Fine Tuning

I have recently moved my infusion sight down to my outer thigh and have been having huge problems with it. I usually rotate the site locations depending on the season. Spring and summer, when I am in a bathing suit more than not, require that I hide the site under a bikini so it goes into my upper butt between where the pocket of my jeans is and the waistband.

Fall and winter make it easier to put it into my upper thigh since I spend most of my days in jeans and skirts and the only place I get into a swim suit is at the Y to get in a workout so I am less concerned with my appearance.

After three successful years of this, I have found my system faltering. My butt has developed scar tissue which hinders the insulin from getting from the infusion set to my blood stream where I can actually use it. I thought it might be time to make the switch to the upper thigh to give my butt some time to heal.

As soon as I did I started pulling out sets when I changed clothes. I had to train myself to be careful of the new spot and then I would be fine, I told myself. After a week and ten different sites being pulled out, I got the hang of it and stopped accidentally pulling out sites. But then I started to notice that the sites would go bad after only a day.

When I first started using an insulin pump the sites I used, like mini IV's, would stay open and useful for seven to ten days at a time. I loved not having to poke myself or remember to change a set for a whole week or more. As time has worn on that period of time has been reduced greatly, mostly due to scar tissue.

I have had to abandon using my stomach due to the scarring and now my thighs and butt are both showing signs of deterioration as well. I just wonder how many more body parts are viable options. Am I, in ten years, going to have to affix this thing to my ankle?

Luckily my ankles have very little fat. But of course this means I can't use them as an infusion site. Maybe my chest will have to do, though, I am not sure how much Tony will like the looks of that one.

So what are those other sites I have been overlooking, ones that I will not pull out easily,but have not scarred up ye?. Or maybe there's some new technological advance to erase the scar tissue so I could go back to the old reliable sites?

Thank God for Sick Days

I think paid sick days from work should be handed out on a sliding scale. Most jobs will come up with some arbitrary number of days that you can miss a year and still get paid. Maybe they should work on tightening up that formula.

The standard person gets ten. Oh You're a diabetic, that's four extra days a year. So you have hyperthyroidism, that's worth three extra. You haven't seen a doctor in fifteen years and you haven't been sick a day in your life, you get two. I have been teaching now for thirteen years. Each year we are given ten fully paid sick days a year. If we don't use them all they are carried over for the next school year. People who have been teaching as long as me usually have around fifty days stocked up by now.

I have zero.

I have not had a year yet in which I did not use each and every sick day I was allowed and a few extra, sometimes quite a few extra. There were the two high risk pregnancies which took me out for five and seven months. Then there was the year before I got meds for the hyperthyroidism that took me out for four months.

But even on a good year, I have not been able to keep it under ten days. I suppose I should be grateful for the ten paid days, some jobs don't even offer that. But after a night like last night, I just want to whine and complain and ask for more days off.

I went to bed at 9:30 with a blood sugar of 329 which I promptly corrected for. I should have been back to normal two hours later. So when Eli woke me at 12:30 after having a nightmare, I was surprised to have that high feeling. And not just a moderate high feeling, but the one where your whole body seems to be filled with that metallic taste.

I tested and knew it would be bad. 404. Into the bathroom, shut the door and replace my infusion site. I've gave up on using my thigh anymore, the last fifteen tries there have been met by speedy failure. So again it is a shot in the butt to insert the infusion set and off to bed. One- thirty comes and I am woken up by the sound of Eli walking down the hall. We have an old house and the upstairs creaks with every step. I can hear my kids the second their little feet hit the floor. So I wait for his entrance, but it never comes.

If he's not the one who's walking around my house at O-dark-thirty in the morning, who exactly is it? I jumped out of bed to look for the prowler that Eli has been worried about the last few days, only to find a raccoon digging through the trash. I didn't even have the energy to scare him off, I just fell back into bed. At two thirty, Nick woke me to tell me my blood suaras were still high, 273. By now, with all this insulin on board he should only have dared wake me to tell me I had overshot the good zone and entered Low Land. But no, new site be dammed, I still was not good.

More insulin. Nick has a two hour sleep button so he left me alone for a while, but right at four-thirty, he was on my case again. Still high. Damn, really? 240. More insulin, but not too much. There's nothing worse than spending a whole night at 400 and then waking up at forty. Six a.m. comes way too soon. I curse the sun's punctuality and hop in the shower hoping to wash away the fogginess now firmly entrenched in my brain. I get out, dry off and get dressed and attempt to put on some make-up, but a whole night without insulin has done some damage on my body. My cells have not been able to get any sugar to perform any function and they are screaming about it now.

I look at my makeup bag and cannot decide what to take out, so I grab the first thing I see, my eyeliner and for a moment or two I cannot figure out what to do with it. I just look at it like some sort of NASA space tool that I have never seen before.

After a minute or two my mind has finished processing and brings up the right use for it and I proceed. I sometimes feel like my brain on mornings like these is working like a five year old PC that has never been cleaned out and is so crowded with programs and data that it takes ten minutes to boot up and fifteen to open any program you ask. And if you decide to open too many programs at once it will simply crash. This morning I was on my way to that very crash.

I made my way down the stairs and into the kitchen to make breakfast very slowly, dragging from the achy-ness that feels like the moment your flu aches actually become painful, when Tony comes in and gives me a big hug and asks what's wrong. It's great being married to him for so long because I have very little explaining to do for him to understand exactly what's going on.

"I was high all night" I say.

He holds off his teasing when it's this bad and is always the right amount of sympathetic. I go back to trying to make breakfast for myself and the kids so we can all get to school on time, when Tony says, "Do you need to take a day?" I usually will push through a morning like this one. I have to or I would never make it to work. I had been toying with the idea of taking the day off to recover. I usually try to get ready for the morning before I make my decision to see if just getting up and moving around will shake the cobwebs out of my brain and body, but there are two things that make that decision very easy to make.

The first is when I have to consider if I should go hang my head over the toilet because the high has now made me very nauseous and expelling the contents of my stomach has become eminent. The other is when I can't control the tears that begin streaming at the thought of having to move my body enough to get the kids to school and then go teach 150 seventh graders all day. When Tony asked if I needed a day, and the tears threatened to expose themselves, the decision was made, chalk one more up on that board. And everything gets easier.

I can now drop the kids off and crawl back into bed by eight and sleep until ten. I can get up and eat the only meal that will do on a day like this, one that I am sure of its effects on my blood sugars, fish tacos.

I can now try to find some Anti-fatigue caps from Hammer Nutrition, which are amazing at removing all the nasty metabolic by-products made by my body during a night like last night, at my local supplement store, The Nutrition Zone, and run into another active diabetic who is isolated from the diabetic community and share what Insulindependence has done for me in my diabetic life. And I can now write and try to find some amount of catharsis from this damned disease.

If only I had more days like this...

An Aptitude for Solitude

The Pacific From Our Upstairs Window

I snuck out for a few moments on my way to Back to School Night Tuesday and saw the horizon out of my 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 lunches.

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 going with someone else.

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 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...