Brave-Pancreas

I had a glazed donut the other day.
It was the most amazing thing I had eaten in a long while.
I nearly cried it was so amazing.

I still get a lot of "you can't eat that" comments.
Once, my uncle just looked at me sadly when they made a dessert I really wanted.
I believed that I couldn't have the things I wanted because I wanted them.
I knew I was wrong, though.

Tonight, I had a creamsicle. It's this drink at my college. It's basically orange sherbert, vanilla ice cream, and milk. It is the most heavenly drink on the planet earth. I highly recommend it.
But bolusing for drinks, especially drinks that don't have openly posted carb counts, is difficult.
And because it's difficult and because it's a lot of sugar, I resigned to the idea that I would never be able to have another creamsicle again.
But tonight, January 29, 2017, I treated myself to a creamsicle.

This disease has been filled with sorrow and disappointment and fear of failure.
But I will not let it ruin my life and take the small joys away from me!
If I want a creamsicle, by golly I am having that creamsicle!! Because this is MY LIFE!
No stupid disease is taking away my joy. Sure my blood sugar is high now, but tomorrow I might have a low. Tomorrow my numbers will be different. Tomorrow, I can go back to eating salads and behaving myself and striving for good blood sugar.
But tonight...
TONIGHT WE LIVE!!!

(By the way, Brave-Pancreas is a reference to Braveheart. I know, my humor is incredible.)

Bare Truth

Diabetics are not healthy.
Our bodies do not work in the way they were intended to work.
I get frustrated because I'm so broken sometimes. I should have this blood sugar right now but I don't. Is it my fault? Am I a bad diabetic? My friend who is diabetic has better blood sugar than me. Does that mean she is a better diabetic? Can I judge that?
My numbers will not look like a "normal" person's numbers.
That's not my fault; it's a fact of diabetes.
Am I doing everything I can to be healthy?
I try to.

I want to please people. I want to please my doctors. I want to please the people who care about me.
I want them to be happy and proud of me.

Sometimes the numbers are good and it's not because of anything I did or didn't do.
Sometimes the numbers are bad and it's because I did something specific.
The numbers will always change. If I sit around worrying about the numbers all day, I will never have time to live my life.
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For the time being, I'm only going to update on Mondays and Fridays! See you soon!

Gratitude

With everything that's going on in my life and in this world, I thought that now might be a good time to start a gratitude journal.
My cousin gave me this great little 90-day gratitude journal so I decided to start filling it.

"But Elizabeth, how can you be grateful when all this political upheaval is going on/ you have diabetes/ the world sucks so much/ etc?"
Well, my depressing yet kind-hearted friend, no day is without its ups and downs, but if we focus on the disappointments of the world, I don't think we'll ever be happy. Ya feel me?
So it's time to appreciate the small victories and to start seeing the positives!
I'll see you all next time.

Photo Time!

I have some pictures to share with you today!
Here's a picture of me a week or two after I got diagnosed:

I was gaining weight, but I was still really skinny.
Look at those legs!
You can't tell in this picture, but my arms are really skinny too. I had no muscle on them which made it almost impossible to open doors or lift a jug of milk.
I don't have my glasses on because my eyes were readjusting with the insulin and instead of being nearsighted, I was slowly getting far sighted. Of all the things that happened to me, that was definitely the weirdest!!









Here's a picture of me I took last semester:

You can really see the difference in my legs.
Look at those babies! They're like tree trunks!
I have glasses again because I'm nearsighted once more. Honestly, I missed my glasses. It felt weird to not wear them.














I still look over these pictures sometimes. I just can't believe it took me so long to notice what was happening to my body. The weight loss, the thirst, I just thought I was stressed out by school and that if I came home, I would be fine. It's still unbelievable to me.

Who Moved My Pancreas?

The other night my blood glucose level was pretty high (I had had a bad day and so I was rewarding myself with some pie). So as I walked around my room, willing my blood sugar to go down, I read the book Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson.

It's the story of four creatures, two mice and two littlepeople, and how they respond to change.
When they lose their cheese, the two mice move on to search for more cheese but the two little people respond differently. They both have a hard time dealing with the change, but one manages to move on and change himself.

A lot of this stuff is hard to relate to with diabetes. Enjoy the change? I think that no matter how good I'll get, I'll never enjoy stabbing myself with needles.
Though one section really hit home with me.

"Sometimes things change and they are never the same again. This looks like one of those times. That's life! Life moves on. And so should we" (Johnson, 45).

Getting diabetes at this time in my life was both good and bad. It's good because I'm old enough to be responsible for my numbers and making sure that I'm doing what I can to be healthy. It's bad because I remember what it's like to not have diabetes. There's a very clear BEFORE diabetes and AFTER diabetes. Things have changed and even if they find a cure tomorrow or the day after or five years from now, I don't think I'm ever going to be the person I was before diabetes.

Endo Office Frustration

I've been going in for a lot of tests this week.
LOTS of tests.
My boyfriend even took me to the lab to do a urine test. (He's such a good sport.)

And then I got the results.
They called me and said "Your numbers for your microalbumin are high but they're not as high as they once were. We want you to do a 24-hour urine test. We're going to mail the lab slip."
I'm going back to college in a few days so I don't have much time for peeing in buckets.
And how high is high?

The range my microalbumin should be is 5 to 100. When I was diagnosed, it was 2000. It's currently at 973. That high of a number could mean that I could get kidney disease.

So I call them and say, "Can I just come in and pick up the bucket?" "Oh, yeah! Sure."

We get there and I just want to go in, pick up the pee bucket, and get out. I sign the forms, get approved, and go into the lab. The nurse ushers me into a seat and brings out one of those tiny urine cups. "Oh no, I need the bucket. I just did the random urine test yesterday," I tell her. "The form says a urine sample. You'll probably need to go up to the endo office and get that fixed," she responds. How frustrating! And then the nurse says, "Do you want to do the blood sample before you go up?" BLOOD SAMPLE? I already did my blood sample!!! No no no no! The whole form is wrong. Thankfully my mother was there to calm me down and explain things to the nurse.

So we go up to the endo office. "The lab got it wrong. That form is right," the endo secretary tries to insist. Thankfully one of the nurses was around. She takes the form back and gets it fixed.
All I needed was a stupid pee bucket that I don't even want. I don't even want to do this.
The nurse comes back with a new form. "There are some new nurses here that must have messed it up." Sure. Cover your own butt.
The blood sample was still on the form. "No no, I don't need this." The nurse crosses it off.
I take the form back down to the front office.

Now, you'd expect the story to end here but it doesn't!!
I ask the front office, "Do I need to go through registration again or can I go right into the lab?"
One lady looks at the paper and says that the nurse didn't initial where she crossed off the blood sample and that I was going to have to bring it back up FOUR STORIES to get this NURSE TO INITIAL WHERE SHE CROSSED OFF!!! TO GET A BUCKET! FOR PEE! I could get my own bucket to fill with pee and it would be FASTER THAN THIS!
Then the woman I usually see at the front office comes over and says that the paperwork is fine. Just go into the lab.
And the nurse at the lab tells me, "I'll take care of the labs that you didn't do. I'll take it off of the insurance." And they give me my pee bucket.

I don't know what I hate more, the diabetes or the endo office.

Doctor's Office Visit

Just got back from the doctor's today and I'm happy to say that I am the proud owner of a healthy A1C of 6.9. The diabetic is now doing fine and resting comfortably.
At first, I was kinda upset. My blood sugar is supposed to be at 6.5 to be considered "healthy". Normal people have lower blood sugar. If 7 is a little high, isn't 6.9 skimming the surface? Am I getting a B+ for blood sugar when I should be getting an A?
But forget all that. I was diagnosed 7 months ago. I had an A1C of 14. I'm still learning how my diabetic little body ticks.
Anyways, it's Friday so that means a new Dexcom sensor which means a new pep talk. I've been getting progressively less stressed putting it in. This time, I said "Let's do this!" before I put the sensor in. I think it really helped.
Happy 2017!
Let's do this!