Damn Monday!

I am not a big fan of Mondays, the weekend is over and there is no sleeping in (I am not a morning person, despite the fact that I like to get up and use the day fully when needed). Today has just been a prime example of a damn Monday!

I started the day on the high side. I attribute this to the fact that yesterday was a genuine lazy day with no virtually no exercise (the weather killed the motivation to get outside). Because of this I continued by lazy-day-basal until mid-morning today. By that time my BG seemed stable and in range.

I am still trying to get to the bottom of the work piles I have at work. Today this meant sitting in front of the computer all day, gathering results from one of the projects. I had my usual afternoon snack around 3 o’clock, and continued working on these result. At 4:00 PM Jimmi sent me a message, asking when I would be coming home, and I answered him that I would just want to finish those results and then I would be heading home so that we could have dinner together before he would leave for a general assembly in one of the unions he is a member of. Around 4:30 PM I finally finished the gathering of results, and mailed the resulting excel-file to the PhD-student in need of them. I was satisfied having finished that off, and started getting ready to go home. This implied a test: 1.8 (32). Damn!

I drained 1/3 of a bottle of OJ (ca. 100 ml), and called Jimmi to let him know that I was getting ready to go home, but that the BG was holding me back. 15 minutes later I retested, hoping to see the BG going up. No such luck, it had dropped even more, now giving me a 1.5 (27). More juice, some chocolate-covered raisins and more waiting and testing. Almost an hour after the first low reading, I had had a whole bottle of OJ (330 ml) and a lot of chocolate-covered raisings, and frankly, my patience was up. I wanted to go home. I would normally not get on my bike with a reading below 4.0 (72), but I made an exception today, as I figured that at least the BG-trend was heading upward and I should have plentiful carbohydrates on board.

When I got home, Jimmi had started eating because he only had 15 more minutes at home before he had to leave for the general assembly. I tested: 3.1 (56) and sat down to eat. I didn’t bolus until after the meal, but still 90 minutes later I was 2.6 (47). The low trend apparently continues, and I am still awaiting the anticipated rebound. Maybe it will come during the night?

I am up for a test before bed time. I am looking forward to see if this damn Monday will continue, or if I have finally managed to get the BG up in safe range.

Back to normal

I returned to work Tuesday this week. I had planned to take it easy the first day, but as work had literally piled up during the days I had been ill, that plan never became reality. I had a load of sample to digest, and as things went smoothly with the first half of the samples, I decided to start the digest of the second half offset of the others. That took a little longer than anticipated......I had the last part of the samples ready for over night digestion at 5:45 PM (I started work 8:15 AM)! To make matters worse, I had to stop by a supermarket to pick up some dinner for Jimmi and I on the way home. Thus, I arrived at home at 6:45 PM. Man, I was exhausted! Of course a BG of only 2.8 (50) did not help matters either :-/

Now, as I told you in my last post, Jimmi and I had company in the form of his dad's little dog, Fido. Jimmi had - against normal practice - served Fido her dinner before preparing ours. She hadn't eaten it all, and once we started working in the kitchen, she was all around us, very interested in what we were doing, and not least if something should be left for her :-) As we had gullash soup there were no leftovers for her, and I guess that she was a bit disappointed about that. When we hit the couch that was all forgotten though, because that meant that she could jump up and nest on the blanket in between us, calling for our attention. Actually, she had almost fallen asleep an hour later, when we were to take her out for her night walk before we went to bed. She woke up fast though, and didn't seem short of energy, keeping the line as well as my arm straight for the whole walk :-) Jimmi took this photo when he walked her earlier that day, and as you can see even though Fido is not very big, it can be hard to tell who is walking who ;-)


Yesterday Fido's family picked her up again, so when I came home, the only trace left of her was all the shed hairs as well as part of a chewing bone, she didn't finish :-)

Double up

The majority of this week I have spent at home on the couch or in bed. Tuesday I went to work as usual. During the day I noticed a progressively runny nose, and as I had a feeling that whatever had caught up on me was probably going to hold me away from work the following day, I made an effort to finish as much as I could before leaving. As I walked down to my bike I felt like the Earth was moving underneath my feet – not a good sign! I wasn’t low, I was just weak and by then sure that I was becoming ill. The bike ride home took almost twice as long as usual and I was exhausted, when I finally arrived. I hardly had any appetite, so I just had a tiny portion and then curled up on the couch.

Wednesday morning I felt just as lousy, so I was definitely not going to go to work. I didn’t realize how awful my voice sounded until I called our secretary at work to tell her that I wasn’t coming in. When I introduced myself on the phone, her immediate response was: “Oh my!” She told me that she would pass on the notification of my illness to the institute secretary, and wished me a speedy recovery. Later that day – in between all my naps – I checked my mail. The secretary had sent an e-mail to the institute secretary saying that I was sick, and probably would be for a bunch of days. I just hoped that was an exaggeration, but maybe she was right after all.

I am very seldom sick. I do get an occasional cold, but rarely something that restricts my daily activities too much. This week has been an exception, though. I have been feeling so tired, I have had a fever, something which is also a rarity for me, and most importantly I have had breathing difficulties. I have coughed a lot, and it has been difficult for me to take my asthma medication without coughing it all out again.

Friday I decided that I better get an appointment with my doctor, just to make sure that I hadn’t caught pneumonia or something like that. The doc and her trainee couldn’t hear anything alarming on my lungs, and told me that a lot of people were sick with fever, headache, sore muscles, and sometimes cough too (together also known as flu). I will not refute the possibility that I got the flu – for the first time in decades. I didn’t get a flu shot, never have, but I haven’t had sore muscles and only transient headaches, which are just as likely caused by BG-fluctuations. Anyway, I do agree with the doctor that it probably is some kind of virus, whether it is the flu virus or not. What I don’t get, though, is her reasons for giving me antibiotics. I will have to discuss that with her another time, when I am not ill. She asked me how my insulin levels were, and I told her that they were twice the normal. She seemed a bit surprised about that, though to me it just tells that my body is fighting some kind of infection. Whether feverish or not, I usually need a lot more insulin when I am sick. Also, this doctor has nothing to do with my diabetes management. She is just my general practitioner, who I might see once a year, at most, so I don’t expect her to be in touch with how I control the D or how my sugars are. And my sugars have generally been good during this illness, although it has taken double the amount of insulin that it would on non-sick-days.

The doctor told me that usually they would just sent people back home to their beds, but given that I was diabetic, and that I apparently needed a lot more insulin than usual, she would give me some antibiotics. The way she said it, at least to me, made it sound like “we all know that diabetics are immuno-compromised, so we better not take any chances”. I know that T1 D is an autoimmune disease, but I have never considered myself to be immuno-compromised. In fact, when I compare myself to both my immediate family and to friends, I seem to have a very efficient immune system that rarely leaves me sick, and if it does, it makes sure that I recover faster than most of the people around me.

I started the antibiotics Friday. I don’t know if they have had an effect, or my body is just recovering itself, but at least I am now feeling that I am approaching the surface of normality once again. I will probably stay at home tomorrow too, but then go back to work on Tuesday. By that time I will also have a lot to catch up upon. Isn’t it amazing how everybody else seems to be so hard-working, the one time when you have to call in sick? The first two days I was at home I received e-mails from two of our collaborators telling me that they were sending samples for me to analyse. Great! Fortunately I have had one of the students at work check the mail for me to make sure that any shipped samples would be properly stored until I am back to take care of them.

I may have infected Jimmi, as he has been quite ill the last couple of days too. Today he is a little better, though, and I suspect that he is doing what he can to get well enough to justify the dog-sitting agreement we have with his father, starting tomorrow :-) His dad and family are going on winter holiday, and we promised that we would take care of their adoring little dog.