An Aptitude For Solitude

On my way to Back to School Night, the horizon peeked out through the open car window. I smelled the ocean and pictured myself for a moment out on that ocean with nothing surrounding me but the sea, watching the sun rise and the sun set for four days in a row.

I realized how much my soul needs some version of extended solitude. Some people are made for that kind of thing, some think it torture. For some it cleanses their souls from all the sludge that builds up on land and brings them back more ready to attack life, for some it drives them to madness.

I am a member of the former group. I have always had an amazing aptitude for solitude. It is what often has made me forgo going out with a group of friends to finish a project at home. It is what allowed me to survive one very lonely freshman year of college where I would go for days on end without talking to anyone except for the guy who made my sandwiches for lunch.

It is, also, what has driven me to plan this solo adventure, to push the boundaries of what is thought possible for a diabetic, and what has caused me to spend countless hours planning and arranging and seeking out sponsors to get it off the ground.

Many people have asked me why I couldn't bring someone else along with me. A few were concerned for my safety, a few trying to solve the problem of finding a boat to charter from companies that seemed to outlaw solo sailors I tell them there is an extreme difference between sailing solo and sailing with crew. It's in the freedom to indulge every whim right when it hits. To go out as far from land as I want without having to consider another, to see what I want to see, to stop where I want to stop, and to drive on when I want to meet a goal.

It is so unlike my life on land, where it is always a compromise, when I am pulled in a million directions other than the one I truly want to go. Work pulls. Bills pull. Even having to choose a place to eat involves balancing the needs and wants of everyone else. Tony needs to eat clean foods and needs to eat in the next fifteen minutes. Shea won't eat meat. Eli will only eat foods that involve begin dipped in ketchup. I need to sit in a place that involves direct sunlight on my face and all of this has to be done for under twenty dollars.

But, it is not so when you are solo. It is all me. It is simple to balance the things that I want. One opinion to sway the vote, one need to satisfy, one desire to fulfill.

It's not just about indulging my will, though. It's about testing myself without having any fallback. No one else to confer with or lean on when things go wrong, no one to brainstorm with if something breaks, no one to choose a course or to figure out where we went off course and what point on the chart that huge tower actually is. It will just be me.

When the wind picks up or the boat gets grounded, I alone will have to fix it. If you want to know yourself, to truly know of what you are capable, you have to put yourself in those situations where there is a chance that you are in over your head. It is only then that you can find the outer extents of what you are capable of. If you never get to the end of your rope, how can you ever know how long it is?

I hope I am able to find that point so that I can come back knowing that I can handle anything this pedestrian, land-locked life can throw my way. We will have to wait and see...

My Greatest Diabetic Tool

(Disclaimer: Gu is a sponsor of the Sea Peptide Salties and has provided their product to the team, but I would not use it to save my life unless I knew it was the best way for me to do it.)

One of the greatest finds in my diabetic life was really not a diabetic product at all.

One of the main problems with having diabetes is needing to keep the amount of sugar in your blood within a very narrow window. There are a hundred factors you have to balance and calculate.

And most of the time, you’re really just estimating. There is no number for how hard you pushed on your last swim or the quality of sleep last night. No stress number or hormone level number.

The numbers we do have are not much better either. My blood glucose meter is allowed to be off by at least 20%. TWENTY PERCENT!

So let’s do some math. Your meter says 400. And with a few expletive flying out of your math, you start to calculate. 400 equals 6 units of insulin to drive that sugar out of your blood and into the muscle. And so you coast back to your window of 80-120. But what if really you were 320, 20% lower than your meter said.

So now you are sailing 80 points lower than you expected. Let’s see…80-80 =0. That 20% puts you at zero sugar in your blood. Absolutely none. And I’m sure you can figure out what zero sugar would do to a person. Just like zero gas in your car, you aren’t going anywhere for a long time, or really ever again.

With estimating being so unsure, you need to have a Plan B. Plan B usually consists of some easy to eat, easy to carry, easy to digest sugar source. When I was first diagnosed, I followed my doctors recommendation of carrying Life Savers around (fitting name). Problem is when you are low and somewhat confused, it is really hard to eat a whole pack of Life Savers in under 30 seconds, especially the mint ones.

I moved onto Skittles, but those are really good. They didn’t last long even when I wasn’t low. The 'I’ll have just one…' syndrome. Chocolate milk and Gatorade are my go to sugars on land when I’m mopping the floors and I mop a little too hard (yes, even serious mopping will drive your blood sugars too low).

The conventional wisdom is that Diabetics shouldn’t do anything where they could get hurt if the get low or if they can’t get to a sugar source quickly. That presents quite a problem when I surf, snorkel or swim in the ocean. Sometimes I can be a quarter mile out to sea while exercising vigorously.

I tried candy in a Ziploc, which lasted about 4 seconds. Salty Skittles are just not good. I tried to stash sugars buried in the sand, but they were too far away. I even toyed with the idea of having some waterproof container glassed into my board so I could stash sugars in there. Maybe a little too much work for that one.

My quest was over when I discovered Gu energy gel. For those of you who are not endurance athletes, Gu energy gels are a honey-like gel that contains quick acting carbohydrates and electrolytes. And these things are amazing.

They are the perfect dose (odd that I refer to food as doses, one of the side effects of having Diabetes, I guess.) There is no chewing involved so it takes about three seconds to get one down.

They are designed for athletes so they get from the pack, to your stomach and into your blood stream quickly through some chemical transaction that I memorized in college but have since forgotten in favor of every word of the new Hannah Montana Album (not my music choice, I have a six year old daughter).

They come in these compact cases that fit perfectly into the leg of my wetsuit so I have them ready to go. And I can’t tell you how amazing these things taste after being in the salt water. After the saltiness of the water they taste like vanilla frosting straight form the can. Vanilla is my favorite, followed by the Strawberry Banana.

I had one Strawberry Gel from another company that tasted like a warm, somewhat turned Strawberry Jelly that you kid forgot out on the counter in the warm sun all day while you were at school. And the worst part is you usually squeeze at least half of the pack into your mouth all at once, so you have this mouth full of jelly that you really can’t get yourself to swallow, but you can’t find a way to get it all out of your mouth (I’ve been told spitting isn’t ladylike and anyways how do you get that much gel out in one spit) and you really don’t want to waste the calories on a good, long run.

So you turn your mind off and tell your mouth to swallow. And then comes the real quandary; do you want those extra calories enough to knowingly take another hit, or risk not being able to go as hard as you wanted because you didn’t bring enough fuel. Let’s just say that is the last time I go out searching for one of the new brands just to see if they’re any better. Short answer, No.

One of the great thingsGu has allowed me to do is set into motion plans to sail single-handed in the Florida Keys next summer. Solo sailing is one of the big No-No’s in the diabetic world. It’s up there with flying solo and scuba diving. You get low, you crash.

Or if you’re under water you can’t really stop to test your blood sugars and get sugar (well unless you don’t mind an underwater Gu, which, personally, I think sounds pretty good and doable.) Since I can stash these tiny perfect sugars everywhere, I don’t have to worry about setting a self steering mechanism and going below to get some sugar.

What happens if I have to do that in some bad weather when I can’t go from the tiller? When Johnny alerts me that I’m going low, (Johnny is my Continuous Glucose Monitor who checks my sugars every 5 minutes and reports them to me) I now grab the Power Gel in my shorts and down it. Crisis averted

Why Sail?

Type 1 Diabetes is a multi-talented killer. It kills quickly, it kills slowly and it can kill by stripping you of any desire to truly live. One slip up in your dosing math, one time you forget your safety sugars, one underestimation of how hard that workout really was and the amount of sugar in your blood plummets to the point where there is not enough to support your brain and heart function.

I’m sure you can guess the outcome of that, and it can happen in the blink of an eye. We all do a pretty good job of staying on top of it, but slipups do happen in the diabetic community. It’s a tribute to all of us that it doesn’t happen more often.

But even if we can prevent the Superlows from happening, it is virtually impossible to keep from getting too much sugar in your blood from time to time. Whether its that hot fudge sundae you’ve had your eye on for a week, a forgotten bolus of insulin because one kid’s crying, one was screaming and that pesky telemarketer just knew it was the right time to call, or you got sick and your body decided that it just doesn’t feel like responding to the triple dose of insulin you had to give it.

Then little by little your blood gets thick with those killer glucose molecules that like to attach themselves to any available red blood cell like an over-forty, still-single, overeager, “my-biological-clock-is-ticking” woman when she finds any man who shows even the smallest smakeral of interest in her.

So what if your red blood cells get a little bigger? So what if trying to pump those enlarged cells around your body will wear out your heart a little quicker or that they start to tear at the littlest capillaries like a three-year-old through presents on Christmas morning? Those capillaries aren’t in anything really important anyways, just your kidneys, eyes, hands, feet and one other really important part.

And so very, very slowly Diabetes silently wears out your body. We all work hard to slow this process. We all use the latest technology, we analyze all sorts of data and walk around like Robo-diabetic with pumps, meters, and continuous glucose monitors strapped to our bodies, belts, and in every bag, backpack and purse we own all in attempt to slow the coming tide.

But, I think worse than both of these, is Diabetes’ ability to strip you of all desire to truly live. Your doc tells you never again walk barefoot, no flying or scuba diving, forget Ironman training, just walk for 20 minutes a day.

Everything in moderation, he tells you. And that’s the killer, Moderation. When was the last time you got the least bit of a thrill from Moderation? Have you dreamed about your Moderation for two years straight, saving every extra penny, telling everyone you know, being possessed by your Moderation?

Never.

But talk to any diabetic who has stepped out of the cloud of Moderation and they will turn your ear bloody talking about their training plan and what their blood sugars were every 15 minutes during their last sub-4 hour marathon and every detail of their next trip climbing Machu Pichu.

They are truly living. And they are talking to anyone who will listen. But for years they were talking to those who didn’t know much about diabetes, those who don’t know Type 1 from Type 2, those who couldn’t help with the right basal rate reduction for an 11 hour hike, those who don't know a thing about the low blood sugar induced Midnight Munchies.

That is until a few of these diabetic athletes happened to sit down together at a table together at a conference and started talking. What was born out of that conversation was the plan to build a community to get diabetics together to talk and to support their moderation-busting adventures.

I, too, have been bit by the bug to abolish moderation. For me its a sailing trip. Four days, alone on a 22 foot Catalina, in the Florida Keys. To sit alone for 96 hours, to sail, to think and to write. To get a grasp on what diabetes has done to my life and what I am going to do to diabetes.

And to support others who want to do the same thing in their own way. I have decided to use this trip to raise funds for Insulindependence and to spread the word that Moderation will never win. We can't let it.