I am hoping everyone had a great Thanksgiving and stuffed themselves silly, just as I did. Well, sort of. I tried to limit my carb intake, but that darn stuffing just gets the best of me every year. We visited both families and ate all the turkey, stuffing, and sweet potato casserole we could.

Turkey day was also my Dexcom sensor change day. So, in between meals with families, I changed out my sensor. It was about 3pm when I did this, so I thought, Hey, I should be fine. It’s not like it’s late at night. Everything went well, I actually have gotten used to pressing in the sensor and not being afraid of the needle stick. I calibrated after my 2 hour wait, and left to go to the inlaw’s house for supper. I had no problem there, cgm line stayed right in line with my meter readings.

All seemed well, even through Black Friday. Yep, I put it through the ringer that day. My bg line looked like a freakin’ lie detector! Shopping stress plus no sleep isn’t good for me. I was bouncing between the 50’s and 250’s every couple of hours. I even dropped so low in one store that I started blacking out. I dropped too fast for the CGM to catch it. CGM still showed 85 while meter read 42 after 10 minutes and handful of jelly beans. NOT fun! At the end of the day, I was tired, and so must have been my sensor. Why?

Because Saturday morning I woke up to the lovely error of “SENSOR FAILED”. I hadn’t had one of these before. I panicked for a few minutes, checked my bg (which was fine, actually), and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw I had one more sensor left. So, I changed it out and did my normal 2 hour wait, yada, yada, yada…It seemed to be working great, numbers were sort of off, but I attributed that to a new site I hadn’t used before. Hubby and I had a nice day, and went to bed with a great bg. Sunday morning, to my surprise and irritation, I had another “SENSOR FAILED” error. UGH! What am I gonna do now? That was my last one! So, I gathered myself together. I dug both packages that my sensors came in from out of the trash can and saved them so I could call Dexcom as soon as I could. I also added an extra tube of strips to my meter case since I knew I’d probably go bg-check-happy and check a ton of times over the next few days.

I called Dexcom this morning, gave them the lot and serial numbers to both sensors and they have some replacements on their way to me. They said it takes 3 days to be delivered via FedEx, so I am trying to patiently wait until Thursday for them to arrive.

So, to add to my “What I’m Thankful For” list, I am thankful for companies that stand by their product and send out replacements when things fail. I am also thankful for having enough supplies “in stock” that when the best technology fails, I can still lean on the old-school ways to keep my glucose in check.

Dear Diabetes,
Yesterday was our 21st year of being together. Wow, has it really been that long? At times, it seems it has been, but others, not so much. I guess it’s hard to imagine my life before you came into it. We’re practically joined at the hip, so to speak!
We’ve had good times and bad, but we’ve always made it through. I hated you when I was a teenager, and ignored you, and for that I’m sorry. I am trying to make up for it and trying to take really good care of you now. So, can you, in return, help me out a little? I know it’s just your nature to have temper tantrums, but can we work on that together? Thanks, I really appreciate it.
So now, would you like to make a toast to our 21 years? (Raises glass of Diet Coke) Here’s to 21 years of togetherness. May the second 21 years be filled with more smiles than tears, and be a better, healtheir relationship.
Yours forever,
Sarah

Since you really couldn’t see what it was that I was doing in my other site change video, I made another one using a different camera.

(If you can’t see the video above, click here.)

There are a lot of responses people can give when they find out you are a diabetic. There’s the “Oh, so how long have you been diabetic?”, “Is it the bad one or the better one?” or “Oh, okay, my (friend, father, mother, sister, brother, etc) is diabetic too!”.

There has to be one reply that is my pet peeve. It’s the “Oh, I’m sorry”. And, yes, I know they are just trying to be nice, but really, it’s not their fault that I’m diabetic. Heck, it’s not even my fault.

 Wilktionary describes an apology as:

apology (plural apologies)

1. What you say when you regret saying or doing something affecting others.
2. A formal justification, defense.

The other times that I hear it is when I’m having a tough time with my diabetes acting up and my husband gently hugs me and says “Aww, honey, I’m sorry.”. I know he means well, but truly there was nothing he did wrong. Just stupid diabetes acting up that day. He said it the a few days ago when I was having lots of lows. We had gone to bed and an hour later, I woke up low again. I told him and went to get the juice. I came back, got in bed again and he reached over to hug me and said “Aww, honey, I’m so sorry you have to deal with this.”. It was night time, I was tired, and I had enough of his apologies for something he didn’t do. So, I told him not to ever say “I’m sorry” when it is in relation to diabetes again. I told him that next time he wanted to say “I’m sorry”, to keep it to his self and use that energy just to hug or hold me. Let me know he’s there to support me, not that he’s sorry for me.

So, just for the record, if you ever meet me, and for some reason don’t know that I am diabetic (which, if you are reading this, you should already know that little detail), please don’t say “I’m sorry” when you find out. And if you already know me, don’t apologize if you know I’m having a bad day with my diabetes. There is nothing for you to regret saying or doing to me. All I need from you is just to support me… let me know you’re there for me, just as I would for you.

While driving to work this morning, I was trying to figure out why my dexcom wasn’t working right (it was reading in the 180’s with double arrows up, while my meter stayed around a 120 mark… haven’t figured that one out yet). So, when I got to work, I tried to “fix” my Dexter by calibrating every 15 minutes until it read slightly normal. This worked after the third one. It came in range slowly with my meter. But I just couldn’t figure out why it was doing this. It had been messing up this weekend as well. My next site change is Wednesday, so maybe I can keep it straight with regular calibrations until then.

My pods weren’t working right either. I thought maybe I had some bubbles or something that (of course) I couldn’t see that were causing me to go high. Thankfully, after remembering Lorraine’s advice (mom of Caleb), I used and became very familiar with Superbolusing. You know, that bolus where you take your correction and add what you would take for 2 hours of basal on to it and then stop your pump for two hours so you get all of it upfront and you come down faster? Yeah, that thing. It helped me with the 3 really high-highs that I had. (Especially the one the morning of World Diabetes Day!!! I couldn’t have a bad reading for that, now could I???) By the end of the day, I ended up deciding to change my pod from my tummy to my arm.

Then, as I was driving, my diabetic geeklight came on above my head: “Your apparatuses’ like being attached to your limbs.” In simple terms, my tummy is worn out from all of the tummy sites over the past 9 years of pumping and it needs a break. So, since my Dexter seems to read fairly well on only 4 calibrations per day (yes, I know you only have to do two, but I do it at least 4 times) when it is placed on my leg, I will keep putting and rotating it there for a while. And as far as my pods, I will have to keep rotating sites on my arms for those. Pods don’t like my legs and my Dex doesn’t like my arms. They’re mighty opinionated apparatuses’, don’t ya think?!??

(If you can’t see the video, you can find it on Youtube by clicking here.)

I decided to make a video of my dexcom site change. I don’t have a great camera, so it doesn’t look very clear. I am looking into getting a better one, so maybe I can redo this one and post it at a later date.
I am hoping to make one of my Omnipod site change as well some time.

I have been totally out of it, apparently. I guess since I have been off of Twitter more than usual lately, I didn’t realize that today is #dblogday.

You know, it’s amazing to me how far we have come in the world of Diabetes, while we still have so far to go. We came from not knowing how to treat it to giving insulin. From multiple daily injections being the only way to administer this insulin to insulin pumps that are tubeless! From only being able to read glucose on a pee-stick to wonderful little devices called continuous glucose monitors. From thinking it was all about only controlling calories to minimizing calories with focus on carbohydrate counting.

But with all of these advances and things that we have to help us treat our diabetes, it’s only a Band-Aid with better glue. I long for the day when we turn on the news and the breaking headline will be “Cure finally found for Diabetes”. To be honest, I don’t even know if I’ll believe it then. Even still, until that wonderful day, I will continue to use my better Band-Aids and treat my diabetes the best I know how. Because after all, what other choice do I have? Die and let it Diabetes win? Nope, not gonna happen!