Hi from the Rhondda!

Hi, just wanted to say a quick hello - I’ve been type 1 for twenty years following diagnosis at the age of 23. I’d had a nasty bout of gastric flu and my pancreas died within days of that, my consultant is pretty sure it was the cause. I took pretty good care of things until after my son was born in 2003 - post natal depression meant that self care went out of the window. Pregnancy was awful, not so much because of the stress of sugar control but because I had severe morning (noon and night) sickness. There’s a reason my (luckily perfectly healthy 7lb4oz) son is an only child! I’d been pretty much a model patient up to that point, especially when I was pregnant - my HbA1c was in the fives. I limped along after that for a bit.

Fast forward a few years and burnout kicked in on a biblical scale, culminating in two DKAs (BG >50) and several days in intensive care. That wasn’t the wake up call I needed, even encroaching numbness in my toes hasn’t spurred me into dealing with it properly. I’ve developed a deep resentment of my condition - the constant testing (which I don’t do, because my fingers are shredded and I’m tired of bleeding on my work), constant carb calculations and injecting Every. Single. Time I eat or drink.

I’ve just been given the Freestyle Libre system on a three month trial and its revolutionised my life - in that I’m actually aware of my sugar levels and fixing them. Ignorance was bliss before and my HbA1c was around 11 at the last look If I can bring it down by 2.5, I’ll be able to have it long term. Fingers crossed. I’m hoping this will be the thing that gets me taking better care of my diabetes, I have a few mental health issues that seem to scupper my executive function and looking after myself is always the first thing that goes out of the window.

In the last couple of years, my immune system has decided to react to meat, both mammal and bird; as well as cow dairy. I can still eat fish and eggs but for safety’s sake I usually eat vegan when I’m away from home as it’s the only way I can be certain there isn’t anything I’m allergic to. Of course, this makes it hard to follow a low carb lifestyle...

Anyway, that’s me.

Mel

Scott-C said:

Great introductory post, Mel!

It's interesting to hear about the effect libre has had for you. I felt the same way too when I got mine - a real game changer.

There's been lots of posts from people who've been burned out to greater or lesser degrees and then suddenly becoming more engaged after getting libre.

I think one reason is that we're having to deal with a constantly moving target, and having libre lets us see how it is moving full time instead of the little snapshots in time strips give us. Makes it a much fairer game.

There's a useful book, Sugar Surfing, by Stephen Ponder, which taught me a lot about getting the most out of cgm, so maybe keep an eye open for that. It's on kindle.

His idea is to use the constant flow of info from cgm to make small adjustments here and there, say 1 or 2 units, or 5 or 10 grams of carbs to gently nudge levels back into line before they get too much out of range so you're not having to take a sledgehammer to a seriously out of range reading.

You can also bling libre up a bit to turn it into full on cgm - alerts, calibration, predictive lows - by putting a 100 quid Ambrosia Systems Blucon transmitter on top of it. It'll read the sensor every 5 mins and bluetooth the results to a free app xDrip+. The graph is way better than the usual one and it's nice having my phone ring when I'm going too low while sleeping!

Click to expand...

Thanks for all that, I’ll definitely check the kindle book out And if I get the Libre long term, I’ll definitely look at at a Bluecon, I’m currently copying all my numbers across into my DAFNE app which is a bit of a faff. I’m on iPhone, so there isn’t a version of the Libre app that works for me I’m finding small corrections seem to help too.