So, while Nic is away kicking her heals up in Japan I’ve got a firm grip on my keyboard with the express intention of enthralling you all with the various happenings in my life over the next two weeks. It’s not going to be the Truman Show but that said, I am getting plugged in next Monday (to a pump that is), planning a trip to Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand that I leave for just after Nic gets back and doing the day to day stuff in between so it won’t be too dull.

I’ll start with the travel thing though because I’ve just sat through about two hours of planning itineraries, budgets, hotels, tormenting our travel agent by changing flights AGAIN and activities with my partner and it struck me after we joyously announced it complete that I would then be going away to plan the diabetes aspects. Like Nic said in this post, you go through quite the exhaustive list of material preparation before you go but what we all know is that in absence of the all too fictional diabetes sitter, we take our diabetes with us and that’s when the real fun starts.

I’ve traveled a fair bit and I’m never 100% comfortable with the extent to which I am able to manage what it is that I’m eating, what is in it and what’s been added. Not from from the weird and wacky aspect but from a carb content point of view.

While we’re all at home, cooking for ourselves it’s fine but I’m sure that we’ve all had the thrill of eating out during our days and the corresponding carb conumdrum that follows. Well, it’s the same, if not worse overseas but what can you do about it? For some reason, I can’t quite imagine rocking on up to a street stall chef in Vietnam and asking the person whether those handfuls of white grains were MSG or sugar and it’s not like it doesn’t make a difference! There are general things that you can do like learn the phrase for ‘no sugar please, but if you are in Thailand or other places that add sugar as a staple in your favourite dish then your choice is either ‘what the hell’ and you go with it or, it’s “I’ll have 100g of boiled rice and 8.25u of Novorapid to go please.” I’d seriously be interested in knowing what you guys have done to combat this particular aspect of being overseas so please, leave a note below.

The conclusion that I’ve reached for the time being is…that it is what it is. Would I rather come home with an HbA1c of 8.0 and have had the time of my life (including more highs than I care to tell my specialist about) than not go at all and never have had the experience.  While I’m away I’ll still pay due diligence of course but if I don’t have a choice about the diabetes and the injections etc then I’m sure as hell going to enjoy the stuff that I do have a choice about.

Rant over but as Arnold would say if he was auditioning for a movie about classical music, I’ll be bach.

- Aaron