Day 133

8:00 p.m.
It's been a good day - haven't checked BG yet though - had ribs, baked beans and corn on the cob for lunch - should have tested after lunch but we had plans for swimming and needle sticks just didn't fit into that plan. Not hungry enough to eat anything for supper, but I may eat some more of the Strawberry Trifle my daughter brought for dessert today and test after that - she made it diabetic friendly, so that should be a clean test (is that cheating?).

Day 124

4:30 p.m.
Had someone ask how I got my BG in control so well and what I found to eat being that I am such a picky eater so I thought I would share my response:



Because I am a slow starter I had to keep breakfast quick & easy so I eat Jimmy Dean Breakfast Bowls - one has eggs, sausage, potatoes and cheese the other has eggs, bacon, potatoes and cheese. I have also worked on adding oatmeal, so it is the instant variety (but that has been put on hold because it started making me gag just trying to eat it.) I tried Special K cereal but I have found that pasta and cereals are two of my greatest enemies. This may not be the case for everyone since Diabetes is almost as individual as our fingerprints. What hits my BG hard may not hit the next diabteics as hard.


Salads are either: 
(1) Spinach Strawberry Salad
2-3 c. Baby Spinach leaves -I remove the stems as much as possible so that I get more leaf in my dish. Depending on how hungry I feel I go with either 2 cups or 3 cups
1 c. fresh strawberries
.25 cup pecan halves
.5 cup Manchego Cheese (shredded) 
(about) 3 Tbls. Light Raspberry Vinaigrette dressing
*and . . . when I have real bacon left-over from BLT sandwiches I will crumble it up and save it to add to this salad - usually about the equivalent of 1.5 strips of bacon per salad)


(2) Basic Iceberg Salad
2 c. shredded iceberg lettuce
3 slices of sandwich ham (chopped up small)
.5 c. shredded cheese (four cheese blend)
1 Tbls. sliced olives (black or green - whaichever is open in my fridge)
(about) 2 Tbls Light Sweet & Spicy French dressing
*and . . . if I have pineapple tidbits already open in the fridge I will throw in .33 c for more flavor.


The other meal (because some days salad is my lunch and some days salad is my supper so whichever meal my salad falls to the other meals is referred to here) will vary. Sometimes BLT sandwiches (I found Arnolds Premium Italian Bread to be good and it is a denser texture so it is more filling), sometimes grilled steak or grilled chicken with a couple of side items. Maybe: 
- Sweet Niblet Corn 
- Carrots (I cook my carrots in a skillet - I slice them in rounds and add half an onion (chopped large so I can get carrots without the onion on my plate) sprinkle with 1 tsp. Truvia and about 1 cup water - bring to a boil and reduce to med-low and cook about 30 minutes. Makes really great tasting carrots)
- Broccoli with Cheese Sauce (frozen stuff)
- Green Beans (I cook these with a Beef Bouillon cube and some Garlic flakes for better flavor) 
- sometimes I will treat myself to half a baked potato with a little Smart Choice butter and some Manchego Cheese (shredded)
- Baked Beans


The best thing to do is to track what you eat and keep tabs on which foods spike your sugar and which are BG friendly. I started tracking everything I eat for two reasons (1) easier to identify what spiked my sugar (2) to keep track of calorie and carb intake (it's too easy to forget you ate a handful of cashews if you don't note it. You can log it in a notebook or log it online - but it is a great check-double check habit to develop. 

Day 92

6:15 p.m.

Fasting BG was good - 95. Hopefully changing the time I take my nighttime dose of Metformin is the solution. I have had more lower numbers since changing the time. Not tons more, but 3 of 5 have been below 100, 1 of 5 was exactly 100 and the last was 105, which is better than the ones that were coming in at 115- 117.

Woke up dreading that it was Monday and exercise day again, but I got over that pretty fast when I got on the Wii Fit board and found I had dropped almost 2 lbs since last Thursday. Every little bit helps! :)

So far I can honestly say that the only things I have cut out of my diet completely are regular soda, regular hot chocolate and "added sugar". The diet sodas I switched too are very satisfying in regards to my infrequent desire for a carbonated soda. I have no problem using Splenda or Truvia for the "added sugars". But the sugar-free hot chocolate leaves a lot to be desired. And it's not the fact that it is not as sweet as the regular version because I could easily remedy that with some Truvia. No, it's the fact that it doesn't mix up as smooth and creamy as the regular and if I don't drink it quick enough it seems to kinda start congealing or something. I'm not sure whats up with that, but I don't care for it at all.

Day 20

11:00

BG had a small spike yesterday, but so far it is back into an acceptable range. The only difference between yesterdays morning and today is that yesterday I slept late so I was an hour late eating breakfast and the BG spike was with the 11:00 reading. Today I woke at my regularly scheduled time and ate at my regularly scheduled time. And, I ate the very same thing today as yesterday. Next step in testing out what happened yesterday is to wake at my regularly scheduled time and eat at my regularly scheduled time, but check my BG an hour early (10 rather than 11) to see if the spike was simply because of the abbreviated morning. At least I know that on a 3 hour span between breakfast & test the BG was good today. And that is good because I like the cereal I ate yesterday & today. Yesterday was the first day trying it, so I had to be suspicious of it. I feel better about it today - yay!

My doctor was having me email him my BG tracking each week, but last night he replied and told me every 2 weeks would be acceptable for reporting to him. I see that as an improvement! :) Heck, at this point I will take anything as an improvement!

So, almost 3 weeks in and I feel I am adapting to the Diabetic Lifestyle more & more. I guess it will always be a lifetime journey but it hasn't been as bad as I was dreading when I was first diagnosed. I didn't have as much issue sticking the needle in myself as I expected I would, but then, my BG was so high the day I was diagnosed that I was afraid not to stick myself!

For me the hardest part so far has been the things I have have to give up - potatoes, rice, gravy and reducing my bread consumption. I am a very picky eater & for me my staples were meat & potatoes with bread & gravy. In fact I have been known to pass on dessert just to have more bread & gravy! And, before I retired I was going out to lunch with friends everyday and my trusted fallback option was always chicken fingers - yep, those nice, crusted batter, deep fried kind. Thank goodness I was forced into retirement 2 years ago by a force reduction because then I started eating most meals at home. And, while my diet was still very bad, it was certainly better than greasy chicken fingers 3 or 4 times a week.

But I am working real hard at learning to eat the better foods and I am truly hopeful that with a better diet & the exercise I am now working on incorporating into my life will both help me lose weight and hopefully one day be off the injections and as an added bonus, maybe be able to come of my Blood Pressure meds too.

My doctor started trying to get me to modify my diet when he put me on BP meds, but I was stubborn and figured if the meds controlled it life was still good. But the diagnosis of Diabetes? That scared me. Really scared me. All I could think was Diabetic coma. That thought is what makes me try harder to change my ways!

Day 12

10:30

Still hanging in here. Still not happy about the food prospects. I think what I need to do is learn what herbs go well with what meats and try a few experiments. Fortunately we have BLT's on the menu for lunch today. It will shoot my carb goal, but I probably will end up with chicken, green beans and salad for supper anyway. Seems that is the majority of my meals these days anyway.

I read an article this morning on one of my diabetes websites about exercise and apparently it is better for you if you can work it into your morning schedule. Since my mornings are usually free anyway I will switch to a morning schedule starting Monday.  I am still working up to the "gung-ho" "feel the burn" type workout. having been through the start-up phase of an exercise more than a few times in my life I know  that if I do too much too soon I will feel the pain enough to cause me to start skipping workouts. So yeah, I shall be the tortoise this time - slow and steady!

Day 11

10:00

BG is still good but my close vision (as in reading my monitor) is somewhat blurred again. Not sure why that happened but I am hoping there is a link between exercise or not. My doctor told me he wanted me to add 45 minutes a day for four days a week so I decided those four days would be Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday therefor I did not Wii my little Mii yesterday. Today is Thursday so I will exercise around 1:30 this afternoon and see if the vision improves. If the exercise helps to burn up excess glucose than maybe that will help with the blurred vision. And there could be a connection between two of yesterday's BG readings since my 11:00 was back up to 150 and my 4:00 was up to 178. However, my 9:00 was back down to 101. And this morning at 8:00 it was back down to 96. Of course I would have thought excess glucose would affect my BG readings more than that amount of increase before it would have any affect on my vision, but then again, what do I really know? I'm still learning this Disease.

7:00
Numbers are still good,but if I don't find some more things to add to my (short) list of foods that I will eat that also fit into the "high protein - low carb" family I will become a lot harder to live with! I am already so tired of chicken cooked int he oven. I have tried it baked with Panko and just marinated and baked, but it is all still just chicken. 


On the brighter side, my Wii fit told me I was down 1.3 pounds from when it weighed me on Monday. Not that losing weight is a focus, but I'll accept it as a side effect.

Day 9

8:00

Another good BG check, but my 9:00 last night was 124 so while I still have a streak of 11 in a row below 200, my streak for 120 or below is reset to . . . 1. But I'm still very happy with below 200's for the injection factor :D

Wasn't happy with my breakfast today though. In an attempt to reduce fats (as well as carbs) I decided to try alternating my pre-made breakfast bowls with some cereal. I spent a lot of time in the store yesterday reading dozens of cereal nutrition labels and since Lucky Charms doesn't seem to be a good option, even though it is my lifetime favorite cereal, I settled on Special K Blueberry. It was okay. Not really filling and not really satisfying. And I had to eat 2 servings because the stupid stuff calls 3/4 cup a serving. 3/4 of a cup?? Seriously? I mean, pour that 3/4 of a cup in a bowl and that's what my 5 y.o. granddaughter would eat, and probably ask for something else to eat!  And, while I like fresh blueberries, these blueberries weren't even blueberries! They were little dark speckles all over the flakes, kinda like the flakes had some dread disease. You could hardly taste blueberry! Well, I think I may try Honey Nut Cheerio's next round since it also suppose to be good for the cholesterol.

As for yesterday's Wii exercises, so far no muscles calling me names, so I obviously did not push myself too far, I just hope I pushed far enough. This afternoon I will add more time to my free walk session . . . and try harder to feed my penguins in the balance game. I will save my game sessions till the last so I can reward myself for walking up and down on and off the Wii board. Oh, and I failed to mention yesterday that when I set up the program the Wii board weighed me and calculated my BMI! And as if that wasn't bad enough it actually had the audacity to alter my little mii character and make her fat! Fortunately the little mii character was a slim trim cute little mii again by the time we got to the exercise routines.

6:00
BG is still good :)
Found a couple of recipes I'm going to try - hope they turn out good. One is for a snack - all it will be is cheese cooked in the oven into little crunchy wafers. I need to find a hard Parmesan cheese - think I will check the Publix deli. I really need some crunchy and salty or crunchy and spicy snacks. Sweet is not so much an issue, I find I prefer salty.


And my little Wii penguins got a few more fishes today. And I still only did the 10 minute walk, but I did increase  the pace slightly so I did 920 steps in stead of 800. If I had just increased the walk time I would have had to go from 10 minutes to 20 minutes and I know I'm not up to a 20 minute non-stop. I guess if I were at a mall and looking at people and windows at  the same time I could do the 20 minutes okay, but not just walking in my den.

Day 8

9:30

Well, this afternoon will mark one week since my diagnosis and I feel that I am doing pretty good so far. This morning my BG was 104, which is a very good number. In fact, my last seven readings have all been below 200, so I have not had to inject any supplemental insulin and the last four of those seven were actually 121 or below.

At this point I'm feeling that the diet is my greatest obstacle. I still need to find a good collection of recipes that

do NOT contain any of the following:
1) seafood (no seafood - nothing - not even tuna fish or fish sticks)
2) onion (including scallions and other such noxious critters)
3) peppers (bell, banana - doesn't matter. However I am okay with ground peppers for spice)
4) mushrooms
5) celery
6) stewed tomato (pizza sauce is okay in moderation, but not in excess such as with spaghetti or lasagna)
7) beans or peas (I can tolerate green beans and if I add a lot of spice & seasoning I can tolerate baked beans made from pork-n-beans)
7) greens (as in spinach, turnip greens, collard greens, mustard greens. Cabbage is okay either raw or cooked)
8) wild game (no rabbits, deer, quail etc - Basically I only eat white meat chicken, beef, boneless pork options and turkey breast)
9) yogurt, cottage cheese or sour cream (it would be okay mixed in something cooked, but not as it comes straight from the carton)
10) squash
11) asparagus
12) something that someone will suggest that I did not think to add to my list yet

Yep, long list - and hard to work with for someone who has been pretty much meat and potatoes with some bread and gravy thrown in for a side and as dessert :D And I have always preferred the meats fried.But I still hold out hope!

1:00
Well, I know for certain that there is still a lot to learn about this disease. So what did I learn today? Well, I learned that if go to the grocery store just before lunchtime and miss my regular time for my BG check & my lunch that my sugar will drop - a lot. Went to Wal-mart to buy a Wii Fit and a few groceries and spent so much time reading nutritional labels and such at the store that I was an hour late. My 11:00 check taken at 12:00 was a 78. Of course that was before lunch, which, by the way, I was not really hungry for a lunch but made myself eat some salad with cheese and some "salad fixin's" type stuff that had cranberries & nuts in it. Half an hour after my salad I was back up to 98. 


I know I am suppose to adhere to the clock for BG checks and meals, but I really didn't think an hour would make that much of a difference in the sugar level. I am just going to have to be better about the clock. 


So, I bought the Wii Fit Plus. I haven't had a chance to get it set up yet, but I plan to do that this afternoon so I can start working myself up to the 45 minute workout my doctor wants me to do. Right now I doubt I can handle a good 5 minute workout - heck, I can get winded just doing housework. And before anyone says i should have saved the cost of the Wii program and just do more housework, umm . . . . no, I probably dislike housework more than exercise. I do what housework I have to do when I have to do it, but I certainly don't intend to do more and call it exercise! 

3:45

Okay, well, I got my Wii Fit Plus connected. It is 67 degrees in my house and it made me work up a sweat. Of course I am overweight & sedentary so really most any exertion could cause me to work up a sweat, but this did it without me realizing it or hating the devil out of it. I did several rounds of basic step and one round of free step (that was 800 steps in 10 minutes) and then played the balance game of the penguin catching fish - although my penguin was doing more swimming that catching of fish. All in all I'm liking it simply because I did these things without hating it and wishing it was over. I stopped because I was sweating & I  also know that if I overdo it on day 1 that day 2 will be harder to face. Baby steps, baby steps.

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. :)