops and whatnot, but all I could think was that I was clumsy and graceless, and too fat for dancing. I had far too many people who called me clumsy, and it really did nothing for my self esteem. Because I believed them.

    Now, I'm sure you're probably wondering what this all has to do with diabetes. And that's a fair question at this point. But stay with me, I'll get to the point eventually.

    So when I went to university, I went to Cumbria Institute of the Arts and did a degree in Performing Arts. This, naturally, included dance. Our dance tutor there put me in the 'high stream' class. I argued with her, and didn't understand why. I found the whole thing extremely frustrating, and shed more than a few tears over it, because I just couldn't keep up. But in retrospect, I know why she did it. I was better than I gave myself credit for. I didn't sign up to take part in dance shows, or take the dance electives, because all I could think was 'fat, clumsy, graceless'. But I'd see what they were doing, and part of me knew I was missing out. But I took up tango for a while, and loved it. Then after uni, I took modern jive classes as something to do in our town, which was in the middle of no-where. It was simply bad timing that I actually got an acting job which took me away, and I then moved to York, so I've not been able to carry it on.

    There are lots of other things I've wanted to be able to do. When I was younger, I imagined that by the time I was 25, I'd be working regularly as an actress, have an amazing boyfriend, two cats and a gorgeous home. I'd be playing at least five instruments, painting, know how to surf. I would be a published author. I would travel, and speak multiple languages. I would know how to fence, do archery, and I'd be an amazing cook, I would be happy going for a run. I would be pretty and slim and confident. Oh, and of course, I would dance. And if I want to stay in line with that, I have about 6 months to complete an awful lot! And it wasn't that long ago that I thought all these things were achievable.

    Now, with diabetes thrown into the mix, I've got a whole load of new things I want to achieve. I want to lose enough weight for my BMI to edge away from its current 29 (I really hate BMI - I think it makes everyone feel bad). I want a brilliant HbA1C. I want perfection in my blood sugars. No hypos. No highs. I want to be able to take everything in my stride. I don't want to ever feel down, depressed, angry, stressed or frustrated about this chronic condition that I didn't ask for and don't want. I want to eat better despite the hang-ups and issues I have with food. I want to exercise plenty. And I want to do it all with grace and humour. I want to make it all look easy and effortless.

    Of course, that's ridiculous. I'd be completely in cloud cuckoo land if I thought I could do all that. But wait! There is hope, as I see it. Of course I can't do all that. I can't be a multi-instrument playing, surfing, quad-lingual, travelling actress with perfect blood sugars, a HbA1C to envy, and probably perfect hair and skin as well. But what I can do is try. Simply TRY to achieve some of these things, and be realistic about what I can and can't do. Self-destructive behaviours don't help anyone, and they simply hurt you. Now, I'm not claiming that I won't ever doubt myself or want to quit trying to do better. What I need to try and realise is that I could do all these things, and be this amazing person, but I'm probably not too bad as I am. Even if I don't think I am.

    So, just to take stock of a few things, I've lowered my HbA1c from 8.8 to 6.0 since June. That's pretty good. I've lost about a stone pre-diagnosis, and I've not put any of it back on. I've lost another couple of pounds. That's an achievement, Becky! I'm going to try and get to the bottom of why I keep hitting the 3's before lunch. Oh, and I plan to send an email to York Dance Sport about their beginner's ballroom classes after the Bank Holiday weekend is over.

    So what about you? Want to join me? What's your dance class?

    xx

    Posted by Becky at 21:38 | Labels: , , , , , | 0 comments |

  5. 200 needles in

    Thursday, 27 August 2009

    I have a box of pen needles on top of the bureau in my bedroom. Every morning I pick out three of them to put in the case of my meter, so that I have all the three I'll need for the day, in case I get delayed somewhere and I'm not at home for dinner. Yesterday there were three left in the box. That was my second box of 100 needles. It was then that it hit me that I've been through 200 needles. In honour of the 200 needles, I was hoping to come up with a list of 200 things that I've learned/realised/observed during the time I used them.

    Then I tried it. It's hard. So I managed 50 things. And here they are...

    1: I actually have to eat. It's rather important.
    2: Chocolate is not the be all and end all of everything.
    3: I really miss the ability to freely drink fruit juice.
    4: Apparently I look like a horse chomping on polos whilst eating glucose tablets (I've been told this by my friend Jenny several times)
    5: When you don't drink coffee, and don't know how to carb count, there's basically nothing at Starbucks that you can freely eat or drink other than bottled water.
    6: When you have a 30% discount card, and go and pick up things for other people in the office relatively frequently, this can really get annoying.
    7: You cannot make a mango fool with Splenda. It makes something rather like scrambled eggs instead.
    8: Suddenly having to do fasting bloods on a night that you've invited 10 people over for food is somewhat inconvenient.
    9: Then finding out that those bloods actually had to be done at the hospital rather than the GP's and needed to make it to the lab within 30 minutes, not 40 hours (meaning they had to be done again) is irritating.
    10: Discovering that the labs at the hospital caught fire the morning you go to get those bloods redone is concerning. Thankfully they were no longer on fire when I was there.
    11: The irony that Innocent Drinks finally made a banana free smoothie which I love, and had become hooked on just before I got diagnosed, which I can't really drink any more, with 29g of carbs and 26g of sugars per 250ml, is not lost on me. (In case you don't know, I cannot stand bananas, and don't tend to eat a lot of fruit and veg, so that smoothie was like sweet lime rain from heaven)
    12: Nairn's oatcakes are amazing. Both regular and ginger.
    13: If you actually have to eat breakfast in the morning, you do need to factor in getting up earlier into the equation. Otherwise you're just late all the time.
    12: The less Cadbury's Dairy Milk you eat, the less chocolately it tastes when you eat it again, the more it tastes of cocoa butter. (Also, bravo to Cadbury's for making Dairy Milk FairTrade now!)
    13: If you accidentally lock a sharps box, it takes the force of a man with a pocket knife to get back into it.
    14: Said man will then tease you about accidentally locking it for quite some time.
    15: When you test and you come up with a score of 12.4mmol (199 mg/dl), two glasses of white wine will get you back down to under 10, and pleasantly drunk and marginally more aggressive than normal whilst playing Mario Kart on the Wii.
    16: When out and about, there is nothing more frustrating than being in bar or restaurant and having only water or diet coke as your non-alcoholic options. How about another diet drink?
    17: People who say that you should get some orange juice instead make me want to bang my head against the wall, no matter how well meaning they might be.
    18: I don't think my fingertips will ever look normal again.
    19: Pins and needles now make me worry, when before it just made me think my foot was asleep.
    20: I still wonder why no matter what time of day it is, and regardless of whether or not there are any children there, the TV in the reception at clinic always plays children's TV.
    21: The guy who does my height, weight, blood pressure et cetera, at clinic clearly has a broken measuring stick because there is just no way I am as short as he says I am, because everyone I know who is shorter than me would have to be ridiculously small!
    22: There is really nothing that can explain how miserable it is when the only long lasting carbs you have access to are some very, very soft digestive biscuits, and having to eat them anyway.
    23: Despite the fact that people have so many complaints about it, I'm very proud to be part of a country that has a system like the NHS, and I really wouldn't want to be without it. I just don't understand a society that could provide health care for all and doesn't. It just seems wrong to me. Give me the NHS even with its faults any day.
    24: I'm not totally sure that my meter reads below 1.9mmol. Either that, or the lowest I seem to go whilst hypo just happens to always be 1.9
    25: I hate having to throw away an insulin pen because it's been out of the fridge more than 28 days when there's still about 100 units left in there.
    26: Frio wallets continue to fascinate me
    27: The online diabetes community is full of pretty fantastic people.
    28: I feel extremely bad about having encouraged people to by 'diabetic' chocolates in a former job at Thorntons. I blame the fact that they expected me to sell lots of things, regardless of what they were because I was their best salesperson. However, I still feel bad!
    29: Having tried a bar of 'diabetic' fudge, I can honestly say that though it doesn't taste bad, or give me any of the rumoured laxative effects, it still has some 'interesting' effects.
    30: I shall not be hurrying back for more.
    31: My meter, the Asencia Contour seems to be deeply unsexy in the world of meters. Although they have said they will be sending me a pink case for my meter. I would have preferred a colour other than pink, but beggars can't be choosers.
    32: When you pick up a box of Splenda, it does seem like it's actually completely empty. If it were it would be a very expensive box of nothing.
    33: Glucotabs taste like slightly stale Refreshers - not unpleasant but odd.
    34: I have an incorrect set of test strips on my prescription, which I sometimes get instead of the correct ones. I still have absolutely no idea how to get rid of the wrong ones, despite telling the pharmacist again and again that I would really like to know how to do this.
    35: Cinemas have absolutely rubbish snacks when you think eating popcorn is probably a bad idea.
    36: Articles in magazines, etc, that just say 'diabetes' and don't differentiate between Type 1 and Type 2 really get my goat.
    37: Re-reading the Babysitter's Club book 'Stacey's Emergency' is quite comic with more knowledge. Also a flashback to being really little and enjoying the BSC series a lot.
    38: I find injecting in any place other than my stomach awkward, and particularly in my arm, a bit painful.
    39: This is weird, because after I left hospital, I really didn't want to inject in my stomach, because I found the idea strange.
    40: I'm oddly proud of the fact I managed to inject in the cinema without anyone noticing.
    41: I found the story of the demise of my friend's diabetic cat, Marmite upsetting. Not because of the fact it was heavily caused by the diabetes, but just because I love cats.
    42: Listening to my body is rather crucial.
    43: When I'm hypo, I find myself obsessing over the strangest things, which become the centre of my universe for that period of time, and then I can't always remember them five minutes afterwards.
    44: A dream that I had (actually last night) in which I forgot to take one shot of insulin, then decided to make up for it by taking two (whilst shopping for a basketball, if I remember correctly), disturbed me greatly. Mostly because it took me a minute or so to realise that I hadn't actually done it
    45: People behind the bar don't seem to ever listen to you when you say DIET coke. This actually caused a friend of mine to yell at one bartender. She then turned to me and asked me if I minded her bringing up my diabetes. I didn't, but it was a bit late then!
    46: Dead test strips get everywhere! I still can't work out how one got inside my sock.
    47: I still don't like needles. Especially if I'm not the one controlling them.
    48: A 45g 70% cocoa Divine Bar is 12g of carbs, and I can't easily eat a whole bar. Which makes it a good choice, as chocolate goes. And it's FairTrade (which is very important to me).
    49: I found myself amazed at achieving the magical 5.6 (90mg/dl) that seems to be on most boxes of glucose meters, today. Interestingly enough, not on the box of mine, which has 5.2
    50: I never appreciated how amazing my pancreas was until it stopped working properly.

    Posted by Becky at 21:42 | Labels: , , , , , | 0 comments |

  6. What's in your bag?

    Wednesday, 26 August 2009

    So, I am a huge, huge fan of Kerri Sparling's blog, Six Until Me so, when I discovered that not only could I record videos with my laptop, but that she'd thrown down a vlog challenge, I had to have a go.

    So, this is "What's in your bag?" - my first attempt at vlogging


    Posted by Becky at 22:15 | Labels: | 2 comments |

  7. Guilt, with a side order of guilt

    Saturday, 22 August 2009


    I have this problem. I'll mentally compose a post for here, but by the time I actually get a chance to sit down and write it down, I forget what I was going to say in the first place. And then I feel guilty. Which strangely enough, is what has been preying on my mind a lot lately.

    I tend to feel a lot of guilt, over a lot of things. I'm not sure why. But when it comes to the whole subject of guilt, there are two schools of thought that I always seem to remember. Number one is that guilt is normal, but you shouldn't let it eat you alive. Number two was something that I read in a book several years ago. Which was 'guilt is a self-indulgence'. Battling between these two ideas often ends up with my feeling guilty about feeling guilty. Which can get dizzying.

    But, what have I got to feel guilty about, you might ask? Oh, just about everything. If I eat lunch too late, having a lie in on a Saturday morning, which means I didn't probably eat breakfast early enough. Taking a lift home from work that was offered, instead of walking, which means I probably didn't exercise enough that day. Not drinking enough water. Forgetting to log down my BS scores for 5 days, choosing to leave them in my meter instead, which means I couldn't see any patterns forming.

    If I have a score that's over 7 mmol/L, I'm cursing myself for what I could have eaten to push myself up. If I'm anything lower than 4, I'm telling myself that I've chosen foods that were too high GI, or been irresponsible for leaving it too long without eating, or not testing enough. If I have a snack, I beat myself for a lack of self control, and for being 'bad'. Any hypo is obviously a source of feelings of failure.

    When they weren't sure whether I had T1 or T2, I was hoping and praying that it would be confirmed as T1. Not that I wanted either one, obviously, but because of T1 being an auto-immune condition, which means there was less way I could be blamed for it. Now, please don't read into this that I think people with T2 are to blame for their diabetes. I don't, but so many people do seem to think that, and I, in my selfishness, wasn't sure that I could cope with that. But of course, I remain unconvinced that I didn't in some way, do something to cause my T1.

    Pre-diagnosis, I did, as many people do, lose a lot of weight. I'm actually fairly convinced that I lost a lot of it on the days leading up to going into hospital. I lost about a stone. And of course, on one level, I'm fairly pleased with this, because I needed and wanted to lose some weight. But now, every time someone congratulates me on losing it, I feel bad, because it wasn't through my own efforts. And even though I'm now the thinnest I've been in years, apparently my BMI is still 29, which makes me heavily into overweight on those charts, and on the border of being obese.

    I have clinic on Monday, and wondering about what my A1c is going to be is driving me crazy. I was at 8.8 last time I had it done, and I'm hoping so badly that I've brought it down, but I'm not convinced.

    So what do you do with it all? I have absolutely no idea...

    xx

    Posted by Becky at 14:12 | Labels: , , , , | 0 comments |