The Bigger Blue Test

I spent last Saturday in LA at a shoot for The Big Blue Test commercial and it was fantastic.

The Big Blue Test is a month-long program to encourage people to get active and test their blood sugars.

To participate, between October 14 and November 15, test your blood sugars, get active for 14-20 minutes and test again.

Then log on to BigBlueTest.org to share your experience. For every log-in Roche will donate $5 to give life-saving diabetes supplies to those who need them here at home and abroad.

During the shoot, everyone was doing a different activity. Some were running, others doing yoga. They even had a band led by a six-year-old drummer who rocked.

I got the chance to do some tarp surfing which I've always wanted to do.

They rolled out a huge blue tarp and pulled the corner of it to form a huge wave that we would ride skateboards through.

It is probably the only time in my life I will be in a six foot tall, stand-up barrel.

And I got the time to take a few photos, another one of my hobbies. It was great to have professional lighting and a real set to play with.

The last shot I was in was a group shot of the whole cast rounded out by Elliot Yamin. I don't think I've ever heard a sweeter voice in person.

After a day filled with the noise of direction and background conversation, the set was quieted by the call of "Quiet on the set." They actually say that. I laughed to myself.

And then Elliot started singing. Damn, he's good. And not the over-processed, only-good-'cause-he's-been-remastered kind of good.

He's also got some basketball skills to go along with the singing.

This year there is also the BIGger Blue Test and I am going to take this one on. For each 30 days in a row I will test, get active for 20 or more minutes, test again and post my results.

Since getting better from the thyroid drama, I have yet to daily get back into exercise. I have made great strides forward in doing big workouts, but the daily discipline still isn't routine.

How are you planning to do THE BIG BLUE TEST this year??

Old Reliables

After spending the last 14 years as a runner, I have easily run over 2000 times. I have run different routes, in different cities, in different weather and in different clothes, but there are those runs that I will run over and over again. Routes that have cemented themselves in my mind, ones that I look forward to running every time.

There is the 2.75 mile route from my mother-in-law's house in the inland hills of San Diego. This one I run every Christmas morning after the early morning present rush and before the afternoon extended family dinner.

The first mile starts out easy. The first time I ran it I was convinced that I was having the run of a lifetime, where every thing falls into place and every step feel like pure joy. After the first mile, I looked at my watch and noticed it was the fastest mile I had ever run.

And then I turned the corner at the bottom of Alpine Boulevard and realized that I had been running downhill the whole time and that the incline could not last forever. Those first steps around the corner taught me quickly that it would be a long uphill journey home. I finally felt the elevation kick in and start to burn my lungs.

Now, Alpine is not all that high up, but for a girl who has, with the exception of four weekend spent at the bottom of the rockies in Colorado, never lived above thirty feet of elevation, it feels like Everest. The next mile is spent in a gradual incline and then another corner. Then I am running straight up.

At the top of the hill on the right of the road is a graveyard, and by the time I have reached it I feel like finding one of those empty holes, lying down, and just waiting for someone to come along and throw a little dirt on me. The rest of the run is a gentle downhill that lulls me into believing it wasn't such a bad run and that I will probably do it again next Christmas.

There is the run from my parents house that is flat and fast and gives me a chance to see how much speed I have earned from my training. Nine-tenths of a mile as hard as I can before I reach the turnaround at the end of the boat docks in the Seal Beach Marina, stop for a moment to breathe in the salty air, admire the 50 foot cruisers and racers, dream for a moment of taking to the sea for a year long voyage, turn around and sprint the nine-tenths of a mile home faster than I ran there.

There was the five mile loop I ran every Tuesday in college. The one with someone singing cadence alongside me and yelling, "Run! Walking is for wussies." (I think that may be the edited version).

There's the Torrey Pines loop that starts with a hike straight up the mountain chatting with Tony, only to be followed by a great dirt road gently sloping to the sea with enough stairs to descend and turns to make and tourists to dodge that you have not a moment to think of how tired you are, and the views that lull you into the false belief that you could do another loop, no problem.

The great thing about these runs is that you I them so well. I know exactly how hard they will be, and the exact spot where the run will give me a great view, and when I know that it is all downhill form here. I usually seek one of these runs out when I am faltering in my training, or when life is spinning out of control and I want something to turn out like I planned it.

They never disappoint. For me they are a lot like my faithful meals. The ones that I am so familiar with that I know, without fail, exactly what they will do to my blood sugars, and precisely how much insulin to give to cover them. They are the old reliables.

After a day like today, where I am eating on another person's schedule, and the dinner that was planned for two-o'clock is served at three, and I have no idea what ingredients were used in the dishes served to me (did they use canola oil or butter? Or maybe just plain LARD!), when I have been chasing my blood sugars all day and testing every two hours, and checking Johnny every twenty minutes, it is nice to go back to the old reliables and be sure that my blood suagrs will turn out just like I planned.

I think tomorrow will be a day filled with them. A Met-RX shake for breakfast, an apple and string cheese for snack, a Met-RX shake for lunch, and a two egg omelet with a little veggie sausage and some bell peppers topped with a quarter-cup of shredded cheese next to a piece of wheat toast to wrap up the day and plenty of water all day to replace what all the highs took from me today.

And hopefully balance will be restored and I will have one of those flat-line days that we all love to boast about and post pictures of on Facebook. You got to love the old reliables.

Multivariable Equations

As any good scientist knows, if you want to find out what effect any one part of your experiment has on the outcome, you change only one thing at a time. Diabetes is much like an experiment that I conduct on an on-going basis. Recently it has all gone haywire and after months of not being able to catch up with it, I went a little ape-shit. I decided to change nearly all of it and hope it comes out alright. Some of the changes came at my own hands and some were dealt to me.

A month ago everything was stable: relatively consistent diet, workouts getting progressively but slowly longer and higher quality, and everything else in life just humming along. And then I got sick. Sickness, I think, is the ultimate diabetes enemy.

It makes it so you can't workout, which will change insulin needs. It makes it so you sit on a couch and sleep all day, which will change insulin levels. And then your appetite gets all funky and you get hungry at weird times and nauseous at others, which of course changes insulin needs.

So, after being knocked out for a week, I slowly rebounded and began training again. And then I got hit by another cold and was back on my butt. As soon as that was over I was gearing up for my son's surgery- 3 days in a hospital room with a crying child who just wanted to go home and not be in pain-10 days with not more than 20 minutes of sleep at a time and the other 23 hours of the day constantly tending to his needs. The needs of a four-year-old with two casts up to his groin are abundant and frequent. So my overall stress level changed in an instant. Which, of course, would make it the perfect time for my doctor to change the dosing of my anti-thyroid meds. More insulin change.

Now with all this change, one might think I would naturally shy away from more self-inflicted change, but, alas, I am not that smart. I decided to do a complete overhaul on my diet to try to discover what has been going on with my blood sugars and to finally get a leg up in the two-year battle with the pounds my funky thyroid has strapped to my ass.

And, of course, there was the addiction to way too many diet sodas a day to mention. I don't know how I got so addicted to a food that isn't actually a food, but a product made in a lab somewhere. I figured I would need to go cold turkey on that stuff for a while until I got a handle on my blood sugars.

So Monday morning the changes started. Monday was rough. Tuesday was worse. By Wednesday the headaches were throbbing. Thursday the blood sugar patterns were still undiscoverable.

On Friday I decided to cruise through a website that had invited me to blog for them called asweetlife.org. And I stumbled across something that I learned in that hospital Diabetes 101 class, but had failed to recognize in my wild sugars. I had been fighting frequent, random lows for almost 2 months and then huge swings up to the 300's after. It wouldn't matter how little sugar I gave myself to correct for a low, it always jumped right to 300 after. I read a blog on the 'dead in bed' syndrome , which I have to say is a far too cutesy name for such a horrific, life-shattering event.

I have always done well with my nighttime blood sugars, which is nice because if you can consistently have good nightly blood sugars you have conquered one-third of your daily routine without having any brownie cravings, or extra time on the bike trainer or a movie marathon on the couch messing you up. It's fixed and it's easy.

Well, in the last two months, overnight has been anything but easy. I either wake up low and rush downstairs to get some sugar and then, usually, a few hundred calories to follow up, or I wake up high. There was no in between. I was afraid to turn up my basal rate for fear of getting too low and dying in my sleep, but I couldn't turn them down because then my highs would be higher.

My nighttime basals have varied between 0.45 and 0.5 for the last 13 years that I have been on the pump. It is one of the few basals that hasn't really changed at all over the years. In comparison some of my other basals have changed from 0.8 to 1.6 over time, so the nighttime consistency is nice.

That is when I was reminded of the Somogyi affect and realized I might not be going about this the right way. The Somogyi affect is this weird thing that I always struggled with when I was on shots because my nighttime insulin needs are so much lower than my daytime needs. I would take a shot, but it would be too much and drive down my sugars. I would be low and asleep and not wake up from it. My body would get pissed off after a while at being so low and pump out a series of hormones to counteract it and let my liver release some stored sugar to counteract the low.

I would then wake up high and think I needed more overnight insulin, thus worsening the cycle. The insulin pump fixed the problem back then, but now my inability to listen to my body was forcing the same affect. Even though I figured this out, I was still pretty stubborn about it and didn't want to lower my basals for fear that I might be making myself go even higher.

But hearing a phrase like 'dead in bed' for the first time shakes off the stubborn attitude real fast and finding the research they are doing on what causes 'dead in bed' was even more alarming. There are studies out there that say that overnight low blood sugar can alter the way your hearts electrical system works and although more research is needed in this area, the thought of messing with my hearts beating was enough to scare the living daylights out of me.

After reading the second study, I promptly took my hand off the mouse, lowered it to my belt and grabbed my pump. Those basals never saw what was coming to them. Low, lower, the lowest they have ever been. Later, after sitting on the edge of my bed convincing myself not to be afraid, that I would probably wake up tomorrow like I have done for decades already, and very appreciative that I get to sleep next to my husband who would probably notice if I began to convulse with a low blood sugar and be able to rescue me, I laid down to sleep.

And God smiled down on me with the first night in three weeks without a low. I woke up at 6 refreshed and alert and not feeling like crap like I had for weeks before. When I laid down to sleep the night before I was 125. My glucose moniter registered at 155 that morning.

After this great night of sleep, I realized a few things. When I sleep through my lows, or even if I wake up (typically it's after being low for an hour or more) my body is more resistant to insulin for at least 12 hours after. Which makes the whole day a battle against my body.

On top of that, I wake up feeling hung-over and hazy and grumpy and unfocused, which is not a good combination for dealing with a classroom full of fidgety, talkative, well-meaning 6th graders for 7 hours at a clip.

So with my new basals in hand I guess changing up everything all at once wasn't such a crime. Although I think I could have come to the same conclusion if I had only cruised around on the internet a little earlier and not been so afraid to try something new. Now let's see if a happier, more well-balanced body will let go of the extra padding it has developed in some sort of hibernation preparation.