I’m getting pretty good at estimating my blood sugar levels based on how thick my blood is. If I prick my finger and blood pools immediately in a large drop then my blood sugar is lower than it is if I have to squeeze to get the blood out.
If I prick my finger and blood sprays across the ceiling in an arterial spray then my sugar is way too low. If I have to slice my finger open from tip to end and rub it over a tampon until I get a spot of blood from it, then my blood sugar is way too high.
Made it through to Friday, pretty tired today generally. Lovely weather outside, bright sunshine, crisp. Bubbles is out there somewhere baking herself in what are probably the last few days of warm enough sunshine. She’s got conjunctivitis the poor bugger. We’ve got some ointment to put on twice a day, she’s been pretty good about it despite the whinging.
Watched Fright Night last night after recording it on Sky+. Classic movie, how on earth did we find those special effects ((special in the loose sense)) scary? Not even sure why it’s an 18, I guess some of the more fleshy scenes are the cause of that. Evan watching stuff like that the experienced is improved with the surround sound, we’re still really pleased with it.
I got sick of paying for a Sky Movies subscription and not watching anything. It’s because we don’t sit in front of the TV these days unless we’re doing so to watch something we recorded, so I went through the entire week ahead and set 4 movies to record (Clerks II, Fright Night, Deja Vu, American Gangster) and I’m going to try and do that every few days and record anything I’ve not seen or not seen for a while. Pan’s Labyrinth was on a week or so ago too, so recorded that and not watched it yet, and Hairspray was on Sky Anytime so I’ve ‘recorded’ that for Grete.
Still pleased with the 5.7% HbA1c result. Found this nice little chart in case you wanted to know more about the test,
|
HbA1c
|
Normal/abnormal
|
Average blood glucose
|
| 4-6.5% | Normal for those without diabetes | 3-8mmol/L |
| 6.5-7.5% | Target range for those with diabetes | 8-10mmol/L |
| 8-9.5% | High | 11-14mmol/L |
| Greater than 9.5% | Very high | 15 and above |
I bought a Marathon bar ((yes, yes I know, but I like living in the 80’s)) on Wednesday to eat after I got the results, either as a celebration or a commiseration depending on how the results went. Celebration was a good option. I never ate a lot of chocolate or sweet stuff before being diagnosed, but I did enjoy a Snickers bar every now and then. Almost amusingly, they don’t have a totally terrible effect on my blood sugar because of the high fat content, but as you can imagine I’ve had about three since I was diagnosed.
Roleplaying tonight, 4th edition D&D, first time we’ve played (rolled characters up last week), so should be interesting. Always takes a while to get ‘into’ any campaign, never mind one with a new ruleset so I’m expecting tonight to be pretty slow.
My good friend Simes blogged about some TV he’s been watching. It certainly feels like the TV schedule has picked up, mostly stuffed with American TV. The Fringe pilot was cool, the Burn Notice pilot was also interesting and we’ll be watching that to see where it goes. We’ve got quite a wait for the new series of Criminal Minds sadly, but Bones is back on and is as good as ever (I think).
And I’ll leave you with this,
And I think Pirates would kick both their asses.
5.7
I am very, very pleased.
Got a phone call with my GP at around 6pm tonight to get the results of my HbA1c test. Fingers crossed.
It’s been a long old week, but we finally made it to Friday. I need to start doing more than 30 minutes on the Wii Fit, because I’m not out of breath after 30 now like I was at the start. Or, start mixing it up a bit more (I tend to do mostly Aerobic stuff) and throw in some more Yoga.
I’m working on a little Wii Fit high score web-app thingy so that the folk I know with Wii Fit’s can see who’s the champion at Super Hula, but work over the last couple of days ate into my evening free time so it didn’t make much progress last night.
I think we may be about to start tabletop roleplaying again with Chris and Christine which would be fantastic, it’s always going be tougher at our age due to kids, jobs, lives, but hopefully we’ll be able to get together twice a month at least and get some games in. Really looking forward to that (probably 4th Edition D&D at this stage).
I was reading some stuff about diabetes and the HbA1c test, and it suggested that morning glucose readings (basically, fasting readings) should give a good indication of where you are with your blood sugar control. If the morning readings are high (consistently) then you’re probably not getting enough drugs, or your control is out, or you’re eating too much (or a combination). Mine tend to be pretty good, I don’t check them all the time (it doesn’t really help to do that with type 2 diabetes), and at 4.8mmol/l this morning I was quite happy. I had some low GI bread toast from a small bakery chain which I’ve not tried before, it was ok. I’ll check in a bit and see how it affects my sugar, I had four slices so I should get a decent indication if it’s going to be worth buying or not. (In fact, I just noticed it’s a couple of hours since I ate it, so off I go to finger-prick).
Hmm, 8.4mmol/l is a little higher than I’d like, I guess I’ll need to stick to less slices and/or the Bergen low GI bread although the strong flavour in that had started getting to me so I needed a break from it.
Finished bleeding, nurse found a vein on the first stab but it wasn’t particularly giving and she had to wiggle the needle around to coax a full sample.
Just got to wait 7-10 days now to find out how I’ve done for the last 6 months.
This is a good description of the test I’m due tomorrow. From the article,
In the blood stream are the red blood cells, which are made of a molecule, haemoglobin. Glucose sticks to the haemoglobin to make a ‘glycosylated haemoglobin’ molecule, called haemoglobin A1C or HbA1C. The more glucose in the blood, the more haemoglobin A1C or HbA1C will be present in the blood.
Red cells live for 8 -12 weeks before they are replaced. By measuring the HbA1C it can tell you how high your blood glucose has been on average over the last 8-12 weeks. A normal non-diabetic HbA1C is 3.5-5.5%. In diabetes about 6.5% is good.
Today has been a good day. It’s gorgeous, a little too warm in general for my liking, but clear skies, crisp and cool this morning and dry all day. We had our regular weekend high class Tesco breakfast before our Saturday shop, and then we headed straight over to B&Q for some random DIY purchases. We needed more woodchip for the border in the garden, and while we were there found some plastic border things which are better than the ones we were using.
I think I blogged about the last lot when we did the border, this lot are short sections, hammer-in, much sturdier and more durable and look a lot better. So when we got back, since the weather was so decent we ripped up the old stuff and I hammered the new ones in. We ended up doing about 5 hours of gardening, which included pruning the small apple tree right back now the leaves are starting to fall off (I have no clue what the best time of year to prune is, so don’t feel you need to correct me, we prune, when we want to prune). Then we had to chop those branches up and get them into the brown bin ((our council collects garden refuse once every two weeks in a brown wheelie bin)). Since we were doing that, I chopped up the bigger logs almost from the pruning we did in the front garden a few weeks back that have been lying in the other border.
Then we decided to finally tackle the small shed’s load of cardboard. We cleared out 70% of the cardboard that was in there a couple of years ago, it’s been there since we moved in. But as we got near to the bottom it got more and more hairy to move it without freeing up about 100 spiders, so we stopped. We really want to be able to use that shed for the lawn mower though, it’ll be much easier to get in and out than the other shed, so we sucked it up and pulled all the cardboard out.
Some of those spiders are the size of squirrels.
I’m not arachnaphobic. I don’t like being surprised by something that’s moving quickly, no matter how big it is, but if I can see a spider and know which way it’s going they don’t frighten me as such, even if they’re on me. It’s when I’m not sure if they’re on me, or not sure where they’re going to come from or where they are headed that just surprises me and gives me that fright. Grete is arachnaphobic, but can overcome that with the sort of aggression only usually seen in gladiatorial arenas or bad cases of PMT.
Anyway, once all the cardboard was out, Grete set about chopping it up into sections.
As well as not being arachnaphobic, I’m not claustraphobic either. However, I think it’s perfectly normal to be a little bit squicked out when you’re in a tight space and surrounded by spiders or other small insects you can’t see but which may be dropping onto you and wandering around your head. It’s that which to date has stopped us squeezing between the shed and next door’s shed to cut down the sycamore which is regrowing at the bottom of the garden. Last year, our next door neighbour had the hedge removed and put a fence up. It’s a nice fence, we weren’t sorry to see it going up and we didn’t like the hedge. We were a bit sad that she wanted us to have the sycamore chopped down, but we also agreed it wasn’t something either of us could managed. We paid her contractors to sort the tree, while she paid for the fence.
Now the sycamore is back, not really our fault, but it’s now stuck at the bottom of the garden with no access, because the new fence goes up to our shed and leaves a gap a little less than a foot. Once past that, there’s more like a foot and a half of space between the sheds, but as you can imagine, it’s pretty well populated with wildlife of the small and creepy kind.
However, it was time to give it a shot and I was pleased to find out I can squeeze through that gap, and as long as I didn’t think about it too much I was ok once I was in the narrow space. So a bit of chopping and sawing later and the sycamore is back to a tiny stump, and as we know, since nature always prevails, it’ll be back soon enough. But now we know we can get to it.
We tidied up, put loads of stuff in bags, sorted the cardboard, and have a whole bunch of stuff for several tip runs tomorrow.
I don’t know if using the Wii Fit for 14 days has given me more energy or not, but it certainly feels like it’s done so, and that’s what matters. I’m not sure I would have been up for 5 hours worth of gardening a few weeks back. We’ve made huge inroads into some of the stuff that’s been bugging us for ages, and the garden hasn’t looked better than this, including when we first moved in. Most of that effort is down to Grete since she mows the grass, weeds the border and keeps it in good shape, I’m more of a desctructive energy gardener, but still. Five hours, and although I’m knackered, I’m not falling over dead knackered.
So, placebo effect or not, 30 minutes of exercise a day (spread out over 40 to 60 minutes as it is with the Wii Fit) certainly feels like it’s elevated my mood, given me more energy in general and made a serious difference. I don’t even really care if I’ve lost weight I just feel better.
Fingers crossed it’s having a beneficial effect on my blood sugar levels (which reminds me, my HbA1c blood test appointment letter came through, fingers crossed).
I’ve probably tested my own blood more than 300 times now. 16 strips per thingy ((tub? tube? barrel? canister? whatever)), 3 thingies per box, easily had 8 boxes. Which means I’ve made over 300 holes in my fingers. After much trial and error I found that my left little finger is the best candidate. Doesn’t get used for much typing, heals pretty quick. When I started out, I’d spread it around (although I was testing a lot more then) and do a couple of shots in each finger, but eventually my fingers would hurt too much. Which is when I learned to concentrate on just one finger.
Anyway, after all this time, and over 300 goes, I still hesitate before I click the plunger and send the little needle into my finger. I still pause, I still wonder if this is going to hurt (it doesn’t really unless my fingers are cold). Something in my brain still shouts ‘why are you doing this fool?’
And then I bleed a little and my brain goes ‘see? see what you did!’
I love flapjack, but as you can imagine it’s loaded with sugar, and even though oats are nice and friendly and low GI, on the whole, flapjack isn’t the kind of snack I should be seeking. It’s the one thing I truly miss that could be considered a sweet snack.
So, I bought some honey (low-medium GI) and some Maple Syrup (pure) which is low GI and I tried to make some flapjack without sugar.
Worst.
Flapjack.
Ever.
The top is crusty and nice but hardly sweet, and the base is like a thick gloop of stodgy gloop which tastes like raw oats, which suggests to me it’s raw oats!
So, maybe I’ll have another shot. I’ve got some options like including some Splenda[tm], more syrup, less honey, baking it for longer, etc. Neither syrup nor honey are that cheap, so either I’ll find a recipe which works soon or I’ll have to re-mortgate the house.
I’m trying not to think about the 125g of butter you’re supposed to use per batch.