More tests...

Had the long awaited sit down with the doc on Friday, turns out some of the lab tests he ordered weren’t done and others make no sense. End result, we start over, so I went in Saturday and gave them six more vials of blood.

Meanwhile my waking BG Level went from the eighties, thru the nineties and hundreds, to the middle hundreds, and this morning up above two hundred; all in less than three months.

My health plan is offering a new feature, I’ll be able to access the results on line myself as soon as I get the password in the mail. Not a bad thing considering my Doctor is out for the next couple of weeks and I’d at least like to see what the results are. As to what he’s looking for, at this point it looks like he’s trying to rule out a few things, but it may be getting narrowed down to some form of Diabetes Insipidus as opposed to the traditional Mellitus types which would explain why I don’t seem to follow the program like I thought I would. I can hope so anyway since Insipidus appears to be much easier to deal with than some of the other possibilities he’s trying to rule out, like polycystic kidney disease, which is just as bad as it sounds.

That still begs the question of what the difference is between Insipidus and Mellitus. Where Mellitus is caused by either a lack of beta cell production in the pancreas or by insulin resistance, or a combination of the two, Insipidus is caused by a damaged pituitary gland or by resistance to the hormone vasopressin (ADH) which regulates the kidneys, leading to all that urinating while still having a BG level short of what would normally cause the kidneys to start working overtime to spill ketones.

It could also be related to problems with the Thyroid gland, which would at least is finally something I have a family history of, small comfort…

Enriched Cocoa Improves Blood Flow in Diabetics

The Devine Ms. M must be ecstatic. Quit jumping up and down already and click the link…

Chocolate as a required supplement, for type II's at least...

And from the University of Michigan...

• What are the recommended servings [of Dark Chocolate] per week?
  Up to 7 ounces per week, average 1 ounce per day
  

From Yahoo news, hat tip to Instapundit.

And the Winner is...

Only a week to go until my appointment with the Doctor where he’ll reveal my various blood test results; I feel like there should be a drum roll and pretty girl standing in front of a curtain.

What I am doing is starting to get organized to make sure I know all the right questions to ask the Doc. And that is a problem. It seems that neither my readings nor the way I’ve been feeling match up with what any of the books say should be happening. It is, well, disconcerting for someone like me, who dealt with the emotional impact of the diagnoses by researching, testing and recording the results to see my BG results come in and make as little sense as they have.

I can eat a high carb meal and be in the one eighties, a low carb meal the next day and be in the mid two hundreds. Worse, the exact same meal will peak as much as a hundred points off of the prior reading. I exercise (and always have) and, on average, I find that I go up thirty points during the hour when I should be going down. I wake either low, or high, and either stay there or not. I’ve gone a week without a fasting reading under one hundred and twenty, and another without a reading over ninety. A week or so into my testing I ate a large plate of Pasta, just to see what would happen, and I dropped from the one seventies to the one fifties in less than an hour. A week later I switched to the low-carb (Dreamfields, and it is quite tasty) pasta, had a large portion, and did fine, the next day I ate a smaller portion of leftovers and took off like a moon rocket.

As much as they argue about target numbers, all the books and all the experts agree on the correlation between diet and blood sugar, but in my case it just doesn’t show in the numbers.

Last Friday, while getting more blood drawn, I went to the urgent care across the hall simply because I’d gone a week being utterly exhausted, unable to accomplish anything worthwhile at work, with a constant low grade headache, dizziness and numbness in my toes. Turned out I was dehydrated, they gave me some water in an I.V. and sent me home, feeling better, but it didn’t last.

Most disappointing is that my buddies are all heading to the track today for this month’s race, and I can’t get back in my race car until I pass a medical and that won’t happen, if at all, until I know what is happening to me.

When good logos go bad...

After a week where I couldn't get my fasting BG level back below a hundred, had to go to the Urgent Care after becoming dehydrated (and don't even ask where my post meal numbers went up too), I needed a chuckle. Especially since now they've taken away my coffee.

And that is probably the funniest logo I've ever seen.

The 10,000 names of vomit

One goal in life I could skip out on is to live in a world where projectile vomiting is a spectator sport. And just what would they be aiming at anyway… Turning on ESPN to catch the San Diego Hurlers vs. the Pittsburg Blue Chip Specials is not why I pay my cable bill each month. But just in case you were wondering, yes there is a webpage for everything, including VomitNames.com. My favorite; a tossup between “Anti-Poop” and “Pavement Pizza.”

Anyway, Diabetes Mine included a link to this page on gluten intolerance, which in turn pointed out some of symptoms and yes, I do have a rash (and not the kind that’s fun to get either) along with many of the other symptoms listed, including a tendency toward “involuntary personal protein spills.”

So it’s one more thing for the Doc to eliminate when I go back on the thirtieth. Considering how many foods I’ve just given up, to dump wheat completely is just cruel, so I really hope the symptoms are just a coincidence.

One for two, sort of...

I ordered a couple of new food items to try, stuff I couldn’t get at the store, via Amazon. First was the “Dreamfields” low-carb pasta, which is also a new sponsor for Diabetes Daily. While ordering it, Amazon recommended the “Dixie Carb Counters” country biscuit mix. I really miss biscuits, so I went ahead and got it as well.

The Pasta worked extremely well on taste. The only real difference between it and my old pasta was that it doesn’t stick together quite as much. But frankly it was delicious. It also had a lot lower post meal spike than normal pasta. Even with two slices of stone ground wheat, it topped in the one fifties. Once I dropped the fifty carbs the bread was adding it was fine and will become a staple for me.

The biscuit mix, on the other hand, was not so good. It calls itself, “Health food that tastes like junk food.” In reality, it was indescribable. But I’ll try anyway. Imagine going out onto a gravel driveway, during the winter, and scrapping up some gravel mixed with rock salt and dog urine. Liberally mix in some rancid lard. Bake until the smell would make a rat gag, and finally, if you are me, nibble one edge, vomit profusely and toss the remainder in the trash.

But the pasta was excellent…

Dumbbells

Survived GI Jessica’s M, T, Thursday beach drills and did a light workout on my own on Wednesday. Rest tomorrow and then, this Saturday, will be my first, “let’s go for lean muscle not longer endurance” workout with dumbbells. The book I spent a small chunk of my stimulus check on claims there are thousands of things to do with dumbbells. Here and I thought all you had to do was lift them up and put them back down again. Wrong again.

Well, kind of. It turns out that there are thousands of different combinations because the author likes exponents. To work on your arms, for example, you can do a regular curl. That is, lift the weight with your palms facing up. Or you can do a “hammer” curl which has your thumbs facing up, or finally a reverse curl where the back of your hands face up. So we have three ways to lift for the arms. But we can also repeat those same three ways while standing, sitting, leaning over, standing on one leg, tap dancing, peeing while standing (guy) or sitting (gal)… etc. So if we have ten body positions and three ways to lift, it’s ten to the third or, presto, three thousand completely different exercises.

Helpful, yes, and I’d recommend the book if you are looking at trying free weights. It’s the “Ultimate Dumbbell exercises” by Matt Murphy.