".....your result sure embellishes the statistics...."

As I wrote in my last post, I wasn’t sure how my diabetes nurse, Alice, would react to the result of my last HbA1c. I haven’t had time to post about it until now, although my appointment with her was Thursday last week.

The appointment started out with us discussing some things related to the “insulin pump” that the hospital is working together with a company to develop. Alice told me that they had just had another meeting with the company the day before, this time with patients using insulin pens. These patients had, as expected, been far more positive in their evaluation of the product than us pumpers had been. She also had to tell me that the company seemed to have realized that perhaps they ought to work a little bit closer with the caregivers, i.e. the nurses, on some of the dosing issues that had come up during the meetings. One of the representatives had done some calculations the night before the last meeting, and although he couldn’t recall exactly how he reached the results, he was proud to announce that based on his calculations, the typical daily dose of insulin for a type 2 diabetic would be around 15 U! No need to say, the nurses’ reaction to this statement was utter surprise that was not to hide behind a tolerant smile :-) Anyway that is another story; I just think it perfectly illustrates the need for companies working with diabetes remedies to work closely with patients as well as caregivers to obtain the best results.

Proceeding to talk about my management with the pump, we got to HbA1C result. Alice’ reaction to the results just illustrates why you got to love her as a nurse and a person! With a sincere smile upon her face this was her comment to it: “Well, I don’t know how I should reward you, if I ever manage to see a 6.0 on your chart. On the other hand, I must admit that your result sure embellishes the statistics of the A1c of our pumpers!” No hard words, just a smile and this comment along with the “as it is now, I still think we should aim as getting you a bit higher, though”.

I think Alice is the only caregiver I have been seeing through all of my years with the D, who acknowledges the facts that she can say as much as she like, but there is no guarantee that the patients will comply, and that the changes to be made need to be realistic from the patients point of view too. This is also why the conclusion to this appointment was that I would start out cutting 0.05 U of all the basals during the day, so far not touching those in effect during the night, because night time lows do not seem to be an issue. The aim still is to slowly elevate my general BG level just a bit, but at a pace that I am confident with (I do confess not to like seeing numbers above 11.1 (200) in general, many times having a hard time confining my desire to correct it). She understands that, and tries to work with me to find satisfactory solutions. She really is great, and I wish that all of you could be seen by someone like her, when you need to make adjustments that cannot just be made by a few words from the endo in his consultation (no many adjustments can, by the way!).