Waiting for the storm

Things have been going quite well for me control-wise recently. Monthly averages not too shabby, and particularly over the last few weeks where my meter shows an average of around 6.4mmol/L (115 for US types) with hardly any hypos by my standards, and an SD between 2.0 and 2.7. The Accu-Chek Expert is the first meter I've had that shows 'Standard Deviation'. A mathematical concept slightly beyond my meagre adding-up ability, I gather that it demonstrates the variance in a set of numbers above and below the average. Neatly it also reports it in the same units, which means that you can get an idea of the general 'spread' of your BG results. The smaller the SD the more tightly grouped the results (which is a good thing in terms of BG results fact fans). An average of 6.4 and 2.5 SD would mean that almost all of my 14-day results including the post meal ones lie between 3.9 (70) and 9.9 (178). For me that is smile-inducingly good.

But last Friday was the end of term.

I'd been watching its approach like a ink-black cloud on a summer's day horizon. Hoping that it would not mean what I feared it might. Regular readers will know quite how well I've done with holiday periods recently. In short, not very.

So I'm steeling myself for a slightly wobblier period over the next few weeks. Last summer I seemed to manage pretty well, though I think my control has improved since then. At least when the kids are off school over the summer I have a few more weeks to try to find the new rhythm. I'm hoping it will just be a matter of getting some sort of holiday basal working to account for lack of gym visits, and that the new big meal strategy will continue to work its magic. Maybe.

I'll let you know how I get on.

What if?

I still haven't heard about my 'annual review' (due last April) and the post I have been musing on full of questions about potential treatment changes is still rattling around in my head. In the meantime, and partly because no one has posted anything new here in a good long while, here's a quickie about a conversation we had at the breakfast table yesterday.

Beth asked me what I thought it would be like if I was suddenly cured of diabetes and didn't have it any more. Whether I would find it easy to stop doing all that routine diabetic stuff out of habit.

I don't think there is a diabetic who has not wondered about this, even if only for a moment, after living with diabetes for a while. Behind the question there is almost the feeling of 'Do you think, in a weird and unfathomable way, you would miss it?'

The first thing I said was that I would eat a lot more biscuits. No more having to just grab a handful of nuts if I was peckish for me, oh no. Now I know in theory that I should be able to bolus for a snack and eat pretty much what I want, but the reality is that snacks and doses rarely seem to behave for me. Either 1u is a bit too much or not quite enough, the dose stacks with another, or lags behind whatever I've eaten. Mostly snacks are just too much like hard work, and I just get too grumpy when I get it wrong again to enjoy them. Which is a shame really because I do love a biscuit.

The next thing I said was that I'd start eating properly massive pasta meals again. Jane suggested I'd probably stop going to the gym which I had to agree was fairly likely.

The upshot seems to be that if I got rid of diabetes tomorrow, pretty soon I'd be a lot less healthy than I am at the moment. And I wouldn't be getting all those regular checks to spot potential problems either.

So there you go Mr D, you can hang around for a while longer.

I'd still jump at the chance to get rid though really. Sorry about that.