Aaron: Giving the nod

23 December 2010
2 Comments

Outside of the Drs and nurses, dieticians and podiatrists and everyone else involved in our healthcare there is a hugely important role played by those people in our lives that might not have formal health training but nevertheless have a role just as important (more in my opinion) than the aforementioned professionals – our friends and families.

That said, since this will be one of my last posts on the blog, I wanted to properly take a moment to acknowledge the people in my life, our lives, who make living with Diabetes that much easier, who listen when we need to bitch about it, laugh about it when we do and strategise when it comes to that too!

My partner…

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By Aaron on 23 December 2010 at 9.31 am
Posted in Community, Slice of Life
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Aaron: The statistics

14 December 2010
8 Comments

As I approach my 20th anniversary of diagnosis started thinking about how much diabetes I must have ‘done’ during that time so I’ve done a rough calculation based on what I have at hand and here it is.

I think it makes for an interesting read!

38,764 x injections
36,400 x fingerpricks
100+ bloodtests
185 x cannula changes
5000+ hypos
5000+ highs
200+ Dr visits
50+ hospital trips
2 x hospitalisations
756,864,000 x heartbeats

I’m not even going to try and start to calculate the amount of hypo treatments I’ve eaten in it’s various forms in KGs sorry!

- Aaron

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By Aaron on 14 December 2010 at 10.02 am
Posted in Hypos & Hypers, Monitoring, Slice of Life
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Aaron: Beer, bear and bare.

10 December 2010
5 Comments

Being essentially on holiday, I have found myself doing a lot of things in Canada that normally just wouldn’t be a part of my life in New Zealand.

Generally speaking I’ve been getting a lot more exercise than previously by walking and biking all over the city (no car you see), I’ve been going and doing decent hikes of 4 hours plus at least once every three weeks and I’ve also been drinking a lot more alcohol too to take just three examples.

All of these can be attributed to still being in a tourist mindset and as such, walking around this amazing city with ‘tourist goggles’ on as I like to call it – getting out to a…

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By Aaron on 10 December 2010 at 9.10 am
Posted in Exercise, Hypos & Hypers, Insulin Pumps, Slice of Life, Travel
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Diabetes on a dartboard.

3 December 2010
4 Comments

Some days it feels like diabetes is Public Enemy Number 1. It’s days like these I would be tempted to sketch out what my diabetes would look like if it were a person, stick it on a dartboard and take aim at it with a nice sharp dart (or perhaps a syringe, just to make a point).

I had a night like this last week. Had one of those hypos which you know is going to be bad news. I took a reasonably large amount of insulin to go with my dinner, and by only 40 minutes in I was already at a 3.4. Ran to the kitchen and started loading up on glucose. In the meantime I felt the…

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By Nic on 3 December 2010 at 10.14 am
Posted in Hypos & Hypers, Slice of Life
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Aaron: Travel, great. What about emigrating?

8 November 2010
8 Comments

A good friend of mine is a GP who has fairly recently emigrated to the UK and I got to talking to her recently about the logistics of moving countries as it relates to those with health issues like diabetes, HIV/AIDS, cancer, mental illness and everything else that occasionally plagues us.

For those of us lucky enough to live in relatively wealthy and developed countries like New Zealand we wouldn’t necessarily stop to think about how damn lucky we are to receive such outstanding healthcare compared to the billions of people in the work that simply don’t, often resulting in death from simple infections let alone chronic illness like diabetes.

Now imagine that for whatever reason you have immigrated somewhere for whatever reason be…

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By Aaron on 8 November 2010 at 8.00 am
Posted in Slice of Life, Travel
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