So the other day I had my yearly opticians appointment and as part of that they blinded me with a machine that supposedly images the back of your eyeball. The photos they took, very tasteful subdued and flattering, of the back of my eyeballs showed a bit of bleeding. So I had to go to an ophthalmologist to check it. They took more pictures after blinding me this time with eye drops and confirmed there was something there.
So I was then required to go down stairs and get one of my arms drained of blood for "testing" purposes.
They ran some tests and found that my blood is more like a syrup containing too much of the sugars and thus I was diagnosed with Diabetes 2 electric boogalo.
So that was a bit of an unpleasant surprise. They gave me a bunch of pills with cool names like Glucophage! and told me to lay off the cake.
They also required me to stab myself at least twice a day with a tiny spring loaded knife device the Stabomatic 9000 Bloodletter pro and then daub that blood onto a machine ironically called the One Touch.
Ironic because so far it's never one touch, I never imagined it would be hard to bleed enough after stabbing a sharp bit of metal into one or more of your fingers but so far I think I did it in one shot the very first time I used it and then never again after that. The machine takes a little testing strip thing that you shove into its receptical you then stab yourself with the stabomatic spring loaded knife and you then daub the blood onto the side of the test strip where there is a little channel this slurps up the blood and then the machine will pronounce your fate.
However if you don't use enough of the claret it flashes an error and you have try again with another test strip thing and of course if the wound has stopped bleeding by that point you need to restabbify yourself. So far my personal best is 6 strips and three different finger before I got one that didn't error out.
You'd think it would be relatively easy to cut yourself bleed and then smear that onto a stick for testing but no the machine hungers for yet more blood always. It would be one thing if you could just add more blood but it doesn't allow that just requires you to go again and try squeezing and pressing the wound to extract enough to get a reading and not the dreaded "ERR 4" display and this is more guess work than anything else. I've configured the Stabomatic to maximum stab depth but it only seems to produce a tiny pinprick hole I have to then squeeze and rub to have even the chance of enough of a drop.
Maybe my skin is just too thick from years of being on voice chat and ignoring the 12 year olds screaming slurs.
Other than the repeated blood letting and the pills they want me to take. It's now a case of adjusting my diet to try and get the syrup factor down a bit.
I don't eat a lot of sugary things in any regularity the occasional treat but nothing I can't forgo I don't drink sugar sodas or sweets so I expect the thing that's causing me gripe is the carbs. Once again it's potatoes bread and rice that have done me in. CURSE YOU POTATOES!
It's going to be an adjustment cutting out the sugar should be ok somewhat being a bit more aware of the nutrition info on things to catch any stuff with sugars that is non obvious but mostly I think thats not going to radically change things. Having to greatly reduce carbs is going to be harder as I like a lot of things which are pretty carb heavy. Beer being one of them although to be honest I don't really drink that often these days maybe once or twice a week. I do like gnawing on potatoes though so thats something I'm going to have to reduce and for other things I guess I'm going to be shopping in the Keto aisle at the supermarket and shouting to anyone that I'm not a diet fad person its actually a medical issue.
On the plus side with this they ran me through a battery of tests once they found this and everything else seems to be in good shape so that's a positive at least.
So yeah that's something of a change to my life style
At least I can still eat hummus although grapefruits are now banned because combined with one of the pills they cause you to explode
Comments
Ah shit, sorry to hear that. Best to catch it nice and early tho. I know Scott Hanselman (Microsoft/.NET/Azure evangelist) has diabetes and uses a lot of tech to hack it to control the sugar levels. Worth a Google.w
I remember reading that the big problem he had was trying to buy foods without sugar in them because stuff that shouldn't have sugar does.
Really pleased to hear that you're clear otherwise because around our age stuff starts piling up and when they check you out it gets expensive.
Will you need much insulin? Is it expensive?
So far no insulin and in the type of diabetes I have it's actually pretty rare to have to take insulin with type 2 diabetes. In Type 2 it's not that you don't have the insulin more that it's broken somehow and not working effectively so the stuff I have to take is supposed to help the insulin work properly and reduce the glucose in my blood.
That chap has the type 1 diabetes which is where your immune system attacks the pancreas destroying parts of it and you can't make enough insulin or potentially any. Type 1 is an irreversible autoimmune condition and you have to replace the function of the pancreas with injections and monitoring of your blood glucose and adjusting dosages to mitigate spikes and such.
In my case the insulin is still there and being produced when needed it's just not as effective sometimes you can fix that with diet changes and exercise and some of the drugs. I think with my stuff I'm monitoring blood glucose more at a general trends rather than having to watch it constantly to adjust insulin etc. I just take the pills once a day and then stab myself in the morning and then again at night.
so far most of the stuff seems to be pretty cheap it was all on insurance with a 10 dollar fee for the pharmacy and that included all the pills the little machine that measures blood glucose and all it's bits (stabby machine, stabbers to go in it, test strips to bleed onto, some calibration liquid to use to check the machine is working right)
I'm very impressed with how upbeat you are about it. I'm not sure I would be!
Also "The Blood Machine Hungers" is a great name for a videogame for SNG!
Unrelated, but whenever anyone says "Blood Machines" all I can visualise is the concept short film, which has music by Carpenter Brut
It is absolutely nothing to do with diabetes. It's very distracting.
It's not much to do with diabetes but by a staggering coincidence as part of the treatment regimen every day I listen to turbo killer by Carpenter Brut while stabbing myself in the fingers.
In Other news they've decided I am special enough to start shooting up insulin although some special long lasting stuff so I can just take a hit once a day and that will supplement the metaformin/glucophage I'm currently trying to get my body to tollerate. They're also getting me a fancy skin patch based glucose meter that will just work all the time.
So soon I'll not only have to stab myself in the fingers every day but also in the stomach. Not sure what Carpenter Brut track they will recommend for that part.
Well this is just getting weird. Turbo Killer was the concept pitch for Blood Machines (basically, the "if we can do this for a song, think what we could do with an album")
At this point I cannot help but think that perhaps the blame for all this can be laid at Carpenter Bruts feet, and I ned to update soem of my playlists quite quickly...
It all makes sense now it wasn't all that cake it was Carpenter Brut all along!
Mate, are you just collecting medicines that need things prodded into you? Morphine next?
I went to the diabetes specialist office today to get the continuous glucose monitor and learn how to jam a needle in my stomach.
The CGM is this little disc sensor you affix to the back of the arm and it does what it says it continuously monitors the glucose in the blood or some fluid I'm not sure it actually monitors blood. So you don't need to feed the blood machine twice a day (except if it reads low in which case the finger stabber 9000 is required to confirm since the CGM is operates at a lag and has slightly less accuracy so in that instance where you may be dangerously low you need to confirm to know what to do and how many donuts you need to shotgun to get those blood sugars back up) and like its name it is monitoring all the time day and night rather than the snapshots the blood machine generates so you can get a better idea of what is going on in terms of how your sugar levels react to meds food exercise and so on. Each sensor is supposed to last for 14 days assuming it stays stuck on for that time (apparently they sometimes fall off prematurely)
The guy showed me the device in it's holder applicator its a little disk about 2cm across maybe 3mm thick with a gasket of sticky bandage material around it in a ring and then a massive needle in the middle of it bigger than the stabber and bigger than the actual needles they gave me for insulin injections which I will say put me off a little. The guy taking me through the procedure said most people are a little put off on seeing the interior of that device.
The needle was probably a few cms long which I guess isn't the longest needle but when you are set to jam it into the back of your arm it is a bit worrying. The sensor widget comes in a little round attacher applicator mechanism a cylinder with a sort of spring loaded ring around a cavity with the aforementioned needle and disk in it. You put the device on the back of your arm and then press it down and it then plunges its way into the flesh and anchors itself with some sticking plaster stuff. Then you can connect to it with your phone it's bluetooth the app shows a graph of the levels and you can have the data automatically forwarded to your medical team.
The CGM was surprisingly painless going in and so far has stayed attached but then its only day one of 14 so we'll see. I did wonder after looking at it if I should have shaved the area of my arm before stabbifying. Now I get to obsessively watch a graph go up and down.
While I was there they went over my numbers from the blood machine and they've been trending somewhat down over the last few weeks which is encouraging. They even dropped the dose of insulin I should start with given the numbers are good and perhaps I can even get to the point where instead of insulin pills will be good so I'm feeling positive about the changes I've made thus far in diet and exercise.
So with this new medical implant I'm now more machine than man and my blood maybe less syrup than it was before so good progress.