I had a long list of stuff why I could never be diabetic as well. Needles was and is a HUGE one. Plus I love to eat. Plus I like alcohol. Plus I like sweets. I love to cook and bake. Nope, I could never, ever, ever be diabetic.
And it did suck for the first few months, while the docs and I were sorting everything out. Now? Not a big deal. A lot easier than I thought. Life is a lot the same as before, only I’m healthier.
The needles still suck, though. Luckily most of the ones I use now are hidden and only happen every few days. I had a real come-to-Jesus moment with them when I first started. I couldn’t do it myself, and made Mr. Athena do my injections for the first few days while I looked the other way. Then I sat myself down and gave myself a good talk, along the lines of “this is your life now, are you seriously going to make your husband do every injection for the rest of your life?” and got on my big girl pants and figured out how to do it myself. But I still hate them. Hate hate hate. Blechers.
Yeah, well, for me, it would cost me a lot of time (being not able to just pour a bowl of cereal for breakfast anymore) and money (spending much more on food that I’m able to save on pasta right now - ignoring the whole medical thing and the fact that I can’t think of a single meal I normally have that is carb-free).
Plus, I’m not sure losing weight with my current weight would be a good thing…?
OTOH, this might actually be the thing that FINALLY gets me in for a checkup (though I may still wait to see if this contract turns into full-time so I can get insurance that covers checkups and get a non-clinic doctor). Still, the one I’ve seen before just uses what looks like the home meter tests, without even asking how much I’ve eaten and when or anything, so I guess it may not be accurate regardless…
My best places to jab are the sides of the tip (between last knuckle and fingernail) of the middle finger, along the edges of the pad. Skin is thinning out there, but still enough cushion so the jab doesn’t hit anything hard or cut muscle. I really don’t like doing it anywhere else and a lot of places won’t give up their blood.
I was recently hospitalized, and the nurses checked my blood a few times a day. Every single one of them did it in exactly this spot. There were no problems, so I’m doing it that way now.
Ahahahaha! This reads exactly like me. Although throw in a family history of diabetes too.
I’ve been tested before and told I didn’t have it, but I just knew it was coming. I didn’t have any different symptoms from when I did my other tests, but I got tested anyway, and it finally was enough for me.
Me neither. But my doctor wants me to give it a try anyway.
I at least partially figured out the blood thing. The gom jabbar wasn’t cocking right. I played with it a bit before putting the cap back on, and somehow got it to cock right. I bled just enough.
Y’know, the more I think about it, the more the food thing is the part that I’d dread the most. No more pasta (and no, minestrone is not a substitute; I have no idea why someone would think it was). No more bread. No more rice, a staple of Japanese food (and no, brown rice is not the same; different texture and it tastes gross). Nothing but water to drink. It just seems like such joyless, time consuming, expensive (compared to what I spend now on food) deprivation that I’d just feel like curling up and dying.
Hmm. If diabetes didn’t maim, I’d almost consider death as a possible alternative.
Aw shit no! I’d give up too, if I had to give up artificial sweeteners. You will pry my diet soft drinks out of my cold, dead hands.
It’s been hard for me, I used food as reward and used to look forward to it. I could accelerate my weight loss, but my A1C wasn’t too bad in the first place, so I don’t go quite as low carb as most people do. I need a creamy salad dressing, I would die with just vinaigrettes. I’m going to get the nuts with smoky BBQ flavour. If I have to stick carrot sticks down my gullet, I’m having a little bit of dip to go with them.
It seems that my desire to be Forever Alone trumps my laziness: since you can’t get healthy fast food, and I don’t want to go to a sit-down place by myself, I end up eating my own food at home.
One of these days, I’m going to have to take some CEU’s in diabetes education, ‘cause I’m frankly baffled that there’s so much emphasis on carbs here for the Type II diabetics. The little they taught us in plain ol’ RN nursing school is that we’re not to focus on carbs “so much” as in the past. That we should teach people to cut down on sugar, sure, and carbs to some extent, but that counting carbs was passe and not supported by the evidence, and we should really just focus on teaching the same “healthy diet” as for everyone else: reasonable portion sizes, several small meals a day, half the plate full of non-starchy vegetables, a quarter of the plate for protein (meat, cheese, nuts, beans) and a quarter for whole grains. And a reasonable sized plate, of course. And drink water or diet soda; juice is now medicine for hypoglycemic events, not a beverage.
There’s a line in this article that I really like: “A healthy diet for diabetics is really the same as a healthy diet for anyone, though the consequences of not paying attention are greater.”
That’s exactly what the CDEs told me as well, 4 years ago.
But really, how many people eat “a healthy diet”? Do you know what 30 carbs worth of pasta looks like? It’s not even a side portion. You might think a “healthy” deli sandwich from Arby’s like a Roast Turkey and Swiss Market-Fresh Sandwich would be a good choice, but it has a whopping 77 carbs! How about a nice piece of fruit? A medium-size banana pushes 30 carbs.
Add in that you suddenly have this little gizmo that tells you just what those carbs do to your blood sugar, and a healthy dose of education about what high blood sugar will cause over time (blindness, kidney failure, etc) and it’s hard NOT to be totally fixated.
(I really hope I’m not hijacking this thread too much from the Type 2s. I am trying to keep it to the common ground, and I gotta think “fixating on carbs” is definitely common ground…)
Well,* I *wouldn’t. Funny you should mention that, though…I had this discussion with a patient just today actually, about a Subway sandwich I walked in to find him eating! So I challenged him to take it apart and arrange it on the plate. Of course, the bread far exceeded its allotted quarter of the plate! He was shocked, and much educated by the experiment. I may just take Subway sandwiches to all my diabetic patients next week…
Now if I could just get him to knock it off with the fruit juices…
You see what I mean, then! It’s fookin’ hard! The average person would think that a Subway or a deli sandwich would be better than a burger, but in many cases it’s not, at least from a carb perspective. Cooking is my hobby; I know a lot about what goes into food just because I’m into it (and was, long before becoming diabetic), and I had a hard time learning about carbs. To someone who is not particularly interested in food-as-hobby? Miserable, and incredibly hard. Carbs are in everything.
That’s what I was told by the nutritionist, but I’m confused by what the medical staff tells me and what people with diabetes tell me. On the internet, people are much more serious about things. Like I said earlier, there’s a huge focus on carb counting and people try to minimize it to 30g or less per day. I see claims that eating any sort of grain will spike blood sugar into DANGER ranges for everyone!
Plus, when I see medical staff, I assume they’re trying to cater to the lowest common denominator. To get a 1-on-1 meeting with diabetes specialists, I had to go through a group seminar first. It was astounding how little people knew - the whole 3 hours was spent talking about stuff I learned in the first half hour of checking out the Canadian and American Diabetes Association websites. You mentioned your diabetic patient that drinks fruit juices. I’m so far beyond that in my knowledge. It creates a cycle, because I have to jump through hoops to talk to a medical professional specializing in diabetes, and while I wait I further educate myself online, which turns me to the more extreme attitudes online.
I try to meet each line of thought halfway. Focus more on carbs than the nutritionist does, but don’t be as crazy about it as the hardcores.
Try getting a wrap instead of a sub, or the sub turned into a salad.
I happen to prefer subway because I can get a wrap or salad. Of course you need to doublecheck the sauce they use - some of the creamy ones are absolutely loaded with sugars of various types. My preferred sub is an italian on a wrap, loaded with pretty much every veggie other than peppers or mushrooms. [road trip foods, I think my gall bladder is going all wahooni on me, I get gastric dumping if I eat most fast foods or something at home that is fairly oily.]
I do the nutrition consult every couple years but I still remember the group one I did about 5 years ago. It is amazing how many people bought into the fruit juice is healthy thing, and simply can not read an ingredient/nutrition panel, and have no idea what a single portion of whatever looks like. I do like the bowls, measures and plates that are out now for portion control and portion training. I first learned my portion control when a meat portion was the size of a deck of cards, now it is a cell phone or something like that.
And yes, carbs are still important - you have to be able to make the educated choice between a portion of macaroni or a portion of something more nutritionally dense like kasha or quinoa and actually know how to decide what to order out in a restaurant or at a friends house. It isn’t necessarily about the carbs actually, it is about they type of carb, and the nutritional density of the carb. Though my nutritionist did give me a random 180 cal per day non assigned food, and told me when I asked that yes I could get a spoon and dig into a bag of sugar if that is what I want to put those carbs to. It is the whole ‘there are no evil carbs’ thing, it is there are useless carbs that fill you up, turn into glucose and don’t give you any other nutritional benefit like minerals, vitamins or amino acids.
We are lucky to be diabetic now, with the foods available that we never had before like quinoa, or teff, or groats [well we had groats, only weird hippy types ate them, or little old ladies from Croatia] and yoghurt, and better understanding of how the body processes foods. We get fresh fruits and vegetables shipped in from all around the world - so stop complaining about not knowing what to eat, that is a first world problem and with the educational availability online and through hospitals it comes off as whiny … imagine being some poor schlub in 1900 - diabetes was a diagnosis of death.
Half of a banana is considered to be one serving of fruit, on the diabetic exchange. Yeah, surprised the hell out of me, too.
And if carbs aren’t in the food naturally, why, we’ll just load up the food with high fructose corn syrup until it tastes better!
Subway is somewhat better than most fast food places because you can get the various sandwiches as salads, instead. The vinegar that they use is quite tasty, and is a great salad dressing by itself, without any oil needed. If you want, though, oil, vinegar, salt and pepper are pretty good on the salad. I just get the vinegar because I don’t think that the oil is necessary, and if I’m getting a cold cut sandwich it certainly has more than enough sodium in it already.
Get a kitchen scale and a good set of liquid and dry measuring cups, and measure everything.
See if your insurance will pay for a diabetic education class. Many will, because it’s cheaper in the long run. These classes will differ in the kinds of info they present, and how they present it, but most of them are pretty good. I’ve been to three or four of them over the years, each of them lasting three to five days.
No shit. Really, I look at just about all mass-market food as suspect. I don’t often eat fast-food, but sometimes (like on road trips) it just makes sense, so once or twice a year I find myself at McDonald’s/Subway/whatever. I carefully look up carb counts of whatever I order and try to pick low-carb items. And regardless of how well I do my homework, my blood sugar ALWAYS rockets.
I honestly believe they lie on their nutrition information. I don’t think it’s highly regulated, and who can really tell without an expensive investigation? A McDonald’s Egg McMuffin shouldn’t be all that different carb-wise than the egg/ham/cheese-on-an-English-Muffin I make all the time at home, and according to their nutrition info, it’s not (30 carbs for McDonald’s, about the same at home depending on what brand of English Muffin I use). But the McDonald’s one spikes me high every time, and I end up correcting 3 hours after eating. At home, I’m spot-on.
OK, rant off. It just bugs me that fast food nutrition data seems to always be wrong.
I personally don’t need the help - I figured it out just fine - but this is great advice to someone new to the whole thing. I learned a lot from various classes I took.
Funny you should mention that, though…I had this discussion with a patient just today actually, about a Subway sandwich I walked in to find him eating! So I challenged him to take it apart and arrange it on the plate. Of course, the bread far exceeded its allotted quarter of the plate! He was shocked, and much educated by the experiment. I may just take Subway sandwiches to all my diabetic patients next week… 