Color.

Color is an amazing thing.  It truly is.  I have often wondered how different everything would be if I were to have total color blindness.  As odd as it may sound, I kind of want to go through a day or two with no colors, simply black, white, and the varying shades of grey.

Part of me wants to start a project similar to the diabetes365 project, where we take a black-and-white photograph each day that dramatically shows the importance of color in our lives.  Maybe importance is not the correct word… maybe simply the affect that color has on our lives.  The only problem, which is the same problem I have with the diabetes365 project, is that I do not feel I would remember to take that photo every day.  I still think that would be a really cool photography project.  Maybe we could do something like color7, which would have a deeper meaning.  It would be one week worth of photos, but the number 7 also corresponds to the colors in the spectrum:  ROYGBIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet).  Maybe each photo could correspond to one of these colors, starting with red and ending with violet, coming full circle on the spectrum.

Just an idea that came to me while I was sitting in psychology class, learning about perception.  :-)   Shoot me an e-mail if you think this project would be fun to do, as having only one person doing it wouldn’t be worth it.

Thanks,

_Tom

Back to the Basics?

As many of you know, I have been in somewhat of a diabetic slump lately.  Basically “just getting by”, not testing nearly enough, not bolusing nearly enough (either ignoring the fact that I’m eating carbs, or simply forgetting)… and the thought hit me today… What about going back to the basics?  I’ve got an endo appointment coming up soon(ish?), and maybe now is a good time to take a pump break and go back to injections and break it all down to the basics again.  No chance to just flip on the basal switch and go, I’d have to pay way more attention to what is going on than I have been for the past year.  I’d probably get back onto the pump after a week or two, but I think going back to the basics of doing all the math myself, tracking carbs better, and not simply letting the box do it for me.

I was just wondering what everyone thought about this idea.  On one hand, I’ve got the whole “I’ve had better, more sustained control while on the pump” and the “I’ve had more lows on injections”, but on the other I have “It’ll take more thinking on my part” and “It could be good to take a break from the pump” ideas.  Let me know what you guys n gals think.

Thanks,

_Tom.

Baja Chalupa? Er… 1000?

While I was in Puerto Rico, I got an e-mail from a Baja1000 team asking me to help spread the word about their team, Desert Dingo Racing.   These guys are running the official World Diabetes Day car, a 1969 VW Beetle.  The race itself coincides with World Diabetes Day, so the timing is perfect.  Two members of the team have Type 2 diabetes, and a number of the other team members have strong histories of diabetes within their families.  The team has partnered up with the IDF (International Diabetes Foundation — Our friends), and are passing 100% of the funds they raise through their drive-a-thon on to the IDF.

I am currently falling asleep, and have just stumbled across the e-mail again (I gave it a star, and still  forgot to make the post.  I’m ashamed.).  Please just check them out at http://www.desertdingo.com/  and if you can, please make a donation to their effort.  They will be live-blogging and Twittering as they make their way down the Baja Penninsula in the race, which I think is pretty damn cool.

Scott, over at Scott’s Diabetes Journal has made a very good post about this effort if you need any more information about it and don’t want to get it from the Desert Dingo website.  You can find this post here.  Please check it out, and if you can, donate to the cause.  It’s a pretty cool one, ya know… diabetes and all…. :-p
Thanks,

_Tom.

Two New Hands.

I was diagnosed at the age of 17. I will never know what it is like to go to the first day of 3rd grade with a pump in my pocket, or what it is like to play a little league soccer game and have to worry about my sugar. I will never have to worry about having to talk to the school nurse about my care, or having to talk to the principle and administration about special disability forms that need to be filled out in order to ensure the best care possible. I will never know what it is like to rely on my mother or father to take care of my set changes, or to check my sugar in the middle of the night. I am extremely lucky that I will never have to go through childhood with the D. I have the utmost respect for those of us that did, or those of us that are going through it all right now. Dealing with it all now is difficult enough without all of the growth and puberty and the like.

Earlier tonight, I was thinking about how lucky I was with my diagnosis. I got past most of the hard things while I was still relatively healthy. Over on TuDiabetes.com, it is Children’s Week. I have been thinking about what word I could put in my hand for the “Word in Your Hand” Project (link on the right side of this page), and kept getting stumped. What word should I put in my hand. Survival? No…. it doesn’t really fit too well. Believe me, I wrote it…. I took a picture… I didn’t like it. While everything we do is, in fact, about survival, I did not like having that word in my hand.

I was looking at a facebook group devoted to the “To Write Love on Her Arms” movement, and kept seeing the word love, everywhere. I thought about it, and I imagine that while you are a child with diabetes, there is a lot of love involved. You hate the disease, but love the fact that you are surviving with it. You love the people who care for you. Those people, obviously, love you right back. There is a lot of love related to diabetes, to counterbalance all the hate that is thrown at the disease itself.

To go along with the word love, the thought of trust came to mind. I remember one day I was so angry with diabetes that I was refusing to put a new insulin site in. When my mom asked if I would rather she do it, I remember telling her that I don’t trust her. I think a little part of my mother died that day, hearing that your son doesn’t trust you with a needle. I obviously trusted her at some point (thermometers up the butt anyone?). I don’t know why, but I have never really trusted anyone with my diabetes care, not even my endocrinologist. So I chose to write trust in my other hand.

These two words, love and trust, are fairly common words. People say “I love you” all the time. Trust is an everyday occurance. You trust bank tellers with your money, you trust your wife to lock the door on the way out. Words that we see every day are sometimes words that mean the most to us. Lately, love is a word that means a lot to me. Love is confusing, love is comforting… and in the words of my sister (Expletive coming up) “Love is a mother fucker”. Trust is also another big factor in my life recently. I have started trusting people with my secrets. I have began to trust that people aren’t always out to stab me in the back.

So with all that said… here are my two hand photos. I must be getting to bed.

The Land of Sand and Piña Coladas.

Every year, the Villanova University Band goes on a fall concert tour over the university’s fall break. Last year we chose to go to Canada and tour in Quebec and Montreal. This year, we chose to fly to Puerto Rico and tour in Ponce and San Juan. Even though our band was completely owned by the Ponce Municipal Band, we had a great time. The beaches were great, the drinking age is 18, and the people (for the most part) were friendly. After a rocky start (with a migraine and sugar that would not stay up), the trip only got better and better, until we left. Getting through security for the first time with an insulin pump was somewhat stressful, but after a visual inspection and a pat-down I was good to go. On the way home, however, the pump didn’t set off the security gate, which was fine by me. While we were in Puerto Rico, we spent a lot of time at the beaches, but also took a tour of the Casa de Bacardi, a sweet rainforest, and one of the biggest caves in north america. It was all pretty amazing. I’ll be posting pictures to share with you all, and I hope you like them. I can only upload a few of them, as I am running out of storage space on the blog, and currently don’t have the money in my budget to buy more space. Other than using external image storage (which could possibly cut my bandwidth after a few people have viewed the images), there is no other way. So you will all have to deal with only seeing a few photos of the 400+ I took while in Puerto Rico. Enjoy! :-)

So after editing this page maybe fifty times trying to get all the links to work, I have given up. Each image had its own page with a description and such, but the links break every time I save the post. So screw it. WordPress blows too much to waste any more time on getting photo descriptions. If you have any questions about any of them, like “Where the heck is that?” or anything of the sort, feel free to comment or shoot me an e-mail. Thanks!

_Tom.

EDIT: I now have 12 out of 14 links to description pages working. The page for the glass of water and for the red plant do not work completely. Linking to their larger images also does not work at the moment. We shall see why this is shortly. I have developed a deep hatred towards WordPress.

EDIT #2:  Okay, all the pages now work… and I still hate WordPress.  Time to start looking for my own domain.  Can you say unbalancediabetic.com?

Word in Your Hand

I know a lot of you are members of TuDiabetes.com, maybe even all of you. World Diabetes Day is November 14th, and TuDiabetes decided to start a project that leads up to it perfectly called “Word in your Hand”. Please check it, and the rest of the site, out by clicking on either of the links on the right side of this page. The first one leads you directly to the WiyH project page, and the link further down leads you to the main TuDiabetes.com site.

Anyways, my first submission is below. I’m planning on submitting some more, taking different approaches to the concept.

The word in my hand, or symbols rather, means “Fearless” or “Dauntless”.

Thanks,

_Tom.

Throw it out the window.

Take all of that work that you have done. All of the effort it has taken to get your A1c down, all of the effort to keep your numbers good, all of the fights with yourself to not hurt, all of the friends you have made in hopes to keep busy, all of the effort it took to get into a good school. Yea, take all of that. Now throw it all right out the window.

I hurt myself last night. I took all the work to not hurt myself for 6 months, and in one second I threw all that effort onto the floor and stomped all over it. Whatever. It could be worse, and I’m fine with that.

I’m thinking about transferring schools, as well. Which is why all the work to get into Villanova is being thrown out of the window. I’m looking at Towson University, which is a mile or two north of Baltimore. Basically what I’m looking for in a school is a better computer science department (Towson has this), and a legit marching band with members who actually care and don’t show up to performances wasted (Towson has this as well). Towson also has an easier academic program (I believe), which would be a good thing. Villanova is actually giving me some trouble academically. Eh.

I’m not sure how all of this will pan out, but we’ll see. I know my A1c is shot to shit, but I know it could be worse.

Peace out.

Edit: The part about my A1c being messed up has nothing to do with last night, but it’s got everything to do with the fact that I haven’t been checking much lately, nor have I been bolusing much lately.  My basal has pretty much been it.  I’m in one of those slumps where you keep thinking “This isn’t happening to me.  It’s all just a bad dream.”   Sorry that wasn’t clear.  :-\