Archive for the ‘Type 1 Diabetes’ Category

Death By Frosted Flakes

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

I told my wife the other day that if I ever got diagnosed with some nasty disease and only had a day to live, I’d take myself out with Frosted flakes and half and half. (Actually, I said I’d used heavy whipping cream, but I tried it the other day, and it was so thick it was hard to eat… LOL) That said, I’m just kidding. But, man Frosted flakes are good…

The reason I’m rambling on about this is because I had a bowl of them the other day, for the first time in like 30 years, and dang they were good. But, they jacked my blood sugar through the roof in about 2 seconds flat. Since I’m sure that this happens to other diabetics from time to time, I’m going to share a little secret with you on how to get your blood sugars down ASAP.

What I do when my blood sugar gets super high, is to take my insulin in the my shoulder, high up and on the inside in the tender skin by my chest. Then, once the insulin is in, rub it really hard for a full minute. Make the spot hurt and make it hot with friction. I can make my blood sugar drop by 150-200 points in an hour if I need to. (Luckily that doesn’t happen too often, but it does happen to all of us from time to time, so this is just a heads up so you know what to try…)

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Insulin Pump Injection Site Update

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

When I moved my insulin pump a couple of days ago, I stuck it in my belly fat, and my insulin usage went straight up like 80 units per day. It looks like picking a spot that doesn’t have 31 years of needle scar tissue, along with picking a low fat spot, really reduces the insulin that is needed to do the job. Some young Doc needs to do a study on that….

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Rethinking Your Insulin Injection Spot

Monday, December 14th, 2009

I put my insulin pump back on the other day, after about a year without it, and had a couple of surprises. The first was that I forgot how the thing worked, the second was that I’ve had it for 4 years and the manual was still in the shrink wrap, the third was that there are bolus settings called “Square” and “Dual” and the fourth was that where you stick the needle makes a huge difference in the amount of insulin you need.

I decided to put my pump back on because my last two A1C’s have been pure crap, coming in at 7.1 and 7.2. I’ve never had an A1C over 6.2 before, and now I have 6 months of really poor blood sugar control that needs fixing, now! So, I dug out my pump, found a battery for it, and got it all set up and plugged into my side. What was interesting, was that I stuck in into my side so far over, that I had to have my wife tape down the cannula, because I couldn’t reach the site with both hands.

The site where I stuck it was also on a thin part of my side, where I don’t have any belly fat, so I basically stuck the sucker in my kidney or liver or what have you… It hurt like hell, and I had to hold my breath and try not to wriggle until it was taped down. Most of the pain went away when I pulled out the 8 foot long needle they use down the center of the cannula to get it to poke through your skin (called a trocar), and I’m pretty sure my liver and kidney will be fine with time.

Well, the pump still had it’s settings, and I remembered that I had cut the basal rate in half, in an attempt to use Lantus for half the basal, to cut down on the massive amount of insulin I was dumping through the cannula. I figured by using Lantus for 30 units per day of my basal, that was almost 100 units of insulin that wouldn’t go through that site. (If you dump a whole bunch of insulin into one hole, then you get an infection a lot faster.)

Well, I almost immediately started having insulin reactions, and over the next three days, I cut my daily insulin to around 50 units of insulin per day, and that was eating a 2750 calorie diet composed of around 30% carbs. That was a drop of around 100 units per day for me.

Part of the drop in my insulin needs was do to the fact that since I eat lots of protein and fat, my blood sugars peak after my insulin has been used or destroyed by my body. Well, since I read the book when I put the pump on this time, I read about dual wave and square wave patterns of giving insulin.

With a dual wave, you give part of it right now to cover any sugar spike, then you set the rest of the insulin to slowly be released over the next 1/2 hour to 8 hours. So, if I ate a bunch of dark chocolate, I could take a little bit of insulin now, and then set the rest to be dripped over the next two or three hours. that way the fast sugar is covered, as is the rest of the sugar as your body pulls it out of the fat…

The square wave is just the second part of a dual wave release. You can just set the insulin to be released evenly over a set amount of time. The square wave works good for meats and fats that give up their carbs slowly, or for people who have Gastroparesis.

So, between sticking the needle into my side, where there wasn’t any belly fat to slow down insulin uptake, and setting my insulin releases using the dual wave and square wave releases, instead of just dumping it all in my body and hoping the food and the insulin would both show up at the same place at the same time, I reduced my daily insulin usage by 100 units.

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Free Diet Tracking Software

Monday, December 7th, 2009

I use a piece of free software that I got from Spaz.ca, called the CRON-o-Meter, to track my weight and everything I eat. The CRON-o-Meter was originally designed for the practitioners of the “Calorie Restriction Diet”, but it works for anyone who needs to tack what they eat and see the breakdown of carbs, fats and protein. The tool is cool, because you load it on your PC, then you can go and enter the foods and the amounts you eat, and the software will show you exactly how many carbs you ate. Since type 1 diabetics need this information so that they can take the correct amount of insulin, it comes in real handy.

It also lets you track your daily weight, temp and a few other things I don’t use. Try it and let me know what you think…

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Diabetics, Diabetes and Smoking

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

OK, this is an e-cigarette commercial. I wasn’t going to start it out this way, but that’s what it is.

I love to smoke. I’ve smoked since I was 17 years old, and I’m now 44. I’ve also been a type 1 diabetic since my 13th birthday. (Yea, that was a really sucky birthday present…)

I quit smoking when I was 34, when my wife became pregnant with our first child. I didn’t want to smoke around her, and I didn’t want the smoke to affect the baby. My son is 9 years old and knows that way back in the dark ages, I used to smoke, but I don’t anymore. But, I actually still do, and I love it.

I’ve been cheating on the smoking thing for the last couple of years, and have been smoking every once in a while when the kids aren’t around. But, it’s hard to hide the fact that you smell like an ashtray…. or just an old chunk of ass.

Well, last month, when I was at a gun show, I saw this dude, who was an exhibitor, smoking in the building. Smoking in a public building is illegal in my state, so I went up and asked him how come he was smoking, and he laughed at me. He showed me that he was smoking an electric cigarette, and that the “smoke” is really just ionized nicotine. So, you’re not smoking, you get the nic that you need, the smoke tastes like smoke, your throat burns like it’s supposed to, but you aren’t really smoking. You get everything you need to feel like your smoking, except the stink and the 4,000 carcinogens from the smoke. You can even “play” with the smoke, breathing it in and out of your mouth and nose like you can with real smoke.

I tried it, it rocked, and I bought the system. I’m sorry for you non-smokers out there that are reading through this, but this is the coolest thing I’ve ever bought. It feeds your addiction, at a quarter of the cost, you aren’t getting any of the bad stuff, and you don’t stink. Where’s the down side to these things?

Here’s the ad for the electronic cigarette. I’m posting it here, because I think it will help me live longer, with an addiction I’m having a hard time beating, at 1/4th the cost, and other type 1 diabetics may benefit from using something like this instead of the real thing, which we know will kill us…

Drop me a line if you’ve tried one of these, and tell me what you think.

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Lantus, Not Lantis (Learning to Spell)

Monday, November 30th, 2009

OK, I’ve been taking Lantus for like 2 years now, and just noticed it’s spelled Lantus, not Lantis. Nothing like running a Diabetes blog and not knowing how to spell the names of diabetic medications. So, since I obviously don’t know enough about the product to even know how it’s name’s spelled, I decided to read the instructions that came in the box.

Have you ever read one of the instruction manuals that comes in a box of insulin? Well, Don’t! The thing is 4 pages of like number 1 font, singles spaced. But, it was sort of interesting reading and there were a couple of things I noticed, that I didn’t know before. So, I’m going to share them here, for those of you who haven’t read the directions that come in the box.

  • Lantus isn’t supposed to be mixed with anything when injected, including another insulin. I’ve been taking mine, mixed with my nightly dose of Humalog, for 2 years now. I wonder if my Lantus dose will go down if I take it by itself. (If it makes a noticeable difference, at $100 per bottle, that will be worth the extra needle.)
  • I didn’t know how to spell “Basal”, as in “Basal Rate”, which is the dose of long lasting insulin needed to keep your blood sugar normal throughout the day, without food. Or, it’s the underlying drip dose you get with an insulin pump that keeps your blood glucose levels at a normal rate throughout the day.

There was more, of course, but it was all I could do to read that much without falling asleep…

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what happens to a type 1 diabetic if they dont take insulin for 1 week?

Monday, November 16th, 2009

OK, that question keeps showing up in my log files for this site, so I’m going to answer it because it scares the hell out of me that anyone would be asking it. The answer is: If a type 1 diabetic doesn’t take his or her insulin for a week, then they will die. As a matter of fact, they will die way before the week is up. A type 1 diabetic who doesn’t take their insulin will die after just a day or three, especially if they eat more than just protein and fat. If they eat carbs, they’re going to be dead even quicker.

While you’d think that a type 1 diabetic could last awhile if they didn’t eat anything, or just ate meat and fat, that’s just not true. A type 1 diabetic, just like everyone else, needs insulin to move the sugar in the body into the cells so that your brain and muscles can work. So, even if you’re not eating anything, you still need insulin so that your cells can use the energy that your body provides from fat stores. For example; I need 60 units of insulin a day just to keep my body working, and that’s just my basil rate, I need more if I eat anything.

On the first day that the diabetic doesn’t have insulin, he or she is going to feel nauseous, sweating and have a really bad headache. The headache is from their blood getting thicker and thicker. It will get so thick that it will start popping the smaller blood vessels in the head and eyes. After their blood sugar gets over 600, they will start going into a coma, and if they don’t receive treatment quickly, they will experience brain death from lack of nutrients and oxygen, followed by clinical death. All of this can happen in a day, or just a few hours, depending on the diabetic and how brittle they are and how many carbs they had to eat.

All I can tell you is that if you’re a diabetic, make sure you keep a couple weeks worth of insulin around at all times, and ALWAYS take your blood glucose and insulin kit with you wherever you go. Something as simple as forgetting your insulin kit when having lunch with a friend, then having a flat tire on the way home and forgetting your cell phone, could kill you.

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Posted in Insulin Information | 3 Comments »

Insulin Prescriptions

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Here’s a question for all of you type 1 diabetics out there. When do type 1 diabetics get to quit taking insulin? I bet you didn’t know there was a time, I bet you thought that you would have to take insulin until the day you died, or at least up until a couple of days before you died. Guess what? You’re right, as a type 1 diabetic, if you don’t take your insulin, you will go into a diabetic coma and die.

I mention these facts because the people at my stupid medical insurance company don’t know that, and niether does my Doctor. When my Doctor writes my prescription for insulin, it’s only good for a year, and if I don’t go back and get it redone, my pharmacy won’t give me any insulin, and even if they did, my insurance company won’t pay for it. At over $100 per bottle, I sure as heck don’t want to have to pay for it out of my own pocket… especially since I already pay $18,000.00 per year for medical insurance for a family of 5.

On that note, I think I’m going to go see if I can find a coupon or offer or something for a bottle of free insulin…. I’m sure at the kind of money that Lilly and whatever that other company is… Novo I think, make off a bottle of insulin, they’re willing to give away a free bottle to pull you away from their competitor.

Drop by in the next day or so if you want to see if I found any diabetic freebies.

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Underactive Thyroid & Diabetes

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

I have hypothyroidism, and have had it since 1989. I didn’t know why I was gaining weight and didn’t have any energy. The Doctor’s finally figured it out, and now I take Armor Thyroid every day. Most people take Synthroid, but it didn’t work for me very well. (Natural stuff seems to work better for me.)

Nearly 11 million people in the United States have a hypo-active thyroid. a hypo-active thyroid is called Hypothyroidism and is directly linked to low energy levels, high cholesterol, weight gain and obesity, which leads to diabetes? If you think that you may have Hypothyroidism, sometimes called an under-active thyroid, you might want to try taking some ThyPro. ThyPro is running a free trial if you want to try some to see if it perks you up any.

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Glycobiology and Glyconutrition’s Roll In Type 1 Diabetes

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

There is a really interesting article at Ezinearticles.com that was written by a CardioVascular surgeon named Dr. Robert Gamble. Here’s a little piece of the article:

“Glyconutrition is the nutritional provision which provides the body with healthy CELLULAR COMMUNICATION. In other words, for diabetes, this means less “friendly fire.”

A study published in the 1997 issue of the Proceedings of the Fisher Institute for Medical Research showed people with type 1 diabetes who were given glyconutrients “…reported a dramatic improvement in their health, including a decrease in vision problems, better wound hearing, less infections, and lower blood pressure.” (Miracle Sugars, by Rita Elkins, M.H., Woodland Publishing, p. 26 -Excellent quick reference incidentally!)

Remember, both type 1 and type 2 diabetes are auto-immune conditions. Read carefully, this next statement by medical researcher, Dr. Neecie Moore:

“Glycobiology has achieved critical breakthroughs in the medical field, primarily by addressing what could be the greatest plague in health care today — auto-immune diseases. Multiple sclerosis, arthritis, diabetes, Crohn’s disease and colitis are just a few of these diseases.”

Research on glyconutrition is growing wonderfully. For example, the Ophthalmology Department of Harvard University in 1995 reported that one of the glyconutrients (mannose) can be an energy source for diabetes (instead of the damaging glucose), providing energy without risk of eyesight damage. (Miracle Sugars, p.27).”

go to EzineArticles.com to read the whole article on Glycobiology and Glyconutrition.

Head over to Wikipedia.com to get more information on Glycobiology.

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