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.

Technology FAIL!

So I get up this morning and my DexCom sensor is starting to flake out. Inaccurate readings, it keeps loosing communication with the receiver, no direction arrows. So I take a deep breath and I restart the sensor. No big deal, after all I am on my 13th day with this sensor which is the longest I have gotten so far. So I pack up my stuff and head out to meet a friend for lunch at Red Lobster. I am envisioning cheddar bay biscuits and more carbs then I usually eat at lunch, yummy! Plus I am excited to see my friend.

Fast forward to sitting at the table after ordering lunch. I pull out my trusty One Touch Ping meter to check my sugar and bolus. Oh oh, WTF? The meter is on?!?! There is an error code?!?!?! Here is what I saw:

I start hitting buttons, pulling the batteries out, looking for a reset switch. No luck, the only way the error goes away is if I pull the batteries out which means the darn thing won't work. Then my DexCom receiver begins to beep at me. It is time to put the 2 start up blood sugars in so my CGMS will start working again. Houston, we have a problem here, the darn meter is out of commission! Of course I don't have an extra glucometer in my purse so I have no working meter and no CGMS data to use. There are 3 One Touch meters at home but that is not helping me. So I start to panic and worry that maybe there is something wrong with my pump too. I pull it out and see it is OK. So I bolus for my carbs, just guessing what my sugar might be. I am going to eat lunch out, I haven't eaten out in ages! Lunch goes well and off I go to get back home.

I get home and grab the One Touch Ultra Smart meter I use as a back up and calibrate my DexCom. It won't calibrate, I keep getting a sensor error. ARGHHHHH! TECHNOLOGY FAIL! So I put in a new sensor and I am now waiting for the sensor to be ready to go. Meanwhile I call Animas about the error on the meter and I am transferred to LifeScan techs. Turns out they have to send me a new meter, this one is toast. I will receive the new meter next week sometime, probably on Wednesday.

Maybe there is a down side to being so reliant on all this technology? Or maybe this was a good lesson about what I need to carry with me in my emergency supply kit that I carry in my purse. Now a One Touch mini, extra strips, and a lancet device are crammed in there. Lesson learned this time :)

Those Red Lobster cheesy biscuits sure were good though :)