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.

We are family!

So I have been super busy getting my house cleaned and ready for my little sister coming to visit. I will be picking her up on Sunday and I am excited to see her. We have lots of fun planned over the next week.

Here is my sister at Halloween, dressed as a zombie...

This will be a true test of all this diabetes technology I have as we will be running around Atlanta and eating out quite a bit. I will be interested to see how the DexCom CGMS and Ping pump help me keep good blood sugar numbers. Also we will see if my rudimentary carb counting skills have improved at all since I have only been carb counting for about a year now. I am nervous and excited all at the same time but ready for some well deserved fun. We are going to the Atlanta Aquarium, Hard Rock Café, lots of shopping (my sis lives in Italy and misses Old Navy so we will definitely be there!), visiting with my Dad, and the big outing is going to a local tattoo parlor.

Tattoo parlor? Really? Is that how sisters spend time together and bond? Well with these sisters, yes, we do bond at tattoo parlors. We are a little crazy! You wouldn’t guess from my Sunday school teacher appearance but I do love me some ink! This time around I spent a ton of time designing and contemplating my new tattoo. I wanted to do something that commemorated all the positive things that have happened to me over the last year or so. I am finishing grad school, I became a born again diabetic, and I lost a ton of weight. I realized the biggest thing I could commemorate is the change in my diabetes care as I lived with zero control for over a decade and I dodged some major complications (still not sure how that happened but I am thankful). So the tattoo I am getting will brand me in ink as a diabetic. For the first time in my life there is pride instead of shame and fear in that word. I am really excited about how I have changed my thoughts and feelings about diabetes and how it fits into my life.

So here is to good blood sugars while eating out and getting inked! I will report back with a picture of the tattoo and how my control is throughout the process of getting it and healing from it. This will be my first tattoo I have gotten while in good control so I will be interested to see if I heal better this time around.

Chh-chhh-chhh-Changes!

I know for me I have never been good at changing to new treatments when it comes to my diabetes. I don't know what that is all about but I got to thinking about it today when I got frustrated with my equipment. It got me thinking about how hard change is...

Here is what I mean. My family tried to get me to get a pump since the late 80s and I refused. It took me years after Humalog came out to switch from R to Humalog. I refused to go to go from 2 shots a day to true MDI after I went on Humalog. Don't even talk to me about trying the new long lasting insulins like Lantus, there was no way I would consider that. Switch from exchanges to carb counting, not gonna happen! Then I got sick and I thought I was having diabetic complications. This is it I thought, diabetes finally has caught up with me and is going to kill me. I was 34 and I was facing my own death from not taking care of myself. So I got an endo who realized how off the path I was and how resistant to change I was. So she met me were I was at and didn't try to force me to change insulins, carb count, or do MDI. She didn't even bring up the idea of a pump. She waited patiently for me to be ready for change.

So what was stopping me from trying different ways of taking care of my diabetes? Why was I so resistant to change? Was it fear of the unknown? Was it pure stubbornness? Was it just that I don't like change like most people? Maybe change is just too hard? Was it fear of failure? One thing I do remember my first endo telling me was that once you figure out what works, don't change anything. It was 1988 when I was told this. Definitely not good advice when I look back but what he said had an impact on my poor 13 year old brain.

So what changes have happened for me over the past year and a half? Well, I started carb counting and got on an Animas pump. I started testing 12+ times a day. I just started a DexCom CGMS in the last month. I totally changed my diet from a fried, high carb nightmare to a low fat moderate carb diet. So what motivated me to change? And not just small changes, but radical changes? Looking at it now maybe it was the fear of dying. I was willing to try anything to feel better and not die now. Then I realized I wanted to finally be in control of my diabetes and not have it control me like it always had in the past. This motivated me to change.

So as I sat here this morning frustrated with my DexCom not working right as I prepared to go to the gym, the old me started screaming in my head, "you should have stayed the way you were, you never went low then!" Of course I never went low back when I was on shots, my average blood sugar was in the high 200s! I was so tempted to throw the DexCom against the wall, just like I felt like throwing my pump away the first month I was on it. Then I went low (again) because I get nervous with the idea of changing my basal settings on the pump. So even though I have weeks worth of data that shows me I need to reduce my basal in the AM, I didn't make the change. I even ran basal tests so I knew I needed to reduce the basal! I just kept going low and having to treat the low every morning at the same time. So I sit at my desk this morning, upset and frustrated. I had to breathe and remind myself, change is good. Change is what has given you your life and health back. Breathe young grasshopper! So I changed my basal and I restarted the DexCom sensor, breathe in, breathe out....

Making changes in my D care freaks me out. Can anyone relate? Thanks for letting me vent, I feel much better now :)