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The Different Kinds Of High Blood Sugar

High blood sugars come in three different tiers for me:  No Big Deal (NBD), Tricky Little Sucker (TLS), and What The Eff (WTE).

No Big Deal (NBD) highs are the ones I see when I first hear the Dexcom BEEEEEEEP!ing.  They are the 180 – 240 mg/dL highs, where I’m cruising out of range, but not so far outside that it takes hours to correct.  The NBD highs are usually mild in their symptoms (kind of thirsty, sort of tired, maybe wouldn’t have noticed if the Dex hadn’t hollered) are thankfully short in their duration, so long as I’m on the ball about keeping tabs on my blood sugars.

Tricky Little Sucker (TLS) highs are obnoxious pieces of garbage that hang on for hours.  These highs are the ones where you hit anything over 200 mg/dL and just ride there for hours.  HOURS.  Like you can undecorate the Christmas tree and pack up all the holiday nonsense back into the attic and STILL find yourself rolling outside the threshold.  They’re the ones that Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*

Diabetes: An Expensive Disease

Back when I was a young bird with type 1 diabetes, insulin cost about $70 dollars per bottle.  (And I had to walk uphill both ways to the endocrinologist’s office.)  I had no concept of this cost, or how it played into my family’s finances, at the time.  I would just open the fridge door, grab the bottle, uncap the orange top to a 1cc syringe, and take the units my mom would yell to me from the kitchen sink.

“Two. Two of Regular should do it.  Rotate to your right arm this time, okay?”

“Okay!”  (And then I’d proceed to jab it into my left arm because I’m right-handed and also stubborn.)

Now, twenty-five years later, insulin has taken a bit of a price hike.  I just ordered a three month supply of Humalog from Medco and the total for the insulin came to six hundred and ninety-seven dollars.  For six bottles of Humalog that will be all gobbled up by early March.  (And thanks to a high, but manageable-on-paper deductible, we’re responsible for the full cost this round.)  Almost seven hundred dollars worth of insulin.

We’re lucky that we’re able to pay for that cost without panicking, but knowing what these bottles cost without the assistance of insurance makes me look at everything through a diabetes lens.  When three days are up on my insulin pump site, I am very aware of Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*

Parents Get Tattoo In Support Of Their Diabetic Son

I was just making preparations for the top 2011 posts I’m planning to write in the upcoming days when I bumped into this cute story about a diabetic kid who felt ashamed to wear the insulin pump so his parents got insulin pump tattoos.

Some parents get tattoos of their child’s name, but Philippe Aumond and Camille Boivin went one better.

In a show of solidarity, they each have an image of an insulin pump tattooed on their abdomens, declaring that they are “forever linked” to their son Jacob.

“It is a great thing for him, and we were thrilled just to see his smile when he saw those pumps. It made our day, that’s for sure,” said Boivin, 36, from the family’s home in La Sarre, Que.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Diabetes, Jet Lag, And Adjusting To The 24-Hour Clock

I traveled by small, wooden plane.  The flight from Boston to London took just over six hours.  The time change was five hours ahead of Boston, so when we landed at 6 pm, I was only ready for lunch.  The trek from London to Dubai was almost seven hours, pushing the clock ahead a full nine hours from Boston, making my head hurt because how was it Wednesday morning when I was still on Tuesday’s timetable?

(I wrote about the impact of changing time zones for an Animas column last month, but I seriously had no idea what I was in for when I decided to take the trip to Dubai.)

That first day there, the Wednesday, everyone gave me the same advice:  “Don’t go to sleep.”  (It felt like A Nightmare on Elm Street.)  “Work through the exhaustion and just go to bed on Wednesday night on Dubai time, and you should be good the next day.”

For the first few hours after landing, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*

Making Discoveries About Type 1 Diabetes From Long-Term Survivors

It’s hard to imagine what it was like to live with type 1 diabetes 80 years ago. Insulin was a brand new and relatively untested drug, the only way to check blood sugar levels was by testing boiled urine, syringes had to be sterilized, and needles sharpened by hand. Couple those challenges with the common complications of diabetes—heart disease, kidney failure, nerve damage, blindness, and more—and life expectancy for someone with type 1 diabetes wasn’t that long.

Spencer M. Wallace, Jr., was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1931, at age 7. He’s now an active 87-year-old who plays golf several times a week. He isn’t alone as a long-term survivor. Since 1970, almost 3,500 men and women who have lived with the disease for a half century have been recognized by the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston with bronze 50-year medals. Forty-five of them Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*

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IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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