Why Can’t We Be Friends

Saturday, 30 October, 2010 12:25 Written by The Frizbian

Before I even get started on my rant, I want to reassure Aunt Nurse that I have filled out the appropriate paperwork and I am waiting for a response from Veterans Affairs. Shouldn’t “Veterans” be a possessive noun? I don’t know. I got it off their website.

There is some weird stigma about being a diabetic. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I see it all the time in strange places. It almost appears to be a natural human reaction to people with diabetes that no one even realizes they are doing. You know how I love examples. For example, Mamma and I would go out to eat at a restaurant in Italy. At the end of the meal, the server would always offer coffee. Beth would always ask for sugar and sweetener because I have diabetes. I don’t see it. She would ask for sugar. Got that. Then, she would ask for sweetener because I have diabetes. She wouldn’t just ask for sweetener. It was more like, “May we have sweetener; my husband is diabetic.” That’s not all. I continue to see this sort of behavior in the media we receive about our health insurance or our HSA. Last week I received a document about the health care reform and it’s impact on my HSA and it had the phrase, “… you can still use it to pay for prescription medicines, including insulin… “ Including insulin? Why? Are diabetics so stupid we won’t realize that our prescribed insulin would be included with other prescription medicines.

Then, look at what we have to go through for these prescriptions. I haven’t made my deductible yet, so I am still paying for everything medical out of my HSA. I went to buy my insulin the other day. It cost me $257. I cannot live without it, so basically, I have to pay $257 to live. That’s just one insulin and I have to go back next month to get some more. I take two different types of insulin. Then I went to get more testing strips. A months worth was $106. The pen needles were $50. Looks like Amazon has better prices than CVS. Too bad you can’t use your HSA at Amazon.com I can’t live without this stuff. My choices are buy it or die? That is an AWESOME marketing strategy! I basically rent my body for over $600 a month. I pay over $600 a month for a body with a broken pancreas. Hey! If I’m going to pay $600 a month, I would at least like a body that functions properly. He knows I can hear him. When you rent an apartment, you wouldn’t pay extra for the one that doesn’t have air conditioning. We get it already! You wouldn’t pay extra for the one with the beautiful view of a landfill. He just compared me to a landfill? You wouldn’t pay extra for the one in a bad neighborhood or near bad schools.

Let’s move on, shall we? If I say no, will you stop? My prescription for testing strips from the pharmacy has directions. Insert blood here. They say, “Test up to 6 times daily.” Who decided that 6 was the magic number. That allows me to test before and after each meal. It doesn’t give me a strip for testing before bed. It doesn’t give me a strip for testing when I feel low or high. It doesn’t give me a strip to test if I have compensated appropriately to fix my abnormal blood sugar. So we don’t like six? Six was decided by the insurance company. That is the most they will allow me per day. Any more than that and I have to pay for them at full price. My pen needles say, “Inject up to 4 injections daily.” Four is one per meal and one before bed. Thankfully, my blood sugar is never high. You mean to say, “Sadly my blood sugar is never normal.”

When we lived in Italy, I paid 1 Euro for 25 strips. In other words, I paid 4 Euros for the same number of strips that I pay $106 here. I paid 1 Euro for my insulin. There is a lot to be said about socialized medicine. I am not saying that socialized medicine is the right way to go. I truly don’t have enough information to say one way or the other. Like most things, I am sure it probably has advantages for some and disadvantages for others. What I do know, is that being a diabetic isn’t cheap, and the companies I depend on to provide the things I need to survive, are pretty stingy when it comes to giving me them. That is the downside of capitalized health care. I’m not certain capitalized health care means what you think it means. Either way, whatever Obama’s plan is, I hope it is going to make the prices on survival for diabetics a little easier to swallow. You mean inject.

Evil Fruit Roll-Ups

Friday, 29 October, 2010 00:17 Written by The Frizbian

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Fifteen is the magic number. Not just your IQ? Do you know how many carbohydrates are in the Fruit Roll-Ups on our counter. Wait! Wait! I know this one. Perfect right? I’m guessing, not so much. What evil parent designed Fruit Roll-Ups? One that wanted skinny children. It’s horrible. When you give a child a Fruit Roll-Up, one of two things always happens. Either the child fights with it for a long drawn out battle that ends in chewed fruit flavored plastic being thrown in the trash, or the parent fights with it putting his hands all over the child’s sticky snack. I hope you washed your hands. Or maybe that was the problem. Maybe it wasn’t a parent at all, which is why the inventor thought it would be a great idea to roll a sticky snack in Saran Wrap. It is like we are the mice and, in order to get the cheese, we have to get through the maze. Almost exactly. Except, I don’t have some special cheese smelling nose. No. I have huge man fingers. More like skeleton fingers. They match the rest of your body. They are not designed to remove sticky plastic from sticky snack. Especially when the blood sugar is low. You blood sugar was low? How? When? I think I officially hate my pancreas. Just remember, I dumped you first.

Fifteen is the magic number. With 15 grams of carbohydrates, I can raise my blood sugar approximately 50 points. It’s blood sugar; not touch downs. The point is, I can’t get the chewy snack away from the obnoxious plastic when I’m normal. When, exactly, are you normal? Dude! Dude? This is going to be the first post ever with more red than black. Dissociative identity disorder is an entirely different blog. The problem is that no one really takes my carbohydrate needs into consideration. Normally, if I’m low, I need 15 grams of carbohydrates. The glucose tablets are usually 4. So I eat 4 at a time and that leaves with me with 0. They come in packs of 4? No, Mamma always eats the rest of them. Huh? Oh yeah. Mamma likes the taste of medicine. She likes grape flavored cough syrup. Yuck. She once took two weeks of amoxicillin in about 3 days. Table spoon (Tbsp) versus tea spoon (tsp). Fruit Roll-Ups are perfect for raising my blood sugar. The next time you are eating a Fruit Roll-Up remember your diabetic favorite diabetic blogger. Kerri? And see how fast you can peel the fruit out of the plastic. Don’t forget that stupid little corner at the end where you’re not sure if the plastic is rolled over the fruit or the fruit is rolled over the plastic. I hate that corner. That is what I mean by Evil Fruit Roll-Ups.

Time for the Frizbian

Monday, 25 October, 2010 00:02 Written by The Frizbian

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I hate that it has been so long. Not that I have that large of a fan base, but I hate leaving it hanging. Life happens I guess.

That is actually one of the biggest problems I have with diabetes. Great segue. Life gets in my way the majority of the time. The rest of the time he is just lazy. If I’m lazy, then what is a pancreas that quits? In retirement. Uh huh. Diabetes requires the attention of the diabetic. Well, when I get slammed at work or I’m rushing to get Tata to Girl Scouts on time or the baby is crying or the wife is calling or… This could go on forever. It’s not easy, and life gets in the way.

I have a new meter. Walgreens has been having this sale on the Bayer Contour USB, which I have wanted for a very long time. Only because Nick Jonas uses it. Only because the meter has a full color screen, plugs directly into the PC, comes with software on the device to track trends, has a little light to check your blood in the dark, has reminder alarms to remind me to check my blood after meals, the lancing device doesn’t fall apart like my other ones, the strips are better (I can’t really explain that), and Nick Jonas uses it. All I really know about Nick Jonas is that he has diabetes, uses my favorite meter, and is part of the Jonas Brothers, which I am fairly certain is a TV show on Disney. I could look it up, but that would ruin the fun.

The downside of my new meter, is that it doesn’t use my One Touch Ultra testing strips. I just saw the endocrinologist recently so my prescription is for the meter I don’t want to use any more. Well, that would normally be the downside. The real downside is that he is an idiot. I have an HSA (Health Savings Account) as part of my health insurance thing. If the person who invented HSA had diabetes, it would have been a Health Spending Account. Don’t ask me the specifics, but basically, every year, I have to spend $4,000 in health care costs out of my pocket or my HSA before my insurance pays for anything. We call that a $4,000 deductible, idiot. Anyway, every year, the counter starts over in October. In other words, right now, I am paying 100% of my health care costs. Which means my strips, that usually cost about $10 with my prescription, now cost $103 dollars. It doesn’t matter if I have a prescription or not. And you don’t need one for testing strips. I still have to pay full price until I have spent $4,000. Which means he could have bought the strips that go with his new meter instead of buying the ones that he had the prescription for. Exactly.

I think I may have gotten off on a tangent there. May have? I have ADHD you know. Excuses? Even my time to write today was split into sections. This morning we went to a new church. It is a Nazarene church. I’m not entirely sure what that means yet, but Mamma seems to like it. We actually went there this evening for a pot luck as well. They fired the pastor at our old church, and it just wasn’t worth the distance as we only stayed there because Mamma liked the pastor. So what denomination are we? Dolly Parton said it best in Steel Magnolias, “Oh, honey, God don’t care which church you go to, long as you show up.”

So I have a new meter and a new church. Tomorrow is a new day. I have to get up early and go to work. It’s been a busy couple of weeks since I wrote last. Hopefully, I will be able to get more writing in, and the gaps between posts will become less dramatic.

Night Sweats and Corn Dogs

Thursday, 07 October, 2010 21:01 Written by The Frizbian

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I started this morning with a bang. I checked my blood sugar when I woke up and it was 111. I have been doing fairly well at the wake up blood sugar lately. That hasn’t been easy though. I haven’t been doing so great on the amount of insulin I have been taking to adjust before going to bed. In the last, I have awaken with night sweats all but last night. I still can’t figure out why my brain doesn’t immediately assume my blood sugar is low. It has happened more times than I can remember. Yet, when I wake up in the middle of the night, drowning in my own sweat, I immediately think my wife has turned the heater on to spite me. Mamma tends to like the temperature much, much, MUCH higher than I do. Getting up and getting sugar in to my body is not really that big of a deal. The difficult part is only getting as much sugar as I need. When the cravings start, it is very hard to stop. I am still completely amazed about how powerful and how completely controlling the sugar cravings are. I think if I were to go low enough, I could probably suck the sugar out of someone else’s blood. That explains vampires. It’s insane. We should ask the diabetic mothers of the world, which cravings are worse: sugar lows or pregnancy. Because of these extreme cravings, it is very hard to limit myself to just the sugar I need and not wake up in the morning with a greeting on my One Touch. HI. One of these days I will take the time to find out just how high “HI” is.

To make things more interesting, if I ever get up in the middle of the night, Mamma comes running to check on me very soon after I leave the bed. That should be irritating. I am 30 years old. I do not need to be checked on. At least you would like to believe that. True. That is a complete lie. In my sleep, I have super powers. I can walk, have conversations, pick tomatoes, and do just about anything you tell me to. Oh yeah, in my sleep, I can eat and I do not seem to ever get full. You’re never full when you’re awake either. Why do you think I quit? I ate a whole box of corn dogs once. I am fairly certain I did not take any insulin. You should have seen my blood sugar the next morning. You should have seen his wife’s face the next morning when she found all the corn dog wrappers in the trash. One Touch said, “HI” and refused to give me a number no matter how much insulin I took. Diabetics are supposed to have this almost obsessive control over what they eat. Yet, I am an insulin dependent diabetic that eats in my sleep. That’s just wrong.

Eight and Four Tenths

Tuesday, 05 October, 2010 23:43 Written by The Frizbian

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Yesterday was my appointment with the endocrinologists. I was hopeful that I would finally have broken the curse of the 9 point A1C. The doctor came back with the results. I was all pins and needles in anticipation. Imagine the scene. My endocrinologists is an older gentleman. He walks back into the room and says, “I have to remember what your last A1C was in order to compare.”
“9.1,” I said eagerly.
“Well, then you have made some improvement. You have 8.4.”
“YES!” I shout. Not, I said with emphasis. I shouted. A diabetic shouting with joy about an A1C that is 8.4 is just a tad unusual to begin with. Now, imagine his reaction. He could have explained that 8.4 was still not good. He could have congratulated me on my small improvement. There are lots of things he could have done, but nothing quit as great as what he did do.
“YEESS!” he shouted.
“YES!” we shouted, raising our arms in the air like the winners of a race crossing the finish line. My endocrinologist is awesome.

We also talked about getting a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM). I have a number to call today to speak with a diabetes educator and get some time plugged in. I’m still not sure if I’m ready to have things dangling from my body, but I know I’m sure I want to get my A1C down to normal. The CGM could really help. So I’ll start with that. If that goes well, maybe I can get below 7 next time.