Instructions Not Included

It's a busy day. There's much to say and no time to say it. However, I give you the pain of the day. The SHOES of joy did, as predicted give 2 hours of crippling pain:

Today is my wall. I have very little to say, especially not diabetes-related today. However, I am currently engaged in making a storage bag for the shoes. They will be making their first outing tomorrow, to learn beginner's Jive and improver's Quickstep. Tomorrow I will also be baking a cake for my friend's birthday. Cake and handicrafts - I'm a veritable hive of domesticity (who also seems to have lost her lovely collapsible umbrella, boo.) 

So in lack of anything immensely constructive to say, I give you a brief list of things I have observed/wondered today instead.

1: V For Vendetta is a completely amazing film

2: There is a great satisfaction to be had in making a thing for yourself instead of just buying it

3: I am really looking forward to fireworks and fun tomorrow night

4:  What the hell is Powerade anyway? I'm trying my dietician's advice that Isotonic sports drinks might be a better choice than cereal bars for maintaining BS when exercising, but what IS it?

5: What the hell are isotonic sports drinks meant to be whilst we're at it?

6: I'm getting sad and frustrated about my MIA umbrella. I miss it.

7: My bread came out nice again.

8: The fact I can't get a HCA appointment, eye exam and hair cut all in the same morning is rather annoying. Hmph.

Hopefully I'll have something more exciting to say tomorrow. And possibly pictures of the bag and cake :D

You know, I completely forgot it was Bonfire Night tonight until I was walking home and saw the fireworks going off. Fecking freezing on the walk home it was too.

I'm getting a touch bummed out by all the early Christmas stuff though. I popped into Boots on my way home, and they were playing 'Wonderful Christmastime'. It made me sad. As did the Tesco's advert wishing me Merry Christmas last night. And the fact that the little trees on loads of the shops already have their lights on. Now, please don't think that I hate Christmas. I love Christmas, I really do. But why can people not at least wait until after Bonfire Night to start with Christmas? Ideally mid/late November would be better, but I know there's no way they would wait that long.I just like to keep Christmas to December (sometimes spilling over to the last week in November, since I like to give gifts on the 6th December to celebrate St Nicholas' Day, like my parents did for me when I was younger. But oh, can we not wait a bit? Please?

Oh, and for anyone who was interested, end of day score last night was 5.4 mmol/l. Which wasn't too bad

Today's been a bit of a strange day. I've had highs, I've had lows. My word, numbers have been all over the place. Woke up on 8.2 which was a bit of a bummer to start off with. My waking scores have been getting higher. I don't think it's dawn phenomenon, but I can't quite figure out why all the same. Moved on to a slightly more sensible, but a strange dip of 4.6 two hours later. I'd been trying slightly less cereal for breakfast, but apparently took it too far. 

Then before I went to get my lunch, I made an errand regarding shoes (I will get on to that, complete with picture, in a bit). But I clearly spent too long in the shop, because as soon as I left, I was feeling a bit worse for wear. So I headed straight to get food, but by the time I'd got back to my desk, I was really sweaty and shaky, despite the fact it was flipping freezing out there. I tested, expecting a really low score, but discovered it was only 3.9. Still a hypo, but only just. But I chewed away on my glucose tabs, because I was feeling rough as a dog by this point. Waited five minutes or so, found myself at 5.1, so ate my lunch. I'm totally exhausted by now, and remained so for most of the afternoon.

Two hours later, and we've made it to 8.1. Huh. Now a further two hours along, and I'm feeling a bit rubbish again, so I tested again (by the end of the day, I had got through a LOT of strips - many more than I normally do in a day), and I was 11.2. What?! Where is this coming from?

Now, after work, I had headed over to a friend's place, as we were having a 'sofa party' to...well, christen her two new sofas (and very nice they were too). There was food to be had, but I was planning to go home and have some proper dinner, so I had a bit just to keep my levels up, but didn't cover it with any NR.  Checked where I was at, and found myself at 4.8. Weird, but score! Hour and a half later, we're at 10.2. A bit later and it's 13.1. By now, I'm fairly sure that I'm not going to actually have any proper dinner when I get back to my flat, but I'm anxious. I'm not sure whether to leave it, or to take a unit of NR and try and correct. I tell A what's going on, and he 'convinces' me to eat a small plate of his leftover Thai red curry with a 2 unit bolus. For the record 'convincing' me involved threatening me with leaving on Maid In Manhattan, which had just come on the tv, and also his trump card threat, which I will reveal another time. But I can't stand that film, so I did eat it. My test before eating had shown me coming down to 11.6. We'll see what happens in a couple of hours. Before that, I've at least got new (to me) episodes of Psych that I can be watching to fill the time. 

But now, the exciting (for me, at least) bit. I mentioned the other day that I was looking at buying a pair of shoes for doing my dance classes. And I bought them! Aren't they pretty?!

Looooooove them. I'm not much of a girly-girl, for the record. I hate shoe shopping, and do not get excited about shoes EVER. But these are so feminine and pretty and though I'm probably going to be cursing them to high heaven on Saturday afternoon when I've been dancing in them for two hours, I just think they're gorgeous. To the point where I'm going to probably go and buy fabric to make a shoe bag for them tomorrow. It must be love, surely?

So, I was planning today to write about how the marvellous and wonderful TV show Scrubs (one of my all time favourites) talks about diabetes. This was inspired by a conversation about show on Diabetes Support about the same thing. However, this was going to require me watching a couple of specific episodes - oh, what a dreadful trial - and unfortunately for some of this evening, I had other plans.


Now, it's a slightly strange thing that, because I work in theatre, on occasion, I and the lovely people I work with, get invites to various things. The strangest of these had to be when we got asked to go to a branch of Frankie & Benny's for a free three course meal. We thought at the very least there would be some sort of questionnaire for us to fill out, but we came in, ate and left without them asking us for a single thing. It was very cool. Slightly more understandable is that sometimes we get to go to press nights for shows at other theatres, or get free tickets from time to time. But the other week we got asked to go to a launch of a local restaurant's autumn menu. There was promise of champagne and canapes, as well as a wine and cocktail tasting.


Well one thing was for sure. There was a lot of available alcohol. 

Proof in point would be the picture to your right, straight from my phone's camera. (I'm still in love with the new-to-me phone with a camera!) I will stress, however, that not all of that was drunk by me. And that not all the glasses made it on to that shot! I left the office a bit high, coming in at about 9mmol/l (162 mg/dl, I believe), since I'd given in to temptation, and had a small piece of the cake that had been floating about (not literally, obviously) earlier in the afternoon. I figured that since I'd probably be having at least one drink, I was surely better to be on the slightly higher side. And yes, there were canapes. I managed to get my hands on a rather nice smoked chicken....thing. But just the one. Yes, there were also oysters, but I'm sorry, there is NO way I'm going there, not matter how sophisticated it's meant to be. But there was freely available champagne (and not the cheap stuff, either), as well as seemingly endless shot-glasses full of samples of two of their cocktails. Both were very nice. Now, I'm generally not much of a drinker, but that was a lot of fun. Especially because we were the most casually dressed by a good way, yet we were drinking champagne and the mayor was knocking about. But as I pointed out, if you go to something like that dressed down, people might think that because you're not actually trying, you're the most note-worthy people in the room. Totally not true, but fun to think, at least!

Got home to find that my high numbers all day were now down in the threes. Annoying. But tomorrow's another day.

So, it's been a while. I don't know why I seemed to fall off the blogging wagon (as it were), but I've a plan to counteract this, to the point where those of you who follow this will probably be yelling at me to shut up.

NaBloPoMo. It's hard (but fun) to say, and I imagine it will be exactly the same to do. It's a blog post a day for each day of November. It comes, as I understand it, from the same school of thought as NaNoWriMo. (National Novel Writing Month). Now, I was hoping to take part in NaNoWriMo this year, but for the life of me, I haven't been able to come up with anything that seems worth writing, or that isn't a complete hash of already existing novels. So, with the aim of doing Script Frenzy in April, I thought I would give this a try. Plus, as  Northerner pointed out, I have been neglecting this, so here's the remedy.

So it's update time, since I've been absent for most of October.

Now, a while ago, I talked about how I've always wanted to dance. And I promised that I was going to start doing some ballroom dance classes. For once, I've had some follow through. I signed up as a member of York Dancesport, and thus far, I have done two days of lessons, and a practice session yesterday. As of yesterday, I've covered beginners' and improver's Cha-Cha-Cha, beginners' Waltz (which was great fun, but a complete disaster!), and beginners' and improver's Quickstep. And the verdict? It's totally amazing! I highly recommend it to anyone, because it's just so much fun. I've been dancing with a lovely guy called Ben, who's also a total novice, just like me, so that's great. I'm already looking into buying my first pair of dance shoes (I'll not get started into what a minefield that is. I'll save that for another day!). Roll on next Saturday, where we'll be tackling improver's Quickstep and beginners' Jive. As I've said before, I've done Jive in the past, so here's hoping it might be my dance! Watch this space!

 

In other news, I went to go and get my seasonal flu jab yesterday. I've been offered it for years now, because as well as having diabetes, I also have asthma. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to bother me as much as it used to when I was younger. I rarely ever need to get out my inhaler, but trust me, when I do, I'm extremely thankful that it's there. Yet, because I've always seemed to have a pretty solid immune system, I've never bothered with the flu jab. Of course, the irony that in the past I've had a stonkingly good immune system, yet now have an auto-immune disease is not lost on me. But having heard that flu, which I'm told is never fun, also can throw your BS control completely out of whack, I decided that I'd actually go and get it this year.  

Over at Diabetes Support, there's been a fairly extensive discussion over not only the seasonal flu vaccine, but also the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine, and whether or not to get it. I hadn't really made up my mind on the issue, but I was leaning more towards the getting it side of things. I personally get completely befuddled over the whole 'anti-vaxx' school of thought,  but even I had a moment of doubt when it comes to getting a vaccine that hadn't been trialled on a huge wave of people (as best I understand the issue - I'm more than willing to be corrected!). But when I was at my surgery, they asked if I wanted it as well, because they could do them both there and then. So I said yes. This was, I'll be honest, mostly a laziness on my part, in that I didn't really want to have to go back a second time, when I could get them both done in one go.  For those interested, the needles are really tiny, and if you look the other way, it's a small, sharp scratch, and then it's done. The worst that can apparently happen, is that your arm feels a bit achy for a while. And that is true, because my left arm is a bit achy, but apart from that, everything else seems fine.

The one thing I wasn't particularly impressed with about the whole thing was that I hadn't actually received a letter about the seasonal flu vaccine - I happened to see it on the top of one of my prescription slips. I gave the surgery a ring to make sure that it was still on, and to ask whether I should have received a letter. The receptionist was exceedingly snotty, and told me 'It's been advertised in the surgery, and we haven't sent out letters for the last two years'. Well, that's all very well and good, but I've only been registered with them for six months, and since the majority of my diabetes care is done via the hospital, and I order prescriptions over the phone, and use a collection service, how on earth am I meant to know that?!  So, I ask about the H1N1. Apparently she didn't know anything, couldn't tell me anything. I asked whether I would get a letter about this, or was this something I wouldn't get a letter about either? 'Well, you'll have to wait and see what your letter says, won't you?' *facepalm* Oy vey.

Anyway, I'm up at the hospital tomorrow morning anyway, to go and see one of my dieticians. I say one of them, I seem to have acquired two, which is a bit strange. As is the whole reasoning behind this appointment, but I'll save that for tomorrow.

So, to shed some light on the title of this entry. Today is the first of November, which means, as of today, I have been living and dealing with diabetes for a whole six months. Which is strange, when I think about it. It's like so many things in life, which can seem like an instant and an eternity depending on what details you decide to focus on. Six months is a milestone, but it's also a complete nothing, when I think about how long I'm going to potentially be handling this for, and how long other people I know have been living with it for. It's pause for thought, at any rate.

What am I doing to celebrate? Well, I'm currently trying to wash chocolate off a bedsheet (it really IS chocolate, I promise. My friend Nick came to see me last weekend, and as a joke, I put a wrapped Lindor chocolate ball on his pillow, which he forgot about, and went to sleep on), and there is no prospect of cake, unless I decide to make some. Which I could. I'm good at that, which some of you will know. But I probably still won't....although now I'm thinking about it. Hmm.....