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)
So that’s why the math was so hard
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
Diet Soda
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. 
Continuous Glucose Monitor and me…part 3
Medtronic's CGMS
“What is that beeping sound? It is very annoying.”
That was one of the comments of one of the Brownie Girl Scouts in my troop. I had to agree, it was very annoying. It was my pump – beeping at me again. Actually, it was the CGM part of my pump. As I mentioned in other posts, I do like the CGM, but I find it awfully needy. (So needy that I stopped using it for a while because the beeping was driving me crazy.)
It beeps when it needs another meter reading for calibration of it’s data. It beeps when it loses signal from the sensor. It beeps when the sensor is done. It beeps with a high blood sugar. It beeps with a low blood sugar. This time, it was thinking that I was having a low blood sugar. Since I just had a cupcake to correct a low, I checked my blood sugar with my meter. Luckily I double checked with my meter, because the CGM was WAY off. My blood sugar was actually high from me over correcting.
In general, I find that the CGM is mostly accurate. But, on days when I have the wildest swings in blood sugar, those are the days that it is the least accurate. Of course, it is the days with the big swings that I need the most accuracy. Well, honestly, I want accuracy every day.
cold glucometer
I live in an area with seasons. There is a hot season and a cold season. Right now we are in the cold season. Honestly, this season hasn’t been so bad. It has been temperatures above freezing for most of the winter. But, here comes the freeze. Freezing brings about other problems for me. First, I have to make sure my insulin pump stays warm. Insulin stops working if it freezes, and it can freeze just as well in a pump. That is easy to prevent, I just attach the pump to my underwear so it is right next to my body. If it can get cold enough to freeze in that location, I have a lot more problems
The next problem is my glucometer. I have discovered in previous winters that the meter doesn’t work when it too cold. Luckily, my meter gives a warning when it is too cold, so I don’t get faulty readings. (According to the manual, my meter doesn’t work any lower than 43 degrees Fahrenheit.) But, I still am not getting any readings with a cold meter. That has caused problems and I have had to guess if I was going low or not. I wasn’t always right.
If I remember, I try to keep my meter in my pants pocket when I go out in the cold to keep it warm. But, that method doesn’t seem to work that well to warm the meter after it is already cold. The woman behind the Pump Wear company happened to post some solutions to the cold meter problem a couple of days ago.
*sneeze*
Person holding a tissue over their nose
Sigh… I am sick again. I caught that nasty cold that has been making the rounds here. (That’s what you get when it is still raining in January, not snowing.)
The cold is getting me dehydrated (with the fever and my nose running like a faucet), which means higher blood sugar. And, with all that mucus I feel nauseous, which makes eating more difficult than usual. The combo of everything makes my diabetes much harder to deal with. Blah. Nothing is ever simple.
*sneeze*
Thursday Thoughts
Quote
Image from wikimedia - copyright expired
Here is my health quote for the week:
“We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.” – Thomas Fuller(1608 – August 16, 1661)
This quote can be used for anything, but because of my health problem, that is where my brain immediately goes. This quote is very similar to the one I chose last week: the Italian proverb.
prequel to Labyrinth
Super cool news! The company Archaia has announced that they are working on a graphic novel that will be the prequel to the fantasy movie “Labyrinth”.
Have you seen Labyrinth? It came out in 1986, and it had fantasy, creatures made by Jim Henson and designed by Brian Froud and starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connolly. Oh yes, how could I forget – it is also a musical. It is one of my favorite movies.
So a graphic novel is kind of cool (a movie would have been extremely cool) but according to Entertainment Tonight they may have music made for the novel. So, even better… Now, if they can get David Bowie to sing too… *hope* *hope*. They say it should be out in late 2012.
Here is the trailer to the original movie:
Continuous Glucose Monitor and me…part 2
Medtronic's CGM
This is part 2 of my discussion of the Medtronic CGM. This post is devoted to one of my least favorite warning signals — the weak signal warning.
The weak signal warning shows up when the pump is having trouble reading the transmitter. It is an important alarm. But, it seems that the transmitter is not very strong at all.
If I go to the gym (which is one of the more important places where I would want the CGM to work), I have to make sure my pump is as close to the transmitter as possible. I guess all the electronic equipment at the gym causes problems. Ugh.
I could live with that — but it also has problems in computer labs. Well, since I teach in computer labs, you can see that it would be important to me. Grrr.
Well, how about at home? It seems if my pump goes underneath me (when sleeping for example), it also gets a weak signal. Blah!
Now, if you look at the documentation, it would seem that a weak signal wouldn’t cause that much of a problem. It claims that it keeps up to 40 minutes of data which it would upload once it gets the signal. But, in my pump that isn’t the way it works. If it loses signal for more than 15 minutes, (and then get it back) it then goes back in the “Start” sequence. That means up to 2 hours of no glucose readings. Then it will need to be re-calibrated, again.
Perhaps it acts wacky because I have a Paradigm 722 and not a Revel. I really hope so.
contact lenses
Have you seen this yet? It is super cool! Microsoft Research and University of Washington is working on something called the “Functional Contact Lens”. They have discovered that a person’s blood sugar level can be read in a person’s tears. So, the contact lens will sit in the eye (just like a regular lens) while it is there it can read the blood sugar level and send the info to a different device. Now, that is cool enough – technology like this could avoid a lot of finger stabbing and belly stabbing. But, that is not the end of this technology.
They are hoping that the contact lens could show the information to the wearer directly. So, the info will be seen on the side of their vision. Maybe with a blood sugar number, or perhaps with a warning message. The video that they have on the website makes the Natural User Interface look like the info the Terminator gets in the terminator movies.
This project is a long way away from being released, but looks very very cool. I know I would be interested in trying it out when it comes out…