Couchsurfing with the Diabetes Fairy

The only constant in my life at the moment seems to be change!

I’ve very recently landed in Dorchester, and was delivered to my new host, Susan, by a nice postman called Chris who treated me gently.

I started out on this odyssey thinking I knew everything there was to know about Diabetes. How wrong could I be? I keep discovering new things…

I always thought you couldn’t survive without a pancreas. I’ve just discovered there are people without a pancreas walking the streets near you. My host, Susan, tells me she had hers removed 4 ½ years ago because she had a rare type of pancreatic cancer called a neuroendocrine tumour. She says she isn’t Type 1 or 2, but some people call it:

Type 3!

That’s a new one on me!

Or Type 1 ½

Someone’s having a laugh

Or Type 0

Mr Neil Pearce is Susan’s hero

(I’m a poet and don’t know it – I must have spent too much time in Northerner’s company!)

 Mr Pearce works at University Hospital Southampton, and I must say he looks like a nice chap.He says her diabetes is very brittle. I suppose that means she’s got to be careful not to break it. He also told her that more than 10% of people who’ve had their pancreas removed die of hypos, so she needs to be even more careful than most diabetics.

I thought Susan looked like a nice clean living girl… and then she took me to one of her pottery classes. She tells me that a mud pack is very good for my skin. You would not believe all the places the clay got into! It’s a pity Patrick Swayze wasn’t around, so I just used my imagination (blush… !). I hope you like the castle I made.

 Then I had a go on the wheel… be impressed.

Susan even showed me her scar – though her surgeon is a neat worker and I had to look really hard to see it. (I tickled her with  my magic wand!)

Been here less than 10 hours and just look at the state of me.

Had a long lie in this morning because Susan is retired and doesn’t have to go to work. In fact, she says they pay her not to go to work – sounds like a good plan to me. Breakfast looked promising

However I was not amused when she made wait an hour for it. This is because her insulin takes an hour to start working in the mornings and she’s trying really hard to keep her BG down. If she doesn’t do that she has hypers which make her feel very strange (even more strange than usual!). In the evening it ‘only’ takes about half an hour for her insulin to work. I looked at her bottle of insulin and it’s called Novorapid. I don’t think it’s very rapid at all.

While waiting for breakfast she took her medication and refilled her insulin pump. When she eats she has to take stuff called Creon. She had to open 9 capsules and mix them with apple sauce, as she’s not allowed to chew them. Very generously she gave me some to try… Yuck! Spit!!

[She has to take loads of smaller Creon capsules at the moment ‘cos the manufacturers say there aren’t enough pigs to make the larger ones… Hmm, no I don’t understand that either. She comes away from the pharmacy every month with three carrier bags full (luckily they don’t make her pay for the bags!).]

As well as an insulin pump, Susan has another gadget called a Continuous Glucose Meter (CGM) which she bought on Ebay ‘cos the NHS won’t pay for one for her. (It came from the USA and only understands American  - it measures her blood sugar in mg/dL instead of mmols. I can understand mmoles but megadoodles defeat me. I know she does clever sums in her head (I can tell because of the tortured expression on her face)when she looks at her graph. The sensors cost her oodles of dosh every week (£62  eeek), but her overnight graphs are impressive – just like a normal person’s. Oops! Sorry Susan – I didn’t mean to imply you’re not normal.

I hope I won’t have to visit her in a debtor’s prison plus I don’t know how many carbs are in gruel.

It’s all very hard on a poor old pensioner. A voice from the kitchen just said, ‘Less of the old, please!’

Just been shopping and we saw some fearsome creatures on the way. Luckily they’re fenced in.

 I’m going to have a sit down for a while with a nice latte. Strange noises keep coming from Susan. She says it’s because her CGM thinks it wants a new sensor. She says it's clever in some ways, but not others. She’s going to tell it a lie (shock, horror!) that it’s got a new sensor and it’ll believe her. The longest she’s managed to make a sensor last so far is 3 weeks. 

I wonder what she has lined up for me next? DFx