Tainted

Driving to work, my thoughts drift to the future and all the amazing things yet to come for my husband and I, and a silly grin makes it way to my face. I think of LT’s first Christmas at home, holidays with all the cousins, and eventually being grandparents. For miles, I am lost in my own daydream.

That is until a nagging, cramping sort of feeling in stomach jars me back to reality. This cramping, almost painful feeling in my stomach has seemed accompany high blood sugars recently. Just like that my mood plummets and my worry of the damage done my body from diabetes takes over. Guilt is next, since it’s all up to me and let’s face it, I am not a model diabetic.

I hate this disease and the way it taints things with its mere presence. I hate that my biggest worry about being a parent (that is after the huge obstacle of actually getting him home) is my diabetes getting in the way. Will I be able to have good enough control to keep up with my baby and feel well enough to enjoy the priceless moments? More daunting still is the heavy weight of the complications that in my mind are inevitable.

A glance at his adorable face and I pull out my kit to test. I despise testing, those often angry numbers glaring back at me from the screen, but for him I’ll do anything. I will do my best to not let this chapter of my life be tainted by the big bullying D.

Christmas Early!

I got my starter set of Real Time sensors today! I won’t be able to start using them until I get my pump upgrade which will happen next month, but I am still excited. Unbeknownst to me the sensors need to be refrigerated so the package was sent overnight and arrived at my office this morning.

My co-worker and friend, Sarah, was instrumental in helping me wade through the whole process with here inside knowledge from her previous job at Medtronic. Thank you Sarah! See, the first time I needed pump supplies with my UHC insurance it was a huge hassle to get the bill paid and my prescription plan only allows for 2 bottles of Novolog at a time (which is much less than I use) so I therefore assumed that there was no way my insurance would cover the Real Time, but Sarah told me that they would.

So, once I get the pump upgrade and actually start using the Real Time system next year it is game on! No more slacking, no more acting like I don’t have diabetes! It’s time to get those blood sugars under control – I’ve got to be in the best health I can be for baby LT.

IT'S A BOY!

We got our referral! He is a beautiful baby boy from Guatemala. LT is about 2 months old, happy & healthy. We got an amazing video where he is happy as can be, almost-smiling, alert, and simply adorable. It was torture to watch LT on the screen and not be able to hold him, kiss him and breathe in that wonderful baby scent. I wish I could post a picture here but our agency asks that we don’t.

We are head-over-heals in love and we haven’t met him yet. There are still so many hoops to jump through and endless waiting to endure but at least we have a picture to attach to all our hopes and dreams.

Now all we want for Christmas is for LT to come home safely and quickly and most of all not get tangled up in all the bureaucratic crap surrounding international adoption.

PS
All the stress, excitement and waiting is wreaking havoc on my blood sugars

Big News....at least to me it is.

The big news that I have been dying to share with the blogosphere but haven’t yet because there is a part of me that is terrified that it will not happen is....

We are adopting.

As my husband says “Good Lord willing, by this time next year we will have a baby boy home with us.” After much consideration and a huge leap of faith we decided on Guatemala and a boy. We are very close to getting our dossier in and then begins the real wait; the agonizing wait for him to come home. We have been fingerprinted, questioned, examined, schooled, and pushed to our limits with the mounds of paperwork. I think I actually broke a sweat when the social worker asked me tons of questions about diabetes which led to more questions about my Prozac use. There were some moments there where I hated diabetes the disease more than I ever had before because it felt like, for those few moments that I may no be deemed suitable for adoption because of it. The social worker and the agency do not see these as issues (in the carefully worded way it is all documented) but the doubt is still tangible.

I simply cannot wait until we get our referral and thus the picture of our baby. Then it will all feel so much more real. Then I can start decorating the baby’s room and buy him some adorable, tiny cargo pants, ooh and tiny Crocs, and little Converse and …. Then I might feel like this could actually happen to me.

I love kids. Love them sticky hands, sloppy kisses, whininess, brutal honesty, and all.
When I think of my future there is a child in it, and my husband too.

PS It seems so impersonal to call him just baby but without sharing the name we have picked out I am stumped so if you have any ideas let me know. Art Sweets moniker of Guatababy was great and is all I keep thinking of.

21 Days, They Say...

You can’t keep doing this! You are killing yourself slowly. You have diabetes; it’s not going away; just get over it! These thoughts and more swirl in my cloudy head as I walk into work feeling like crap with no idea what my blood sugar is and 3 cups of coffee with calorie-containing cream down the hatch. Last check was in the middle of the night and was 317 which I corrected for so there is good chance that I was low when I woke up. My testing kit was even right on the dresser near the bed (where I nearly left it) but I still did not test. Testing is just not a part of my routine or habit, especially in the morning when I drag myself out of bed, make coffee and get ready for work. Seems like a simple fix – just do it consistently and it will become habit. Ha! Some days it is easy to just do that first blood sugar but most days it doesn’t even cross my mind until I start feeling crappy.

So poking around the web I came across this quote from Proverbs: “As a dog returns to his own vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” Hmmm… Strong image to make a point. Is the lesson that constantly repeating (regurgitating) bad habits is as disgusting as a dog returning to it’s own vomit?

Then I came across a reference to something I have either heard or seen before: that it takes 21 days to form a habit. I’m going to give it a try to make those first-thing-in-the-morning-blood-sugars a habit.

It takes at least 21 days to form a habit. This means that you have to do something at least 21 times before it begins to become part of your everyday routine. So . . .
1. Decide exactly what you want to do. Write it down and post it where you can see it every day, like your bathroom mirror. Be as specific as possible.
2. Schedule time to do what you want to do. Again, it takes 21 days to form a habit, so schedule at least 21 days on your calendar and don't let anything get in the way of your schedule. If you miss one of your scheduled days, it's best to start over and schedule
another 21 days. You must be consistent and dedicated to doing what you want to do.
3. Once you reach your 21 days, congratulations! Don't stop now though, schedule another 21 days, and then another and so on, until you do those things you want to do, without even thinking about them . . . like brushing your teeth.

I made a sheet to check off the days & will keep you posted.

Painfully Familiar

My husband and I purchased bicycles recently. We have wanted them for some time, since it is one of the few physical activities we both enjoy, so we just did it. It has been a long time since either of us has ridden a bike. That first ride, the first day we got them was wonderfully familiar to me. In my younger days, I was a true biker. At age 14 I did a 600 mile bike trip in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, it was not uncommon for my me and my dad to hop on our bikes and go 10, 15 or 20 miles, and then in college I loved mountain biking with the boys. On a bike, I feel comfortable, capable and strong.

I love the whirring of the tires on the pavement, the wind in my face, the click of the gears as I shift and that the bike only moves as hard as I pedal it. On the second ride we took at a nearby park, biking became painfully familiar. We may have overestimated ourselves by choosing to take the 3 mile path that is quite hilly. As in real hills not just slight elevations that when on a bike seem like huge hills. My heart beating so forcefully in my chest that I could hear it in my ears, gulping huge gasps of air, trying to catch my breath and the burn in my legs as I struggled up the hills, those too, were very familiar.

The next evening we were back on our bikes for a flatter ride and plan to ride when time and weather permit.

Old Dog, New Tricks?

They say “you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.” I feel like an old dog who cannot seem to learn new tricks. The feeling like an old dog part has meaning on several levels since I just have not been feeling that great lately. I caught a cold (the stuffy nose and gross cough variety) that I just can’t seem to shake, my monster headaches have returned, insomnia is in again and the general stress level of my life is up. All I want to do many days is sleep like an old dog. The new tricks part refers to me and my learning to take better care of my diabetes. The minimum: testing, logging, bolusing and carb counting.

The only one I have really done better with is testing but since I haven’t picked up the trick of logging I have no good proof of this. I feel like I have been better about blousing when I eat as opposed to after, but again, it’s hard to show that when I am lacking the logging the part. I’m trying to not be so hard on myself and recognize what I have accomplished and keep trying.

I have been blessed with an anonymous-to-you-commenter (but not to me anymore) on my blog who offered their help in the baby steps and subsequently given support via e-mail. We had a great plan to check in with each other on Mondays and Fridays and set goals for ourselves. Well I am ashamed to admit that I let the ball drop on that one. The last time we e-mailed was like the 14th of March. Before I post this, I will e-mail them and see if I can salvage that support.

Other stress comes from work get busy with a couple of big events coming up: The Celebrity Art Auction and Gala and the Tour de Cure Rock-n-Ride at Blossom. Then there is the bigger stress of a serious illness in my husband’s family which entails one dog staying at our house and my husband staying at his sibling’s house with another dog. We get to see each other every day for dinner and on the weekends but the whole situation is crappy and tough. Except for having Skippy stay at our house – he is a great dog.

Another bit of stress came after I spent a few days in Toledo with my niece, Maddy, who stole my heart and came home really, really, really wanting one of my own. Because of many reasons we are looking at adoption and since there are age-limits for many types of adoptions, (not to mention, our own life plans) and my husband will turn 44 in May, the clock is ticking. It hasn’t gotten stressful yet but we are well aware that path ahead is likely to be rough.

So in a nutshell, that is what’s going on. I was horrified when my faithful reader in the office pointed out that it had been 20 days since my last post.