Day 7

9:00

Good numbers for my last 3 BG checks. I like the 3-in-a-row, but would love some 4-in-a-row's. And I am ever sooooo happy that my vision is actually a good bit clearer than it was this past Monday. I can again read the clock in my den and I no longer have to sit with my face 18 inches from my (big, like 22" big) monitor. I can't say how safe I would be driving yet. i will have to go out with Terry and see if I can read street signs again or not. In time, in time.

Kinda got a slight let-down with my breakfast this morning. I decided I need to start counting the fats as well as the carbs and discovered my "fallback" frozen breakfasts will seriously undermine my attempts. I have got to find a better solution that is quick and easy as well as tasty. I will finish the week and a half worth of what we already bought, but then I will pass on the Jimmy Dean Breakfast Bowls. I have one that is a Jimmy Dean "D-Lights" Breakfast Bowls and it has better numbers, but it is turkey sausage and I haven't much cared for the turkey sausage I already tried. But, if that's what it takes, then I will go with it. I am also going to look at some type of cereal, but it will have to be a tasty cereal - I will not eat things that taste like cardboard, so for me Product 19 is out (that's the one my dear hubby is pushing me to go with. Nope, tried it before and don't care for it.) I think I want to try Total cereal, one of the ones with little chips of dried fruit in it.

6:00
So happy! I have had 5 BG reading in a row below 200. And while they are not necessarily within the prime range of 90-120, they are below 200 which means I do not have to give myself the supplementary Insulin injections (of course the 9:00pm is always the exception since I have to inject the Lantus at 9:00 regardless of the BG number). So for right now I am just happy to be below 200! Once below 200 is the norm I will change my Happy Meter to register the numbers that fall in the acceptable range.

Overall I think I am doing okay with this. I had one day of shock & one day of emotional distress, but all in all it's okay. I expect there to be other days that fall into the emotional distress category as I deal with adjusting my diet to fit the Diabetes. Diet is gonna be my biggest obstacle to overcome because I am a very picky eater.

Today I also found a website that I think is going to be pretty helpful - http://www.everydayhealth.com/

This site has a calorie tracker that is pretty neat. I set my calorie, carb & fat ranges and then just plug in the foods I eat and it calculates the balances for me. It has a lot of foods  already pre-built so all I had to do for most foods was search it my name, such as Arnold's Italian Bread, and it found it for me. And for items that I can't find in the food search I have the option of loading the food and it's nutritional information and going forward I can select it from the list on the "Foods I Added" tab.  And for foods that I consume either more or less than a serving I can edit the entry and the site does the math for me. Like for lunch today I had a leftover steak - roughly 8 oz., the food search gave me a 6 oz so I just edited to show I consumed 1.33 servings.There is also a Glucose Tracker and several other tools, so I think I will be using this site a lot.

Day 5

9:30

Woke up to a good start. This is the second day I woke before my 8:00 alarm and I am so happy for that since over the past couple of months my waking time had slowly been slipping away from where I prefer it to be. I mean, seriously, I didn't retire to sleep my days away! But what was I to do? I was always so tired all I knew to do was sleep. But waking between 7 and 8 is only part of what made this a good morning. I checked my BG at 8:00 and had my 3rd reading in a row that was under 200! That is good because as long as it is under 200 I do NOT have to give myself an injection of Humalog. Of course the middle reading was my bedtime reading last night & I did have to give myself the Lantus injection regardless of the BG number . . . but it's all good. :D

And, just a note - I decided to start publishing my daily post as I type it up rather than wait until the end of the day tho push it to publish. I will still publish 1 post per day, but I will update that one post as I add more stuff through the day.

1:30
My 11:00 number was back up and broke my roll of under 200's, but it was not bad (well, not bad if you compare it to the 612 I was Monday afternoon - lol). Had a very good lunch but found I could not finish my plate so I think that is a good thing. Knowing I would not eat all I had I pushed myself to finish the salad and lean meat and save half of my corn for another meal. And it was a small corn on the cob - one of those half ear's of sweet corn. So that made me feel good. 

Well, spent my morning reading tons of more information on several Diabetes sites so I think it's time to treat myself to some recliner time. And since I seem to have slept wrong and have a small crick in my neck I'm going to take a muscle relaxer and apply my heating pad to the neck. I will try to read and hope I don't fall asleep once I get all snuggle-y (yeah, one of my made up words) comfortable.

Day 4

9:00

Good Morning! I woke up closer to the time I use to wake up. That doesn't seem like much, but I realize it as a small improvement. When I first retired I relished the idea of not having to get up every morning at 5:30 to be at work by 8. But I didn't want to sleep my retirement away so I decided my new wake up time would be somewhere between 7 and 8. And it was, but of late that time had crept to 9:00 - 9:30. And I have had several days of late that I would get up around 9, have my morning hot chocolate and a snack cake and then fall back asleep in the recliner. Some days I would wake again around lunch and some days I would sleep until mid-afternoon. And I have always hated sleeping my day away. It makes me feel like I have cheated myself out of one of the limited days God gives us on this earth. 

I hope my new breakfast menu is going to be good and acceptable on this journey. Today I had my coffee (made in my new coffee maker) and a breakfast bowl - a frozen quick food by Jimmy Dean - sausage, egg, cheese and potato (but I pushed part of the potatoes aside - yay me?). 

10:30

It's funny (not in a ha ha sense) how things creep slowly up on you in life and you don't realize it until it has fully grabbed hold of you. That is what has happened to me in the past few months - little things crept up on me and got a good hold of me. Sleeping later, going back to sleep after my morning bite, sleeping the entire day away and not doing as much crafting as I did a few months back. With sleeping later and later I would just tell myself that is one of the benefits of being retired. With sleeping all day I wrote that off to my bodies natural inclination to sleep when I fight things like colds, UTI, sinus infection, etc. I never tried to justify my loss of interest in my crafting. I think, for one reason, that it was partly due to having committed to helping make 40 invites and admission tickets for my granddaughters 16th birthday and when I wasn't too tired to do any crafting I was working on that project. But honestly, looking back I realize that project should have taken only about 1/3 of the time it actually took me. 

I guess Diabetes has been creeping up on me for years and just recently decided it had enough ground to launch a full on attack. Considering I have never had good eating habits it had a very big open door for that attack! I am the  first to admit I am a "Picky Eater" (synonymous for Pain in the A**). My friend Brenda once told a waitress that if she would not serve something to a 5 year old then don't serve it to me. I have had weeks where (for lack of an option I was willing to eat) I have had chicken fingers for lunch 5 days in a row. And I have been known to pass up dessert in favor of more bread & gravy. Gravy is a true weakness. I don't think there is anything edible that cannot be improved on with some good homemade gravy. "homemade". Not that nasty powder stuff. The real McCoy, grease, flour, water, salt & pepper. Sometimes with some beef or chicken broth for added flavor or with tomato sauce for Tomato Gravy (sooo good over rice!). Yeah, like I said, I left the front door so wide open for this disease that it should have been more of a shock that it didn't get in sooner than the fact that it finally did come on in.

Okay, I will finish today's post after my doctors visit this afternoon.

4:30

Back from the doctor visit. He says so far so good and he confirmed my numbers should be all over the board right now but that they will stabilize with time and continued attention to the meds and diet. He also wants me to start adding some workout to my schedule. I don't know how I'm going to work that in unless I spend 45 minutes four days a week just going up & down the stairs to my basement. And with my house being as small as it is there is truly no room to add a treadmill or anything else that will help facilitate the exercise requirement. Gonna have to think on this one for a bit (maybe while going up & down the stairs to my basement for 45 minutes.

My doctor is a GP, so he really couldn't answer some of my questions about how many carbs per day/meal etc., but he did give me a number to call a Registered Dietitian if I feel I am not getting a good enough understanding of the dietary issue. However, his nurse printed me out a couple dozen pages of information that I looked over (and will read more thoroughly later) that seemed to have a little better explanation of some of it. 

He has not reduced any of the injections. He said that would be a while. But he did increase the units of one medicine. 

So, currently my schedule is to test my sugar at 8:00A, 11:00A, 4:00P & 9:00P. For the 8, 11 & 4 sugar sticks I have a sliding scale that based on the number of my sugar I will inject a certain number of units of Humalog. Humalog is a fast acting Insulin that my body will absorb and put to use right away. 

For the 9PM sugar stick I inject Lantus regardless of what my BS is. Lantus

Theoretically I could be injecting at all four sugar checks, and so far there have only been 2 where the sugar was at a level that I did NOT need to inject. And, YAY! Today's 4:00 BS was one that I did NOT have to inject (so glad since I still feel the spot where I injected my 11 med.

In addition to the insulin injections I am taking Metformin twice a day. Right now it really has no effect since it is a medicine that has to build up in my system. But eventually it will be doing something to help my body "reduce the amount of sugar made by the liver, limit the amount of sugar absorbed into the body from my diet, and make insulin receptors more sensitive (helping the body respond better to its own insulin" (copied that, don't ya know!).

6:00

Gonna add one more time to today's post. This one is one I started to tell my daughter when she stopped by here a few minutes ago, but since she needed to get home I told her I would blog it.

It's kinda sad how much damage we can do to ourselves . . . unintentionally. While this Diabetes has been building up to the point of my diagnosis over time I only became really concerned with something being really wrong when I seemed to have lost half my vision in a matter of days. Well, that and the fact that we went to see my financial manager & something his assistant said kinda scared me. She & I have both had disc surgery twice. We have discussed and compared symptoms and side effects just about every time we have seen each other. On our way to the financial manager's office I mentioned to my husband that I was becoming concerned about my vision because even that day it seemed to have gotten blurrier than it was the day before. Well, we get there and Samantha & I start comparing symptoms again & before I even mention my vision she says she has started having issues with her vision and with the other symptoms (which we both have) her doctors has scheduled her for an MRI to look at the possibility of MS. I looked at my husband and opened my eyes wide in that OMG look. So yeah, after we left there I knew I would be seeing my doctor sooner than later. (quick side note - her MRI ruled out MS)

Well, before the vision became an issue the excessive thirst was bothersome, but not really distressing. I have never been a very thirsty type person so it was a minor annoyance, but nothing I couldn't live it. Of course, with more liquid going in, more liquid had to come out so of course I was going to the bathroom more - another annoyance, but again, nothing I couldn't live with, especially since I'm now retired and at home most of the time - where my own bathroom is. Oh, I guess I haven't mentioned that I have a phobia about public restroom. And I considered the restrooms at the office I worked in as "public", so before I retired there were very few (and I do mean VERY FEW) times I would even use those bathrooms. But I digress, anyway - I was drinking more and so much so that sometimes I could hear myself slosh. Kinda odd to hear sloshing inside yourself. And, I'm not a froo-froo uppity person, but I will only drink bottles spring water. Of course you had to see that coming since I mentioned in my first post how much I hate our water supply. Anyway, I went through an entire case of 16 oz. bottles in a week. And for someone who hates water & is not normally a thirsty person, that's a lot! And here's where the unintentional damage started. Because I was drinking so much I decided I needed some hard candies to suck on to make my mouth create more saliva (thinking some of it may be dry mouth more than thirst that was driving me to drink so much). Yep, not knowing it was diabetes I sat for a week eating Jolly Ranchers to fight off the dry mouth/thirst issue. Not so good for a Diabetic - but in my own defense I plead ignorance.

Tomorrow is a new day - another opportunity to reduce my sugars and carbs and another step towards getting this disease under control. :)