I’m having a terrible diabetes week. My blood sugar average is 7 mmol/l (126 mg/dl), and today I went into the teens again with a whooping 18.3 mmol/l (330 mg/dl). For someone following a ketogenic diet, these are not good results. Let me explain. I’ve been thoroughly tired of having diabetes. At times I’ve pretended…
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When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I was super confused. I had needle phobia, and the thought of having to inject myself made me ill. You quickly have to get over that if you want to live. The other thing was food. I would never again eat a meal without counting carbs and injecting…
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Today I woke up with an astronomical blood sugar of 16 mmol/l (288 mg/dl). I haven’t been at that level since Christmas when I got drunk and ate a loaf of banana bread. What did I do this time? Well, I had half a bag of crisps. And some peanuts. And a little more cheese…
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Yesterday I met a fellow type 1 diabetic in a bar. She spotted my libre sensor and showed me hers. We were libre buddies. There the resemblance ended. Her blood sugar was at 15.2 mmol/l (274 mg/dl), and she was drinking a pint of Guinness. When she pulled out her iPhone with the librelink app…
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A collaborative project between the University of Gothenburg and the University of Oxford looked at the significance of blood sugar levels in the first years after diagnosis with type 2 diabetes. Scientists found that diabetics benefit from getting control of their blood sugar fast, much more so than we previously thought. Targeting an HbA1c of…
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I read a study the other day that showed that two out of every five Americans who die from covid-19 are diabetic. It makes diabetes one of the highest risk conditions in the pandemic. It’s sobering that while only 10% of the US population suffers from diabetes, 40% of covid-death cases are connected with the…
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I’m taking a summer course in dystopian fiction. This week we’re reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which annoys me no end. It presents organ transplants as a route to life extension in a near-future England, where human clones serve as the donors. The problem I have with the novel is that it disregards…
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One of the fears I had as a newly diagnosed diabetic was that I would go to sleep and not wake up again. It is known as dead in bed syndrome, where you go to bed fine, but then they find you dead in the morning. The reasons why it happens are unclear. Scientists speculate…
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When you’re diagnosed with diabetes, there’s a lot of new terminology. What’s the difference between basal and bolus insulin? Why do we need continuous glucose monitoring? Which is the best app for carb counting? You end up with more questions than answers. For me, the most confusing thing was HbA1c. When I went for my…
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When I first asked my endocrinologist for regular insulin, she wondered if it wouldn’t be inconvenient for me to pre-bolus before meals. We’re obsessed with the idea that diabetics should eat a standard diet. There’s a race to come up with faster-acting insulin to make this possible. Few people address the elephant in the room,…
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