Technology and Ink

Yesterday was the big tattoo appointment that my sister and I had been looking forward to for months. As always with any plans she and I make, the plans always go haywire. I think our family has some weird karma curse or something. Also important to mention is that when we are together, we are never on time for an appointment. I am the type who shows up for an appointment 30 minutes early and my sister is the opposite. So the day started off schedule to begin with. Our original plan was to get inked and then be home for dinner by 7pm.

We get to the tattoo parlor at about 1:40pm. Guess what? They are closed! I have had this appointment set for a month! There is just a note on the door that says they will be open tomorrow. This is the only day we can do this, arghhhhh! Our friend gets on his phone and calls another friend. We are back on the road trying to find a different shop that comes highly recommended. We get to the new shop and spend some time talking to the artists to decide if we want to get our work done there. After about an hour of talking back and forth, seeing the artist portfolios, and the design the artist came up with for me, we are ready to get going. But wait, it is lunch time for the tattoo shop! Their food shows up so we tell them to go ahead and eat, we will run up the street to some shops up there for awhile.

Now it is 3:30pm and I am finally in the chair with the stencil on my arm. I have not eaten in almost 4 hours and my blood sugar is steady according to my DexCom. The artist gets to work. We stop every hour so I can test just to make sure my CGMS is telling me the truth about where my blood sugars are. At 7:30pm, my tattoo is done. I am getting pretty hungry but we can’t leave, my sister still has about an hour left on her tattoo. Finally at 8:30pm, we are done and out the door. My blood sugar has been cruising at 120 since 3pm so now I know that my afternoon basals are pretty close to right, hahaha! I still need to run a true basal test to be sure but I really hate to skip meals so I keep putting it off.

I think I love my CGMS. At least yesterday I loved it, I can’t guarantee that I will love it tomorrow or the next day, it depends on if it behaves itself! I know I am in love with my pump, no doubt about it! My point here is that never in my diabetic life have I been able to skip a meal and have a normal blood sugar. I am always the one in the group who is whining, “we have to go eat, my blood sugars will crash if I don’t eat!” For once I got to be just like my sister and my friends and just go with the flow. These pieces of equipment allowed me to keep good blood sugar numbers and eat when I wanted to. Even my friend commented on how he had never been out with us and not had to move around our day because of my diabetes. On the way home we did stop at Chick-fil-a as we were all starving to death at this point. For once, we weren’t stopping because I had to eat, it was because we all needed to eat. What a neat feeling to have! I am so thankful for the diabetes technology that we have available to us now. It’s not perfect and it sure isn’t that cure my doctors have been promising me for over 20 years, but it’s pretty darn good!

I will blog later on how the new tattoo is healing and how my blood sugars do. For now, please enjoy my new tattoo. It was a big decision to brand myself as diabetic for the world to see and I am so glad I did it.