(Daniel)
Over the past few weeks, I’ve often thought about someone who told me that diabetes was essentially a solved problem with modern technology. I get what they meant, but now that we’re living it I couldn’t disagree more. Blood sugar management pretty much consumes my every waking thought, and often wakes me in the night. Mylin can’t just sit down and eat. There is now a whole ceremony surrounding it. First, we need to check blood sugar before eating. Then comes counting carbs, my enemy. If you’ve never tried, spend some time trying to get an accurate estimation of the carbs in a dish that is set in front of you with no nutrition info. It is really hard. Is that a cup of rice? Are you sure? How many ounces of fruit is that? The best you can do is check multiple sources and try to make an educated guess. You won’t find out how right or wrong you are for 1 to 3 hours either. If you guess too many carbs, you end up with a dangerous hypoglycemic moment to manage later. If you guess too low, now your blood sugar is out of range and you can’t give a correction dose until its been 3 hours since the last bolus. You are supposed to give the bolus dose for the carbs before you eat, but we still have to give after Mylin eats since we can’t be sure how much they will actually eat last their stomach heals. Then there is all the equipment. The insulin pump needs to be changed every 3 days. You wipe the insulin bottle with an alcohol swap, then use a syringe to inject insulin in to the pump. Next, pull off the pump’s stickers, place on Mylin’s skin, and trigger its needle to go in. Place a sticker over it to help it stay tacked down. Then use tacky off to carefully remove the sticker from the old pump. Then yank it out of their skin. You can’t just throw the old one away either, you need a sharps container for it. The continuous glucose monitor needs to be changed every 10 days. You can’t just swap it out though. You need to put a new one on and let it “soak” for a bit because there’t accurate at first. After that, open the Dexcom app, change its connection to the new sensor, and then wait for the 30 minute warm up period before any readings show up. Then there is what’s required to leave the house. Prior to diabetes, we just left the house. Sure Mylin would need creon in case they were going to eat, but carrying 1 bottle of pills is simple. Now consider what we need to have on hand at all times away from the house:
- a backup insulin pump
- a vile of insulin in case we need to switch the pump
- a glucometer
- lanceletes for the glucometer
- test strips for the glucometer
- alchohol wipes
- backup insulin inejction pens in case of pump failures, there are 2 of them (one short acting and one long acting) and they need to be kept cold
- a glucagon injection syringe for hypoglycemic emergencies
- glucose tabs or other fast acting carb for hypoglycemic moments
- a glucagon nose spray for sever hypoglycemic emergencies
Just think about the bag you need to hold all of that. No matter where you are going or for how long. Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful for modern technology. Insulin pumps talking to the glucose monitor do make things much easier to manage than doing manual injections. But that doesn’t remove the fact that managing diabetes is all encompassing and takes a lot of attention at all times. My definition of it being a solved problem is when technology enables the removal of the active management and thinking. When our attention can be elsewhere without consequence. Until then there is a long way to go.
Mylin and had a zoo day today!
They have a deal in Columbus where you can get $5 admission if you take the bus to the zoo. The catch? That bus only runs every 2 hours. Oh well, I’ll take the car and deal with the expense given Mylin’s physical state and the potential need to leave quickly. The zoo was quite busy and it took us a while to get through traffic into the parking lot. There is no way Mylin would be able to physically walk enough to see the zoo, so I planned to rent a wheelchair. Well, they were out of wheelchairs, so Mylin got drive a “grannie mobile”.
We had a great time. Mylin is such an animal lover and they had happiness written all over their face. I’d still say San Diego’s zoo tops it, but the Columbus zoo is really nice. We saw a bunch of cool animals. Mylin’s highlight was these massive bats.
It went pretty smooth too. When we stopped for lunch Mylin crashed a bit on me. They fell asleep at the table for 30 minutes and then woke up feeling sick.
Thankfully, that passed quickly and they were ready to go. They ended up driving the scoot scoot around the whole zoo and we got to see pretty much everything. Mylin says the stomach feels really tight after today, and immediately fell asleep after the zoo, but it was good to get them out and about. The stomach tightness doesn’t surprise me considering they literally had their abs cut through and help open for 16 hours only 3 1/2 weeks ago. All in all it was a great day. Mylin continues to recover nicely and I loved having more of a “normal” moment with them.
