Thanks to Helana for sending me this story from the Stuff website…. apparently the MidCentral DHB is talking of cutting the diabetes services in the area by $500, 000 – which would result in 6.2 less staff for the area’s diabetics.

Full article here.

Kathy Scott – how can the BeingDiabetic community help? Can we send an email of support for you to pass on or something?

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Hi all,

It seems from first-hand experience that there is a nasty gastro bug going around at the moment. After a night out on Friday and then a lovely breakfast with Flash, Nic (and her new meter) on Saturday morning I went off home to do a massive gardening effort with the flatties.

Gardening went incredibly successful save that about half way through it I went hypo and it was all on. I managed to get the hypo fixed but that didn’t stop the vomiting from taking hold and so it was for the next 9 hours until I landed in A&E hypo from the shock and unable to get my BGs back up for 1 hour…

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Hi all!

New week, new month, new season!

Pardon my absence for the last  couple of weeks – I’ve been a bit crook and have been coming home from work completely knackered and quite incapable of doing much other than going straight to bed! Nic has been cranking out some awesome content though so I’m sure that you have hardly noticed

Having been sick, the last couple of weeks have been a struggle in terms of BGs and not just fatigue with, unsurprisingly, lots of fluctuations and heaps of hypos and highs as I’ve been trying to get the levels back under control. For a couple of weeks I thought I was just working too hard and not getting…

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Grrrr – and breathe.

I’ve just come back from a diabetes check up at my GP’s.

Aaaand breathe.

You see – when I took my son in for his six week vaccinations, they decided to corner me about not having seen the diabetes nurse at the clinic for over a year.

“Ahhhh”, I said. “That would be because I’ve been under the care of the diabetes department at National Women’s for the last 16 months”.

“Well”, they said. “We need you to come in and we’ll go through a checklist of all of your vital tests etc and check that your diabetes is under control”.

Me: “Oh, but you see I’ve been under the strictest care I’ve had in 15…

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A comment on this post led me to have another look at the ‘new’ international standard which has come in to eventually replace the HbA1c results which our doctors benchmark our diabetes control on.

I say ‘new’, because the new ‘molar’ system has actually been available in our lab reports since August last year. Apparently our blood glucose control will be reported both as an HbA1c and in mmol/mol for two years, after which time we’ll switch to solely mmol/mol. The reason for this is to foster international measurement of blood glucose control, as instigated by the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry (IFCC).

To give you a better idea of how these numbers…

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