It looks like on December 27, 2011, Animas was sent a warning letter from the FDA. It complained that Animas didn’t report within 30 days an event of a device failure that led to the death or serious injury of a patient. It also complained that the OneTouch Ping and 2020 insulin pumps were still being sold, even though a few failed. Scary.
We had a nice day today. My daughter and I worked together to get everything in the crockpot for supper. She even took the trash out with very little prompting. So, I decided as a treat we could make a cake together.Watching her try to break eggs was very amusing. Her first couple of attempts looked more like she was squishing the eggs than cracking them. We were originally going to put the sugar free frosting on it. But, then I noticed that the Betty Crocker sugar-free frosting had maltitol. Sugar alcohols and me don’t mix very well. Instead we frosted the cake with dark chocolate (fully sugared) frosting. I wish I could say that I watched my family eat their slices of cake and happily sipped my tea. Nope, not me. We all sang the unbirthday song, and then I had a slice too. My insulin guess was off by a bit, but I got it better by supper time.
Photo credit: darrenhester from morguefile.com
Taught my first class using Google+. I have to say that it works much better than eLearning, but I think I will keep eLearning for the grade book. For the lecture I used DropBox to handout the slides and syllabus and Google+ hangouts for the lecture itself. I have to say I was quite impressed. Hangouts seemed to work as well as Skype. We could even all video conference without having to pay for it. Those who couldn’t video conference could still type their questions. And, there was the extra feature that allowed me to show what was on my screen which really helped the lab part of the class.
Notes for next time: Make sure to keep showing the slides using the screen show. If a student’s connection is having static, mute them immediately. Yay for being able to save gas by staying home!
I was SO happy. But then this conversation happened.
“Guess what! My pre-lunch glucose number was perfect – it was 120!” I said
“Isn’t that high? That sounds like a post-lunch number”
Well, since my blood sugar was either running too high pre-lunch or way too low, I was happy with a 120. Well, until that comment, and then I started to second think my happiness. (And my post lunch numbers are nowhere near 120…not if I don’t want to pass out in 30 minutes anyway.) I started thinking, my numbers aren’t perfect, why am I happy. I should be pickier.
But, shouldn’t it be okay to be happy with something that is finally trending towards good? I think the whole number thing is too easy to get crazy about. It makes you feel guilty. It makes you feel bad about yourself. Grrr.
Those who play the game Minecraft and like legos may be excited for this news. Lego is making a special “Minecraft” lego set. I have always thought that Minecraft was lego like. All the shapes are already blocky looking. Now we can play Minecraft out of the computer too 
News from:
The author, Michael Hicks, let me know that his novel, Empire, is now available for free. You can find it here: http://authormichaelhicks.com/free-novel/
I haven’t read it yet (but I downloaded it today), but it is described as a Sci Fi/Fantasy book. The reviews are very positive. (SciFi is one of the genres that I usually read…that and mystery.)
I’m not getting any money for letting you know about this book. I just thought that you may like some free stuff.
I have downloaded the book and put it on my kindle. Looking forward to my free time tomorrow so I can read it.
So, I found the next diabetes toy that I would like to try. It is the newest glucometer by LifeScan called Verio IQ.
According to the ad on the website, “Introducing the first meter ever that looks for patterns of highs and lows – and alerts you right on screen, when it finds one. So you don’t have to do all the work for a change.” If it actually works as advertised — Yay!
Looking at pictures on other blogs who have reviewed it, I think it looks pretty cool. Bad points: It looks like it doesn’t use the One Touch Ultra strips. (all my current meters use those strips.)
So, I haven’t touched one of these meters, so I can’t tell you if it is cool or not. But, I am looking forward to when it comes out so I can try it.
These blogs are where I heard about it first:
Here is my health quote for the week:
“Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.”- Mark Twain aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910)
I’m a girl scout leader, and it is girl scout cookie time. Me and my co-leader were going through the cookie orders and putting them in the order database. For some reason, the math was getting pretty hard for me. And, I kept on forgetting which person’s order I had entered. (Luckily I have my great co-leader to catch all the things that I was not keeping track of.) We finished so I packed up all my order forms and walked home. As soon as I stepped into the door, my hands started to shake – my usual first symptom of a low blood sugar. My CGM said that I was at 100, but I decided to check with my glucometer anyway — it was at 60.
So, after a little bit of food, I started feeling a lot better. My hands stopped shaking, and the clouds from my brain lifted. At first I thought the low was from the walk, but the cloud lifting from my brain told me otherwise – I must have been low even earlier than that. I guess I wasn’t just tired…it was a low blood sugar. My CGM must have needed calibration. Blah.
Photo credit: cohdra from morguefile.com
As I mentioned many times before, I drink diet soda. It is an easy, tasty way to drink something with no carbs. Lately, I have been told the strangest thing – they told me that drinking diet soda could give me diabetes. I told them it was too late.
But, thinking about what they said, I thought that it was a bit strange. I have heard that non-diet soda causes diabetes. One reasoning is that all that sugar has to cause diabetes. (That isn’t true.) Another reasoning is that drinking a lot of soda can cause obesity, which can cause type 2 diabetes. (this is true). But, diet soda? It doesn’t have calories or sugar… how can it cause problems?
Well, nothing has been proven exactly why, but a study in Diabetes Care (February 2009) showed a connection between drinking more diet soda and higher chance of diabetes. Some people think that it has to do with the diet of those who have soda. (Yes, they are having diet soda, but the rest of the diet is full of fat.) Others think that the sweetness of the sweetener might trigger something so people are more hungry.
Since there doesn’t seem to be anyone who knows the real answer, I’m going to ignore this article for now. It didn’t seem to go deep enough into why it happened. There needs to be a lot more research done before anyone can say for sure that soda can or can’t cause a problem.
Just for the record, I didn’t drink diet soda until my diabetes diagnosis, so it had nothing to do with my type 1 diabetes. And that, I can prove.
