Back to blogging

I haven’t been around here for quite a while now. Not because I’m tired of blogging, but because I have been busy. To busy to even read fellow bloggers’ posts – sad but true.

As some of you may remember, I am to start a PhD-study by June 1^st. This has required quite a lot of planning as well as a great deal of patience with the health insurance issues that employment in another country brings along. The issues have yet to be solved, and it has been enough of a hazzle to fill an entire post by itself :-)

I have one month left of my current contract as a research assistant, and I guess that most of our collaborators have realized that as well, because I have been receiving samples and assignments like never before. I’m involved in 8 different projects (PhD and Master’s projects) and currently (and actually this has been the case for the last couple of months) 4-6 of them are active, as in me having experiments and/or data analyses to perform. Thus, I don’t have a chance to finish one assignment before having to start the next one, and consequently I’m trying to alternate between the assignments and prioritize them according to the order in which I have received them, but it is not that easy because I sometimes have samples in queue for a specific instrument for several weeks/months, and then is often busy with other assignment by the time the data from these samples are finally ready. Because of difficulty with some of the data analyses, I have also had to learn how to use 3 new programs – all of which have no or only rather sparse manuals to help you get started!

On the diabetes front things have been relatively steady. Beginning of April I started soccer practice again – I had participated in a practice match in the middle of March, actually playing most of the game and 4 different positions, without having played any soccer but the indoor form this year (the indoor practice ended by the end of January!). We have had magnificent spring weather the last couple of weeks, culminating this weekend with temperatures of 20 degrees Celcius, and this of course have had a great impact on the motivation for soccer practice :-)

Despite the fact that soccer practice has been relatively problem-free even after I got the pump, this week I had my first real bad experience with practice and diabetes. The practice is from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, so I usually have a small snack about half an hour before starting and then dinner is postponed until after practice. This Tuesday I got home from work at 4:20 PM, had a banana while taking care of a few practical things before leaving for practice at 4:55 PM (the field is just across the street where I live, so I usually get changed at home). Before leaving I checked my BG, getting a 4.2 (76). I was a bit nervous that was too low, but on the other hand, I had eaten a banana without bolusing for it, so I just decreased the basal to 60 % and thought nothing more about it. When practice was over I felt a bit tired, but put that down to the fact that it was just my second practice of this season. Back home, before hitting the shower, I tested: 15.2 (274) WTF?!!! I thought that maybe I had not been drinking enough during practice so while shooting up 4 U of NovoRapid by pen I also drank about 0.5 l of water. While in the shower I started feeling a bit nausea, and when I checked the BG again afterwards it had risen to 16.0 (288) – 25 min after the correction bolus taken by pen! Because of the nausea, I also tested for ketones, getting a 0.4 mmol/l result – theoretically that should not be enough to make me feel this bad, but then again theory and practice often tend to differ quite a lot, especially when diabetes-related. I wasn’t really hungry, but I decided to prepare dinner anyway to see if I could just get a little something down. I couldn’t really, however, so Jimmi ate it instead as he came home just about then. I had bolused for the meal that I ended up never eating (7.4 U), so I actually anticipated a rather quick drop in BG. It didn’t really happen though. At 7:40 PM, an hour after the initial correction bolus and half an hour after the meal-correction bolus, I was still 15.1 (272) and feeling nausea as ever. I lied down on the couch, having a bucket placed besides me just in case. The bucket was needed about an hour later, returning most of the fluids (approximately 1 l, I think) that I had consumed since getting the initial high reading – or so it seemed anyway. I felt a lot better afterwards – maybe a BG finally back in range at 7.9 (142) also deserves some credit for that? However, I still really didn’t feel like eating anything, I was just too exhausted, so I decided that I would just relax on the couch for another 30 minutes or so to hopefully not having the nausea return, and then I would have some kind of snack. I fell asleep, though, and only woke up almost an hour later at 2.7 (49), after Jimmi had fed me glucose tabs and juice, as I – of course – had slipped into a hypo while sleeping (no wonder with all that insulin and no food!). The nausea was gone, and finally I was able to eat something. I still cannot really figure out what went wrong that day for practice to result in such an elevated BG and consequently feeling sick. It has never happened before, and I certainly hope that it never will again!

Anyway, this weekend has been rather perfect. Jimmi and I, once again, have had the pleasure to take care of his dad’s dog, so we have had plenty of opportunities to enjoy the great weather while walking with Fido (the dog). Today I had a morning soccer game on the other side of the island, so I was up early – and so was Fido, forcing Jimmi to get up too and take her for a walk (he had no intentions of getting up at that time, but Fido thought otherwise ;-)). As for the soccer game, I played only the second half of it, but actually managed to keep the BG rather steady. With a 1 U bolus when the game started, as well as increasing the basal rate by 25 %, I had a 7.6 (137) before the game, a 6.1 (110) just before I entered the game, and an 8.4 (151) afterwards. This is one of the most constant BG-courses I have seen around a soccer game since I started pumping :-)

By the way, we won the game 5-4 :-)