I never realized I’d have to give insulin for…

Cold medicine! 

I’ve been sick for like, forever. (Okay, I’m exaggerating. Realistically, it’s been a week and a half. But that feels like forever!) And it seems like no matter how much Robitussin and Sudafed I take, I’ve yet to really start feeling better. 

Luckily, my blood sugar levels have been very normal throughout the entire sickness (which usually isn’t the case!). Instead I’ve faced a new quirk in diabetes-land: most cold medicines contain things like high fructose corn syrup, which is in other words, sugar! And I’ve seen noticeable blood sugar changes after having a dose of medicine. 

The black line above my graph shows my blood sugar before taking my nightly dose of Robitussin. The blue line is the peak of the increase after taking it, when I finally bolused for the rise. 

All is well now that I know this medicine causes a rise in my blood sugar, and I’ll be paying closer attention to the ingredient listings in the future!

Fellow diabetics, what is something you never even thought to give yourself insulin for?

Potluck Day

I stumbled into work at 7:08 this morning, still half asleep. I’m not a morning person, and getting me to go into work even earlier than my required 8am – especially on a Monday – is quite the feat. However, I needed to go in early today, so I did. And when I arrived, I quickly realized it was not going to be just another day in the office. 

Today was a potluck day. 

 Ask anyone who works in my building and they’ll tell you that we love our potlucks. And I mean LOVE them. We used to have them more than once a month, until we all realized we were gaining weight. Now we only have them for special occasions, and every once in a while we’ll have one “because we haven’t in a while.” We love our potluck days because the food is always SO good. Since quite a few of us have been working in the same office space together for several years now, we’ve all perfected our favorite dishes for potlucks. 

Of course, as a type 1, potluck days can be challenging. Especially when we usually start digging in before 8am! However, I try to just keep bolusing for each treat I have, and do my best to guess at the carb counts.   

  
Today’s potluck produced some very successful blood sugar numbers. Only over 180 for 10 minutes the entire day say what!? Unheard of! I’m pretty proud of the accomplishment. Tomorrow’s a new day and the next potluck will be yet another challenge in a never ending stream of challenges, but I feel good knowing that I can enjoy potluck days just like everyone else. 

Confidence

So far, 2016 has been a journey of self-discovery in both my personal and professional life. One of my main points of focus in both aspects of my life has been working on my confidence. 

A lot has changed in a few short months. At work, I would be placed in a situation where I needed to make a decision that was slightly above my pay grade, but I was capable of making those decisions – I just wasn’t ever confident in actually doing it. Now that I’m having to make more and more of them, and being expected to now that I am acting as a “team captain” of sorts, I have been working on exuding confidence in my decisions and accepting critique if I make the wrong decision. So far, so good. 

 
In my personal life, it’s been somewhat similar. Allen and I were faced with an important decision to make – and we needed to be confident in our choice. The stakes were impossibly high, and the stress had pushed my heart rate and blood sugar averages both even higher. After a lot of talking and soul-searching, we made the decision to leave our church that we’ve attended for the last 10 years. 
(I have to sidebar here for a couple reasons. First, people don’t just LEAVE the church organization we were attending. Especially people who are seen as lifers – ones that will be there forever, which we were. Second, we didn’t leave on bad terms – in fact, we were given the Pastor’s blessing to leave the church and were told that we were welcome back at any time. It was incredibly amicable.)

  
However, no one really knows the full reasons behind our decision to leave, and due to that, plus the fact that nobody leaves the church, we’ve been ostracized by our peers. Being treated as if you’re dead is harder than I even imagined. Especially when it’s people you’ve grown up with for the past 10 years – people you’ve watched graduate high school (and did their senior pictures), people whose weddings you’ve attended (and even photographed), people who have spent countless hours at your house for youth nights and who you called honest-to-God friends before you made the decision to leave. 

It hurts that your supposed “friends and family” for the last decade don’t even ASK what happened – they assume they know, or just don’t even care. But, I’m confident in knowing that our true friends will be there for us as we go through this adjustment period. I’m confident that we’ll come out of this stronger, smarter and better off. I’m also confident that we made the right decision for our health, happiness, and overall life direction. And lastly, I’m confident that if people truly care about what’s going on in our lives, why we left, or want to be our friends, then they’ll come around. Otherwise, it was all fake, and we’re better off without it. 

Why am I talking about all this? Well, my Fitbit had made sure I knew that my resting heart rate was way too high, and my Dexcom made it painfully obvious that I was dealing with stress highs. In the days after we left, my blood sugar and heart rate averages both dropped dramatically. 

   
Confidence is so important, and it’s something I’ve always struggled with, but no more. I want to be the best me that I can be, in every aspect of my life.