Thursday, September 21, 2006

Green again

Well, here we are in Seattle again. It's been a bit strange; in some cases I feel like I'm looking at it through an ultrafocused lens, and in some places it feels like we never left. Almost like Tucson was a dream. I don't really understand this feeling yet.

Throwing out the old bottle of Novolog and moving to a 1/12 ratio (from 1/14) for the rest of the trip seems to have fixed things for me. I'm back on 1/14 and putting all my carb counting skills to maximum use, since we're eating out a lot. I'm finally getting the hang of eating more than 49 grams of carbs - I can't take more than 3.5 units an hour unless I'm eating something really high GI. So, basically, I have to take 3.5 units before eating, then 1.5 - 2 units every 30-45 minutes until I get to the right total. This works out pretty well. I'd just been running into issues with (1) remembering to take the injections and (2) calculating the injections correctly. I'm pretty bad at doing arithmetic in my head. BTW I have to do this routine because otherwise (1) my bG ends up too low or (2) too high and it takes the rest of the day to get it down again, leaving me feeling utterly exhausted and bad.

I decided to test drive Calorie King's mobile software on my Palm TX before we went on the trip. It's a pretty good-sized database, although I have had to enter my own foods since I guess I eat a lot of unusual things. I will pay for it when the two weeks is up - it's $29.95 for the Palm version.  To solve the problem with calculating the insulin doses, I am trying out Diabetes Pilot. So far I am finding that their food database does not match my needs (about 95% of the things I've looked up are not in there) and it's too difficult for me to add everything like each bG reading in manually. If it could talk to my meter, that would be another story. I'm wavering between doing it so I can get the pretty graphs and just not having enough time. Still, it's already saved me from calculating the wrong dose twice, so I think I'm going to buy it as well. It's $39.99 for the desktop and $24.99 for the handheld software.

This study that says diabetes takes up to 1 hour a day away from kids made me laugh ruefully. 

4 comments:

Kerri. said...

Hi Lili!

I came across your site this morning and I'm very happy to see that you've added your voice to the blogosphere! Welcome! I would love to add you to my blogroll over at Six Until Me., if that's cool with you.

I have been living with type one diabetes for the past 20 years and the technological advances I've seen in that time astound me. I'm very interested in the software you mentioned and I'll be checking it out.

Oh, and that study about diabetes taking only one hour per day to manage? Those people need a big reality check. :)

Welcome welcome, my friend.

-- Kerri.

Lili said...

Hi Kerri! Sure, it's ok to add me. I love your blog.

Thanks for the welcome!

Anonymous said...

Wow, great to see you started blogging! And it's great to read about your move; I'm getting totally excited about living somewhere (gasp) green again, come May. Hope you're enjoying that cool weather!! :)

Take care,
Beth

Lili said...

Thanks, Beth! I am certainly enjoying a change. It was 52 last night and absolutely wonderful.