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"How are you?" B asked as she shuffled me from the lobby of my dentist's office to her hygienist room.

I like B. She always makes me smile, she's straight forward and we get along great. Even if she is a dental hygienist.

"I'm on the verge of tears!" I said, and then practically let them fly, but I held back. I guess I felt like breaking down in the dentist's office at 7 a.m. wouldn't really help anything.

I held my pump, disconnected, in my hand. There was fresh tubing still curled up in the paper tape, and a full reservoir. It wouldn't prime and I was frustrated. And it was 7 a.m. and I am *not* a morning person.

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I was diagnosed in June of 1982.  In those days, home blood glucose monitoring was about as common and as advanced as listening to music on the go.  In other words, think no ipod, but plenty of cassette player walkmans.  Home blood glucose monitoring was primitive and expensive. 

For the first two years of my life with diabetes, we used various forms of urine testing to track my levels and determine dosing.  First, in the form of tablets dropped into glass tubing filled with pee that heated and turned colors - then in the form of nifty sticks that turned colors after being dipped in urine based on the amount of sugar you were carrying.  Since you weren't actually testing bloodsugar, management was largely a guessing game.

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Yesterday I posted on Facebook that I felt guilty for having not exercised two days in a row. I was feeling kind of down (TAXES!) and knew that a good morning walk would likely help me feel better. But something funky was going on with me last night. I did not expect my sugar to be so wild after dinner and I worked hard to get it in an acceptable range for bed so that it could chill overnight and I would be at a nice place for my morning walk.
 

Good plan. Foiled.
 

Somewhere in the middle of the night Dex woke me. All I remember seeing was a nice, flat line hovering just over 80 for several hours and then an arrow pointing up and the trend graph looking like the side of a mountain. I was already over 200 mg/dL. I remember thinking that this was weird, but I put Dex back on my nightstand and went back to sleep.
 

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He didn't pass. The test was split in two parts - the first part consisting of difficult puzzles to solve and the other being common sense type questions.  He aced the puzzle part. Not only that, the guidance counselor told Susanne that he solved the puzzles faster than anyone in recent memory. However, when asked what he would do if he saw that his neighbor's house was on fire, he stumbled.

"Get low on the floor."

I'm just glad he didn't say, "Get some marshmallows."

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"This is the most sick I’ve ever felt," Charlie said last night, hugging the "puke bucket" so tightly you would have thought it was keeping him afloat.

He looked miserable, wanting so badly to just throw up and get the awful feeling out of his stomach. Get it over with. These are some of the most difficult times of being a parent of a child with diabetes.

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I got up this morning, feeling not so bad.  My bloodsugars, after some nasty stubborn lows over the past few weeks and a high or two, seemed to have started to stabilize over the weekend. 

Having had some odd dreams, I took my time getting up.  I knew I had some projects that needed doing from home, so I'd be working from the apartment today.  I also knew I was due for a site change this morning.  I was doing the "free and naked shower" happy dance!  

Until I started undressing to shower and realized that there was a pretty large amount of blood backed up into my pump tubing.  Dark red near the pump site and bright pink in the tubing from my thigh to the pump.  "Free and naked" happy dance?  Cut short.  Cut short in favor of a test.  I guess the test would've happened anyway, but only after I enjoyed a nice, hot shower sans pump site. 

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On Thanksgiving Day, my four year old nephew noticed me test my bloodsugar for the first time.  A look of dire concern spread across his little face as I drew blood from my finger.  I told him that Aunty needed to test and see what her numbers were before she ate so that she could give her medicine and not get sick.  He nodded, still looking concerned, and said, "medicine, like for my eyes?"  Born with cataracts and structural issues in both of his eyes, he has had more surgeries in his first four years than most people have in their lifetime, has worn contact lenses and glasses since he was three months old, and medicine is a word he's known for entirely too long. 
 

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We have been promised a cure for decades. It's always just around the corner. There was the seaweed and islet cell transplant success that I remember quite vividly. There were pancreas transplants. The stem cell rejuvenation talk. And recently, there has been a large movement towards the artificial pancreas.

And now, JDRF, Animas, and Dexcom have teamed up to do just that. Build me an artificial pancreas. Okay, not me personally. But maybe, someday.

But what does an artificial pancreas actually mean for me? Well first, this first-generation AP (yep, I'm shortening it) utilizes an insulin pump and CGM sensor to continually monitor blood sugar levels then either give or stop insulin as needed. We'd still be bolusing for meals, but the daily hassle of tracking every change would be lessened.

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Holidays are usually pretty rough on Charlie's blood sugars, but his numbers were decent this Christmas. I think the trouble begins with grazing on appetizers.

"Charlie, how many of those crackers did you eat?"

[shrugs shoulders] "I dunno. Maybe six?"

We either over-bolus or under-bolus. It's a holiday tradition.  

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