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I’ve taken a step in a new direction — I’ve decided to investigate weight loss surgery. My primary care physician uses a company called Medical Edge for his administration (I assume it works that way, at least). Well, they have a company called TLC Edge and they specialize in LapBand Surgery.
First appointment is Monday.
As you can tell from my lack of posting, life is busy and diabetes keeps getting shoved to the end of the list. I do see my endo in a few weeks. I’m predicting an A1C over 8.0
Lots of days I’m lucky if I get around to testing my blood sugar. Somedays I don’t get around to eating breakfast.
I’ve also been majorly stressed out over my job and its future. We had a RIF and they eliminated 300 positions.
Oddly enough, my pump warranty expires in February and I occasionally think about it. I’ll probably get a Ping. I probably will use my 3 sensors, two will expire in November, and I’m not sure when the third one does. I probably won’t get any more sensors. Sadly, the worse your blood sugar, the worse the sensors work.
I’ve even tossed around the idea of seeing if I can switch to Byetta and drop insulin and Symlin entirely.
Not doing well, am I?
The good news, is that periodically try to fix the problem. Today I updated my spreadsheet and recalculated my bolus amounts.
The blog at http://www.kweaver.org/cs has more detail about it. Diabetes and my personal life have gone to the back burner, but I decided last Friday I am taking control of my life. Well, hopefully not completely taking control, that would probably mean losing my job tomorrow.
Yes, a somewhat real possibility, my school district is RIFing a large group of people. Fortunately not as many as they originally expected, as a lot took the voluntary RIF. Three people in my building, include the home ec teacher across the hall. She took the RIF rather than maternity leave. (Yes, I know it isn’t called home ec anymore, but I still call the custodians, janitors.
So back to the diabetes news. I was quoted in the New York times this weekend: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/business/12novel.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
I’ve been using that device for several weeks now, I got it the same day that the Dexcom upgrade came. It’s interesting. Also difficult to deal with — my limit is two medical devices at a time, I’ve found.
I’ve also quit working with the Fit4Diabetes folks — they are great, and really worth it, but I’m ready to manage the exercise thing by myself. That’s something that has been at the forefront of the back burner stuff.
As always, it’s an interesting school year. My responsibilities have expanded yet again, not only do I teach a full load of students — well, I do have one reduced sized class, but I am also the campus technologist.
That means I collect the technical assistance requests and pass them up to the district, and I have a few other tasks. So far, this year, it has included making sure that everyone in the building gets fingerprinted. Fun part if that the directions didn’t match the actual process.
So I’ve got added stress AND added walking time, since I end up spending a lot of my time troublingshooting.
BUT the biggest problem this week was Hurricane Ike. Yeah, we live in Dallas, BUT we get our food from Diet Gourmet and their kitchens are in Spring, Texas in suburb of Houston. They didn’t evacuate but didn’t have power until Tuesday. Thus we didn’t have food until Friday. I REALLY rely on Diet Gourmet which is a good thing.
I didn’t even think of using a Dexcom sensor until Tuesday (dumb), which did help, but my mission to reduce insulin TDD was momentairly stalled. The good news, is that the TDD has stabilized.
So far today, I’ve had perfect numbers. Woke up with blood sugar relatively low, the correction I took worked, and ate breakfast. Even my breakfast postpranial numbers were good.
The good news, is that I’ve brought my insulin usage down to just below 80 units a day. Hopefully I can keep up with that.
And the skirt I am wearing is way to big, so maybe I can start wearing the clothing I bought Iast spring.
Very odd… Maybe I should make sure I’m eating more iron rich food.
As we learn more about restless legs syndrome (RLS), one of the facts that is becoming clear is that RLS is more common in women than in men. Some studies show that RLS might be perhaps twice as common in women.
One of things I am working really hard on right now is reducing my TDD. It seems the more insulin you use, the more you end up needing. The result — weight gain.
There are two things I do to reduce insulin dosage — one is low carb it as much as possible. Friday, I stocked my refrigator with low carb snacks that I don’t tend to binge on.
The second thing I do is exercise more, especially after meals. I try to walk after each meal, but haven’t made it so far this weekend. However, I have been increasing my frequency and duration — I’m up to 15 minutes at a time on the treadmill as of today, so that does end up being better.
As a result of working on that over the past two weeks, I’ve gotten my average TDD drown to 89 from 120 two weeks ago. I did tweak my bolus settings a bit today and I’ll see how that goes next week at school. It’s better to go a tad high right now, then end up going low. That does so ruin my day.
I LOVE the new software. Got it yesterday — had Fedex email when it arrived, left school during my planning period and installed it before I left for the shrink.
I really believe that the result is much more accurate than before. Most of the time, I just have to do a minor adjustment when it comes time to enter my blood sugar, and sometimes none at all.
It’s amazing how using an accurate meter makes a difference!
I’m ordering new sensors on September 1st — using my flexible spending account.
I report tomorrow. We have two days of staff development, a convocation at American Airlines Center (getting there will be a PITA), and two teacher workdays.
This will be my 18th year of teaching computer science, and the 18th year in the same classroom.
I suspect I handle the beginning of a big uniquely, but it works for me. I spent this weekend at a dog agility trial, and will do the same next weekend. In fact, I’m scheduled for Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which means I’ll take one of our teacher workdays as a vacation — that is IF I decide to go on Friday.
I’m actually pretty ready. Office Depot had their teacher appreciation discount last week, so I went last Sunday and got supplies. I spent half a day the week before working on putting my classroom together, and spent Friday afternoon. (That equals the day I’m taking off, by the way). Went I left Friday, all computers were up and talking to the teacher workstation, server, and the internet. So I can teach there now, without doing anything else.
My next task is to build a new student image. I want to put Microsoft One Note and Microsoft Expression web on the images. I also want to set of the workstations so building JCreator projects are easy.
I spent the summer writing our curriculum for Computer Science I (Visual Basic), and Pre AP Computer Science I (Java), so right now I’m waiting for our district specialist to start setting that up. I also have AP Computer Science I (A) set up — but currently fu-barred and AP Computer Science II (AB) set up but don’t have my lesson plans set up yet. I’ll work on that during the evenings next week, and probably quite a bit next weekend at the show site.
I’m pretty happy about next year, I have the schedule I want, and I’ll find out which kids and how many by the end of the end. So far, so good, and I’ll use the agility trials to keep me from stressing out about school.
Got behind blogging on the trip. In fact, didn’t touch computer for last two days — but did use smart phone. So here’s the trip recap:
We went everywhere between here and Las Vegas.
We went to a ton of Indian Trading posts including Fort Courage and Geromino. My favorite was Yellowhorse in New Mexico. Also make sure you stop at the scenic overlook at the Laguna Reservation on the other side of Albequerque. There are craftspeople there from the Reservation.
Went to a Stuckey’s and bought candied fruit slices (very good)
We went to Meteor Creator – it was neat, and we should be very afraid (seriously, that is their theme).
We stayed in Williams Arizona, we rode the train to the Grand Canyon and took the bus tour.
We drove through Hoover Dam and stopped a bunch.
In Las Vegas, we went to MGM, saw the lions, went to the M&M store, and the coke store.
Saw the Fab Live show, at Planet Hollywood and saw a thunderstorm IN the Miracle Mile of Shops.
We went to Margaretteville and to the Venetian.
I like nickel poker slots, triple Play – Game King
We stayed at Circus Circus – DON’T but it was free. Lots of screaming children, but we did finally find a parking space where we could avoid the casino.
We stayed at Winslow Arizona, and we went to the street corner (Eagles song).
We went to the Painted Desert/Petrified Forest National Park
We stopped at all of the World Best stuff. It wasn’t. Well, the salt water taffy at the World’s Best Fudge wasn’t bad.
I’m tired.
I did learn some interesting things about my husband.
He is extremely impatient in traffic. In fact, he is a horrible driver in traffic. I drove through Albequeque rush hour, which didn’t bother me a bit. My attitude in traffic is that there isn’t anything you can do about it, just sit back, relax, and focus on staying in your own lane. If you do that, everyone will get home.
He has no sense of direction. I don’t get that, as I alwas know where I am at. However, I do everything left handed which confuses him.
He hates screaming children more than I do. Well, actually I knew that.
We’re both also kind of selfish and really need our own quiet space daily. Which I never did get, he did.