Back in December, I was lucky enough to learn a bit of poi juggling at work, for part of the Christmas carol service at York Minster. For those of you not familiar with poi, think juggling balls, but with long strings attached, which you fit to your fingers. It's great fun, and looks beautiful when you do it right. But if you don't? Well, you'll end up whacking yourself all over the place. Especially when you're learning. Which hurts a lot of the time.
At the moment, things really aren't that dissimilar. I've been somewhat distant from a lot of things that I'm normally so engaged with. Forums, twitter, blogging here, and it's not because I don't love being invovled with social media - if it were up to me, I'd be able to devote a lot more time to it - thoughts of whether I could actually find work doing diabetes advocacy has crossed my mind more than once, believe me. But the problem is that I'm torn between all my commitments. I know that I'm not the only one - we all lead unbelievably hectic lives these days, and I know we'd appreciate the chance to just press the pause button for a few days, and slow the pace down.
I work full time. I study part time for a Master's degree, which means time on campus, as well as all the work outside of classroom time that goes with it. I'm part of the university's Dancesport society, which means I have lessons, and team practice for competitions. And of course, D always has to have its say on everything.
I'm extremely lucky, in that my work are very understanding about my MA. I've been allowed to rearrange my hours to allow me time to take my lectures, which all fall within the working day. Of course, when I'm not there, I'm in the office. Which means that time to use the library, etc, is all in the evenings. Despite the ridiculous price of it, I do own a bus pass, so I can get the bus to and from university. On foot, it would take me about an hour to walk between my flat and campus, and then obviously another hour back. So I get the bus. But because buses stop being frequent after a certain time, if I miss one, I have to wait another half hour. And they only go into town, which means I still have to walk half an hour back to my flat, usually with a stack of books.
So what's a girl to do? If I go to the library after work, the earliest I'll get home is about 20:30, but it's usually more like 22:00 or later. Trust me, by that point, I'm hungry! I've still not really got the hang of reducing my basal rates, and since I'm high an awful lot of the time, I'm not 100% comfortable with reducing them anyway, as I'd probably carry on being even higher.
I knew that when I signed up for the MA it was going to be a lot of work. I'm not complaining about that, because I knew it was part and parcel. Trading off things in order to not completely burn out though? That's a bit more difficult. I'm glad I chose to do this part time, because there's no way I could manage it full time.
I'll be completely honest. My control has not been great at the moment. My 14 day average on my meter is way higher than I would like it. I'm probably not paying as much attention to things at the moment as I should be, and that is unsettling me a little bit. I don't like taking my eye off the ball, but giving myself some slack in one place is the only way I can think of handling things at the moment. At the end of April, all my assignments for the year will be handed in, and I can think of other things as well.
Until then, I guess I'm just going to have to try and avoid hitting myself with the various balls in the air.
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you are only a couple of months into pumping, you CANNOT expect everything to go right and so quickly. I'm nearly 8 months in and STILL struggling, but work and other problems doesn't come into it. It's a matter of FINDING the time to deal with things. And if you don't take the bull by the horns and start playing with your basals now, then you never will.
I know what it's like when you have a million things going on, and diabetes is just one of the things trying to complicate everything. When I was writing up my thesis, I was also buying a flat at the time, and my diabetes control pretty much went on autopilot, and I did the best I could until I actually had the time to sit down and sort things out. I was so stressed at the time, and my routine was so all over the place that basal testing was all but impossible.
What I found helped was that I still kept logs, and I used to try and see if I could spot any patterns, and then use temp basals to sort things out. There were a couple of points when I noticed that I was consistently high, and so I would do an increased temp basal over that period for a couple of days and then adjust my basals accordingly if it helped. It wasn't perfect, but it felt like I was at least doing something even if it was just rolling with the punches, and took some of the stress away, and I think it helped my numbers from getting *too* high.
I hope things settle down soon! :)
"I work full time. I study part time for a Master's degree, which means time on campus, as well as all the work outside of classroom time that goes with it. I'm part of the university's Dancesport society, which means I have lessons, and team practice for competitions. And of course, D always has to have its say on everything".
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That's good to hear. U were able to juggle diabetes with school and work :) Keep it up!
Regards,
Claire