You know how sometimes it’s the little victories that make the difference to your diabetes day?

Well, I had one of these on the weekend of the 20th September when I went hiking in the Laurentian mountains north of Montréal and, being quite chuffed with myself I wanted to share it with you all.

As I mentioned in my catch up post, the past 4 weeks have been a diabetes HELL for hypos for me and I was starting to get quite annoyed about it. When we arrived, I purchased a 2KG pack of white sugar for hypos at home and there is no more than 750G left of that pack now so that might give you a…

I feel simultaneously old, and fortunate today. I remember when I was 16, thinking I was pretty onto it and sort of grown up, and now I’m DOUBLE that age – crikey! The fortunate bit – I don’t have a single diabetes complication to date (despite doing my best to ignore my diabetes for many years in my late teens and twenties), and I am now fortunate to have a regime which (on the whole) works really well for me and is limited in its invasiveness in my life. I’ve been through many regimes – clear + cloudy from a…

I got an email from a reader this week, with a few questions in it. An outline of the questions as follows:

1. Have you even been in contact with anyone around my age (26) who is using a pump that wouldn’t mind a few questions?

2. How do you start the pump process?  Do you contact your diabetes team at the hospital first (as unhelpful they may seem to be for me), or do I contact the pump suppliers first?

3. Also, what happens if I shell out all that money for the pump, and then realise it really isn’t for me?

Given that I’m no expert on things (merely an observer and player much…

A friend of mine, Ruth Hill, is getting together an Application for Funding to the Ministry of Health for insulin pumps and consumables. Here is her message, below:

Right people. I URGENTLY NEED YOUR HELP. I want to make an Application for Funding to the Ministry of Health. I need emails/letters from as many people as possible explaining how your life has or would be drastically improved by the best Type 1 diabetes management out there…

“Arnie!”, exclaimed my husband. We all spun around to look at him, none of us figuring out why you’d call your insulin pump Arnie.

“Because it’s pumping and pumping and pumping”, he said (in a bad Austrian accent).

Hopefully you have all had a great break

Every year for our summer break, Andy and I like to head off somewhere remote for a good week or more to relax with some close friends before we have to start thinking about getting back to work and because we don’t have kids, we ALWAYS go camp.

The joys of camping are boundless I reckon. Sunshine, beaches, BBQs, a chillibin full of beer (and insulin), the road trip with it’s compulsory pies and gas station snacks, the music, feet on the dashboard, card games and scrabble. It’s got everything.

This year, we went and plonked ourselves 5 hours north of Auckland in Taupo Bay with another couple who were camping…

However – like all electronics – pumps sometimes break down too. This is exactly what happened to me yesterday (Sunday). I’d had a momentary problem at work on the Friday when the pump screen just went blank and the unit started alarming very loudly, but I called the distributors and they told me to clean out the battery area and that should fix it. I did, and it worked.

Then, yesterday the same thing happened.…

This afternoon we went to a BBQ round at some friends’ who have a new addition to the family. They asked me how the pump is going and I answered with confidence that it was going brilliantly and I’ve not looked back. Then, about half an hour before lunch I tested my glucose. It had…

BTW I didn’t get a chance to meet Alfrey Bloom today as I’d planned – work blew up into a big ball of chaos around 9am (oh yeeeeah). So I’ll hopefully be seeing her next week now and will fill you in on the tidbits I learn from her.