something else

Being Type 1 I get a bit fed up with all the whingeing on social media. You know the ones, "no one sees the invisible illness, the scars I bear, the depression and the feeling sick, the feeling tired after overnight hypos" etc etc. Yes, that is part of it, but I always feel there is so much worse. Watch someone die of cancer and tell me you'd rather have that, than Type 1. Watch an interview with a refugee talking about what they have endured. Watch a parent loose a child. Just to put some context around this, I was diagnosed 35 years ago. I've gone from beef insulin to synthetic insulin, from needles to pens to pump, from 4 - 10 finger pricks a day to a CGMS. I count myself lucky that I didn't have to live with sharpening my own needles and boiling them or with only urine tests to track the state of my bgls. I count myself lucky that having this condition has strengthened me, demanding resilience, problem solving and self management skills. I co...

I'm not sure where to start with this piece. There are so many threads to the centre of my thinking. Maybe I start in the centre. I want to write about cycling and what it means to be an ageing cyclist. An ageing me. But when I think about cycling I have to think about what it is that I like about it. And then I have to remember all the lovely rides I've done and remember my brother and those wet rides, those tough, testing rides and strange places we'd get to. The first time I got saturated out on a ride, stopping under a tree with him, and he in his typical way shrugging and saying, "it will be over soon" And it was and we rode on down Beach Rd and home again. Then the black, wet winter night when we first attended an Audax Club meeting, in Bells Hotel, South Melbourne and were caught up in the imagination of maybe doing a Paris-Brest-Paris, Randonee. The rides around regional Victoria, north, south, east and west, the Alpine Classic, those sad last years as he ...

Living with T1 Technology After yet another sleepless night responding to alarms from my insulin pump and sensor, I thought I’d better get it all written down to show the endocrinologist. If I wind the clock back to last Thursday the 10th of September, I’d had 3 or 4 days of continuously high BGL’s sitting around 10 and nothing I did would make them drop any lower, finally that day, I decided to change the site. When I took the old insertion out, I felt it rip and blood poured out, nasty black thick blood as if it was old and contaminated. I put a new set in and my BGL’s came down over that night back to a respectable 7. On the morning of Friday 11th, I was wandering around in my pj’s and dressing gown with my pump in the pocket of the dressing gown and the infusion line looping out and back to the insertion site. I caught the line on a door handle as I walked into my bedroom and it gave the insertion site a little tug. I didn’t think much of it and got dressed & went about my d...

Uncomfortable reality.  One of the things that really worries me is that I live an artificial life.  I think all of us T1’s think about this from time to time. Scenario: We’re on a ship, the ship sinks, we are; in a lifeboat/on an island/clinging to wreckage…. with very limited supply of insulin. How long until we die? A Dying Economy   The issues of Climate Change, of Fuel Descent and a dying economy (as in the paper that I read yesterday, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse), are becoming my personal reality.  I'm only alive because I have access to insulin and the moment that access stops, my life stops. So the realities of our economic model crashing, the difficulties that might mean for manufacture of medicines and medical aid, the difficulties of transporting things around the world in a fuel descent scenario, the difficulty of getting supply are becoming a critical facto...

This weekend, I'm at the inaugural AMSL Diabetes Sports and Exercise Weekend at the Australian Institute of Sports, Canberra. I'm here because I was offered a sponsored spot, and I'm extremely grateful to Australian Medical and Scientific Ltd., for the opportunity. As I look around the crowd, I note that the majority of attendees are in their 20's - 30's, but there is a good handful of people in their 50's. I note this, because I have an agenda. I'm not just here to learn more about the physiology of Diabetes and exercise, I'm going to ask some hard questions about ageing and exercise. I'm going to ask where the support for the psychological effort that you need to make as you get older, to keep yourself motivated, is. I'm going to ask, "Who is doing research into Chronic conditions and motivation?" I know there is research into the physiology of exercise and it's effects upon glucose levels, that's part of what we are doing ...

I've been meaning to start writing about how it feels to be getting older while living with a chronic illness. How it feels to be finding that I don't bounce quite as well as I used to, that I'm tireder, more stiff, more sore, less able, more unsure than I used to be and that I don't like it. We've just added yet another of the insidious auto-immune diseases to my collection, this time it is an under-active Thyroid, caused by a disease called 'Hashimoto's Disease', fairly common and more common in women with Type 1. I like to tell myself that I'm immune to the long term effects of Type 1. That because I didn't 'get it' until I was 25, (oh my goodness, I've had T1 now for longer than I didn't have it!), I thought that the creeping long term effects wouldn't impact on me. No heart disease, no eye problems, no neuropathy, yeah all good... or is it? A long time ago, soon after I was diagnosed, someone told me, or I read it som...

In the wash-up, I need to split my reflections on the trial into two, the first being about the intensity of being a trial participant, the ‘LabRat’ experience, and the second being about the technology itself. I have written quite a lot about my feelings about being a 'LabRat' and I'd like to make some comment about the technology itself. The technology is extraordinary, the ‘algorithm’ that runs all the calculations, the engineering of the components needed to translate radio signals to bluetooth and back again. But there is an achilles heel that I discovered on that final night. I was shocked on waking to do my calibration check, to find that I HAD dropped to 2.9 and the pump alarm and and smart phone alarms had NOT woken me. The  thing that woke me was the fact that I had set a 3am alarm on my phone to wake and do the calibration test. My night watcher phoned to see if I was OK, as I was busily drinking the orange juice and contemplating whether it would wreck the tri...