Fail on so many counts.

I missed the big blue test. A night of fun and drinking was followed by a day of hangover and bodily pain, and sleep. So I effectively missed the bbt, but when I did check at like 4 when I started to function, my sugar was at 98mg/dL, which I’m okay with.

My most recent A1c was an 8.7. I’ve drifted a long ways from where I want to be, and I guess it’s time I started to swim back to shore and get that number down to 6ish again. All of my other blood tests were normal (actually I was congratulated on my results, aside from the A1c, because apparently I’m very healthy).

Life has been excessively busy lately… but I guess I always knew senior year would be a whirlwind tour. Classes are going fairly well (all except for a theoretical computation course, which is just silly in my eyes), and the semester is just about 3/4 over. Thanksgiving is almost upon us, and we all know what that means… test test test, eat, then test some more.

Nova Basketball has started up again, and so far our team has been destroying the opponents. I’m a fan of this, and would like to continue going to the games and sitting basically courtside (thank you VU Band…).

Nothing too exciting has been happening in my life… I’m in second round interviews with Comcast to fill a position in their network engineering and technologies department, which is all very cool… I’m working on getting an interview with the CTO of the company that manages Harvard’s endowment, which would also be pretty cool. Boston is a nice place and I really wouldn’t mind ending up there for a while, but then again, Comcast has positions outside DC and Philly as well…. which is also very cool and satisfying.

***Begin Video Game Segment***
Lots of very exciting video games have recently been released, some gleaning more media attention than others (eg Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for various controversies)… I picked up a copy of Dragon Age: Origins, and I feel that I can safely say that it is one of the best (if not the best) RPG I have ever played. I also picked up a copy of the CoD title, but I really just do not appreciate it for what it is… it feels very closed off, and I enjoy a little bit of wiggle room in my games, even FPS games. Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 are still out in the unknown in terms of release date, but I really hope they get here soon. I’m gettin antsy with all this waiting. OH there’s a japanese game out there that was recently translated, released exclusively on the PS3, called Demon’s Souls. This game sounds like it is insane. It’s an RPG with no pausing, actual death consequences, a cool take on online play (with respect to player-player interaction)… I could write more, but I think it’s easier to just check out a review on your favorite gaming website (if you haven’t already). I plan on renting/purchasing a copy of the game over either Thanksgiving break or Christmas break and trying my hand at this “ridiculously hard game” while I have access to my parents’ PS3 at their house. We shall see.
***End Video Game Segment***

Other than that, nothing is really going on in my life that is of note. The holidays are coming, a semester break is coming, life is good. Hope all is well out in the world.

Take care,
TcB.

The Big Blue Test

Hey all,

I know this blog has effectively died out, but in case there are those that have continued to check it out, here’s something that actually got me excited.

Manny over at TuDiabetes.com has the greatest ideas.  Back in July, there was an event called “14Kpwd”.  This event entailed the 14,000 members of TuDiabetes.com and its sister site EsTuDiabetes.com testing their blood sugar at 4pm EST and reporting it through various means.  This time around, the event is called “The Big Blue Test“, and asks people all over the world to test their blood sugar, do 14 minutes of exercise, and test their blood sugar again, reporting both readings through various means.

I think this is a really cool idea, and actually makes me want to check my blood sugar (a very, very rare occurrence these days).  So if it sounds interesting to any of you (it should…) check out the link and participate.  It’s gonna be really cool.  I promise.

Hope everyone is safe and in good health,

TcB.

Some things.

Once again, it has been a while since my last post.  Oy yoy yoy.

Things that have happened that should be noted:

1. Got the results of the Medtronic CGMS study.  – Was pretty good, didn’t like the lack of realtime results.  But that’s the entire point of a blind study, and (sort of) limits the Hawthorne Effect.

2. Did a 7-day trial with a Dexcom. – Liked the unit, didn’t really have the accuracy I was hoping for.  The 55mg/dL hardwired alarm is obnoxious.  Especially when my BG was actually in the 70’s and 80’s each time it went off.

3. Gotten emails from two different people to write posts about things.  While I do not appreciate being told what to write about, I will mention them:

• Diabetic Living Online asked me to inform my readers about four new articles that were posted (“The Truth About Popular Weight-Loss Claims” [investigates 13 of the boldest claims to find what's true and what’s not], “Find the Hidden Carbs” [has quizzes for you to see how accurate you are about how many carbs are in the foods you eat], “Weight-Loss Myths Revealed” [examines various myths about weight loss], and “Know Your Numbers” [gives you a quiz to take in order to find out how well you know your numbers]).
• Over at Running With Diabetes, Søren Lilleøre, a Danish man with type 1 diabetes, was followed as he competed in one of the toughest races in the world, the Marathon Des Sables.  I missed the boat on this news, as the marathon has been completed, but it’s still worth checking out.

4. I’ve got an endo appointment on the 27th, and will then be able to submit my paperwork to see how much (if any) my insurance will be able to cover for a Dexcom unit.  Even though it wasn’t a dream trial (there were holes in my graph, multiple erroneous alarms, a few missed lows…  it was still worth it, and I appreciated having the little guy in my pocket.

5. My life has gotten rather busy in the past month, as is evident by my lack of postings.  Hopefully things will settle down soon (finals are coming! finals are coming!), but I really doubt that it will be as settled as I would like.  The search for a job is still in full force, and prospects are looking slim. =(

Hope all is well out in your respective worlds,
_TcB.

With a new toy comes rediscovered obsession.

Today I got hooked up to a Medtronic iPro CGMS.  Well I guess it got hooked up to me, in reality.  The iPro, while it is a CGMS, does not fit the bill in my mind.  When I think CGMS, I think of a Dexcom or a full-fledged Guardian system.  But no, the iPro is simply the sensor from the Guardian.  It does not have a readout to tell me what (it thinks) my blood sugar is.  It simply records the data it collects, which can then be downloaded after three days when the sensor is removed.

I think that’s crap.  When I heard the words “3-day CGMS study” come out of my new endo’s mouth (Yea, I got a new endo.  Seems pretty nice, the office is constantly behind schedule though, by at least 45 minutes), I was immediately inundated with daydreams of pulling a Dex out of my pocket, seeing a reassuring 97 on the screen, and smiling.  But no.  I’ve got the sensor, the data…. but no doohickey to pull out of my pocket to actually visualize the data.  This is crap.   And to add to my frustration, insurance may not be covering this $150 study, and the sensor is right above my waistline on the rear-portion of my hip.  And it is covered in about 8pounds of medical tape.  And it is uncomfortable.  I demand reconciliation.  I want a little piece of plastic to show me my damn 97.

I asked the endo if she thought I would be able to do a trial with Dexcom, she said that she didn’t feel comfortable with the idea since it’s not FDA approved.  So, that adds to my frustration… but I emailed Dexcom customer service to inquire about the possibility of doing a trial without the doctor (I’d get a prescription if necessary, but she wouldn’t be involved past that, and it’d all be between me and the local rep).  So I am currently awaiting a response from them in regards to that.

Anyways, since the “blind CGMS” truly shows me nothing in real-time, I’ve got to keep meticulous logs once again.  Feels like I was just dx’d again, and I’ve begun to obsess.  I’m tracking my carbs hardcore again (to the best of my ability), I’m tracking my sugars (to an almost obsessive level), I’m using Kevin’s spreadsheet again… I’m even tracking when I smoke cigarettes now (maybe the realization that I smoke too much will help me quit this time?).  Lots of stuff going on that I should be able to do all in my head by now, but it turns out I have forgot a lot of things.  For instance, I was amazed when I realized that a medium banana has an average of 26g of carbs in it, and a clementine has an average of 9g in it.  Seriously?  For some reason I thought I remembered it the other way around.  Time to go back to school on that subject it seems….  This study should at least show me some interesting curves.  So far I’ve been from 77 to 121 to 52.  That low seems to have come without reason too, which pisses me off since I can’t see the trend (and thus had no warning of it to make it not happen.  I thought that was part of the pro’s of a CGMS.  This iPro crap just doesn’t count as a CGMS in my book.)

In other news, Obama signed the executive order to release the restraints on stem cell research today.  Go team.  =)!  It is now time for me to calculate dinner (yea, I know it’s late) and get some food in my stomach.

Gute Gesundheit,
_TcB

Edit:  As Nikki stated in the comments, the Medtronic system for purchase (Guardian) is much different.  I do realize this, and am just frustrated that they only gave me half of the system and waved a magnet over the transmitter (to put it in receiver mode).  That’s the stem of most of this frustration.  Also, about 36 hours after insertion, the tape is half unstuck and the transmitter/receiver nub is sorta just chillin out half untaped.  We shall see how these results look. =)

A Change of Scenery

Have you ever thought that things just were? Not good, not bad… just… are. Boredom has overcome me here at Villanova. I don’t seem to give a shit about much of anything anymore, and I can’t seem to find anything with which to give me that push back towards caring. I’ve been floating through life without really pushing any limits or testing myself for a good while now, and I’m starting to get bored. I don’t really know what to do with myself anymore. Class, eat, sleep, chill out with the same people… that’s pretty much it. I feel like I need a change of scenery for a while, but I’m not too sure how to go about doing that. I don’t seem to have enough time for even myself these days, and taking time to get away from things seems highly improbable, if not impossible.  I’m not really sure what the point of this post is… but then again that last post really had no point either… nor did it relate to diabetes in the least…. so here it is I guess.

tb.

Build it up, Tear it down.

People these days throw the word love around all the time.  Hell, I throw it around sometimes too.  It is a meaningless word most of the time, but more often than not I hear it and it makes me happy.  Somebody loves me.  “Love”.  You hear it and think “Yes, I am wanted here.” and then you realize that the word is simply four letters strung together to create some conception of attachment.  The next time you hear it, it has less of an effect, until each time you hear it it is as though you are being stabbed by a needle in the heart.  You think “They love me, but it’s not the love I am looking for.”  It is the love of friendship, not the love of truth.  The search for that type of love has recently been weighing heavily on my mind.  I do not function well alone.

I tend to become attached to people quite easily, and it freaks people out a lot of the time and screws things up most of the time.  More often then not, to add to that issue I lash out at those I am attached to, causing them to recoil both their enjoyment of me and their trust in me.  If someone can be attached to another, yet still lash out violently (verbally, physically, emotionally…) at them, what kind of person is being dealt with?  Most would go straight to psychopath.

The very fact that I can be laughing with someone and then verbally attacking them within the course of a single conversation makes certain things difficult.  Quite frankly, it seems like I am my own worst enemy when it comes to friendship (whether platonic or more).  I seem to build myself up, and then proceed to tear myself down again.  Pull people in, then push them out.  It doesn’t help that every time (almost without fail) that I push someone out or lash out at them, I end up turning on myself as a form of punishment.  All I can see when I look at myself is a failed endeavor.  I guess I just can’t seem to learn my lesson.  I don’t get it.  I don’t like it.  I’m tired of it.

A Smattering of Things.

As is my usual procedure, I have not posted in ages (has it really been over four months?? Where does the time go in college???). My diabetes has fallen into the background of my life… I’ve sort of been coasting… my most recent A1c (taken…. three or four months ago??) was an 8.1 I believe. Not so good there. BUT. I have recently begun seeing an endocrinologist in the Villanova area.  Which is good.  She seemed to understand how I roll and gave me a stern, but understanding and respectful, talking to about my behavior and talked to me about getting on a 3-day CGMS setup to get a good baseline for treatment.  She handed me the necessary prescriptions, including one for a full blood workup to ensure up-to-date information on her part.  She also wants me to attend a class on carb counting (….I used to be good at that…. it’s been a while, and now it’s just a W.A.G. [or simply forgetting to bolus]).  So I feel like with her guidance, I should be able to actually hop back on the horse and take care of myself this time.  Hopefully.

College life has been somewhat interesting.   Women confuse me (go figure), classes are hard (again, I’m at Villanova.  Go figure).  There just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day, nor do there seem to be enough days in the week to accomplish everything I feel like I need to get accomplished.  But I generally manage to squeeze by and still remain somewhat respectable.

Technology never ceases to amaze me.  The speed at which we live in today’s 21st Century world simply astounds me.  Technology is everywhere, making things “more efficient” (I beg to differ on that point; I got my hands on an iPod nano and played that cool little maze game for hours while I should have been writing a paper).  Our various modes of transportation get us from point A to point B faster than our ancestors could have ever dreamt possible, one can go from Washington state to Pennsylvania in a matter of hours, not months.  You can wake up in Hong Kong and lay your head down to sleep in New York City.  More close to home for all of us, you can hook up to a little plastic box that is, in essence, a spring, timer, and memory bank with that re-assuring *click*, and live the life of a normal person without a worry beyond “This has X amount of carbs, so I need to tell my blackbox to give me Y units of insulin.”  There is, generally speaking, no more sleepless nights worrying about why your feet are that strange color blue and have no sensation of touch.  Not so many days (if any) where you see that obnoxious blob floating through your field of vision.  Technology is a crazy little thing, and it’s not going anywhere any time soon.  Which brings me to the topic of “The Future”.

I’m not sure if I’ve written about this in the past (most likely have), but the future is one of the things about life that scares me the most.  Where am I going to be in ten years?  Hell, where am I going to be in ten minutes??  With the help of technology, as I said above, we live our lives at breakneck speed and, I at least, rarely seem to be able to find time to slow down and enjoy ourselves, even though with all this technology we do things so much quicker and more efficiently.  We simply seem to have an unidentified need to do more things at quicker paces.  It truly seems paradoxical to me.  We invent something to make a certain task take less time in order to have more time for other things… then we take that newly freed up time and cram some other task that has recently become quicker to accomplish, rinse, and repeat.

Well that was a ramble if I’ve ever seen one… But yes.  The future.  I am a junior in college now.  It feels like yesterday I was stepping onto campus as a student for the first time, scared out of my pants that I was going to make no friends and be alone for the four years I attended the University.  Three and a half quick years later, I’m surrounded by the best friends of my life, and have no idea where any of the time has gone.  I don’t really know what I want to do when I get out of here, though I do have an inkling of an idea… though that is GPA-dependent.  But that brings me to the thought of “getting out of here”.  I’ll be ‘free’, sure.  Living on my own or with a few friends, working a steady job (hopefully), raking in the cash (even more hopefully), and living my life.

In the next five or six years I’ll be thinking about marriage.  I’ll be buying my first car.  I might be buying a house.  I might (read: should) be attending graduate school.  (That’s all out of order, I feel.)  The thought of doing all of that, on my own, scares me more than the thought of taking diabetes by the horns, also on my own.  I’ve dealt with things that it is generally not recommended to try to conquer alone, and have succeeded and not felt even a slight twinge of fear, but mention the thought of growing up and I need to change my boxers.  My best guess?  I’m going to take it one step at a time, just like everybody else.  I’m going to lean on people that I know won’t let me fall, and I’m going to let people lean on me just the same as we all go through the same realizations.  We are growing up, and it is scary to some, exciting to others, and no big thing to the rest.

Rants, 3. Tom’s focus, 0.  I feel this post is haphazard enough to make up for the four months of not writing, so I will finish it up, do a short workout, and hit the hay.  Hopefully I will have the drive to write consistantly and follow you all daily like in the good ol’ days.  =P

My dad’s coming to visit and take me to breakfast tomorrow, AND I get a motherly care package.  Score.

Hope you all are safe and well,
Tom.

Pictures. And such.

Hey all,

I pretty much dropped off the face of the Earth, as is customary with me.  I have been doing a lot of work with getting Mac OSX to run on a non-mac machine, and have been successful.  My Dell Latitude D630 is now running Leopard 10.5.4 almost flawlessly.  I’m lovin it.  But anyways, I have finally pulled my vacation photos (and other random photos) from my camera, and resized them in Photoshop.  So, without further ado, I will post them.  They’re getting their own page.  So.  Here’s the link:  Photos.

In other news, my most recent A1c sucked (8.1 up from 7.1)…  but hey, I’m still living and breathing.  Turns out that my triglycerides have gone way, way, way up (from 95 to 241), my albumin level was 9mg/dl (should be between 0 and 8… so… yea) and my “good fats” have gone down to 31.  Looks like I need to kick myself in the ass again, get to the gym, lay out a diet (again), and get my shit on lockdown.  Jesus.  Classes are going fairly well.  Been a quick few weeks so far.  Pretty busy though.  Gotta get back to work.

Peace,
Tom.

Ink 2.0

I got my new tattoo.  I’m so happy with the way it turned out.  I got it done in black and grey, but I’m really feeling the way the irritation looks.  It’s currently shaded in red.  Which will fade.  SO.  I’m thinkin after it’s healed I may go in and be like “Hey.  Ya’ll wanna throw some red into this piece?”  haha

A picture follows the post.  It is blurry, but it’s the best I can upload right now, as my camera cable is stranded back in Philly.  The piece took about an hour and a half to do, and after about twenty minutes I didn’t feel it much at all.  All I could keep thinking each time I looked at it was “Damn.  This looks ballin.”  I took a book so I wouldn’t focus on the pain, and ended up reading a good portion of it.  Though I’m not sure how much of it I actually absorbed, as it is the Bhagavad Gita.  So.  =)  Olympics are on.  I’m out.

Tom.

Ink, Round Two.

I set up an appointment to get my second tattoo tonight. It is set for Monday afternoon slash evening, and I’m excited. There’s a concept picture of the tattoo at the end of this post. I’ll definitely get an unveiling picture for ya’ll, but it turns out that I left my camera cable at my apartment at school, so I can’t upload any pictures. Yea, that means the beach, too. Let’s say that I’m not exactly a happy camper about that. I’ll be able to upload some from my blackberry, but I’ve been crazy busy since the beach, and will have to find time to get it all sorted out.

In other news: Somehow I missed the fact that Animas and DexCom have teamed up to create an integrated system?!?!? Where was I when this news came out??? I got a letter in the mail from them and almost fell over when I read it. It’s about damn time, Animas. Now hurry up and release the pump so I can break mine and just upgrade. hahaha But seriously. I’m really excited for that new pump/CGM integration. I’ve wanted CGM for a long time, but never thought that adding in a whole new device would be all that beneficial. I mean, it’d be crazy benefitial. But I can get by on fingerpricks until the integrated units would be awesome. Seriously. Who’s pumped? This guy.

Anyways, the Olympics are going on. And some of that stuff is mad crazy. The amount of flips that some people can do between jumping into a board and hitting the ground is astounding sometimes. =)

Just two things I saw in the news today: An Artificial Pancreas and Stem Cell Research. Not breaking news, really, but it’s a step in the right direction nonetheless. Thought I’d share in case anyone missed it.

Take it easy, ya’ll. I’ll be checking in again soon.
Tom.

[[The kanji means ‘Little Sister’, and the sun and moon combination
represents our counter-balancing relationship as siblings and twins.]]