Sort of newly diagnosed

[CatsFive]

I was actually diagnosed a year ago - HbA1c of 56 - but it sent me into such a flat spin it was some months before I could bear to look here. At the time it felt full of rather macho 'I will beat it into submission' posts and I simply looked at them and closed the browser window.

However I did change my diet to very little carbs and more pulses, fish, fruit & veg. Luckily I live on my own so don't have the pressures of family catering, luckily I can afford that diet and luckily I've rarely eaten ready meals, convenience foods, pastries & cakes, sweeties and so on, luckily I've never taken sugar in my tea since laziness got the better of me when I left home and luckily I like an active lifestyle.

Also luckily here in Scotland there is the horribly named MyDiabetesMyWay website. It took quite a bit of time to get signed up - that is once I could bear to apply - but now I think it should be renamed to 'MyHealth' or similar and opened to all. I have a record of all prescriptions back to some time in 2008 apart from those in hospital, ditto my weight. Blood was taken on Friday and I saw the results yesterday afternoon. I can add my own weight & blood pressure records. So apart from the name and the poor admin when I was trying to join, I rate it.

A year on my HbA1c is down to 46 and I'm about 12 kg lighter. I don't feel any different probably because I lost weight very gradually, but I have a lot of rather baggy clothes and the metatarsalgia I had had gone, though exercises for Achilles tendon issues are partly to do with that.

However there is still 8kg to go to a BMI of 25, and I'm interested to see what the HbA1c will go down to.

 

[MrsA2]

Welcome. You've achieved and learned a lot. Glad you are sharing your experiences. This is what keep the forum live and relevant

 

[chocoholicnomore]

I'm another Scottish member who thinks the mydiabetesmyway is great! I had hba1c blood test at 9.40am yesterday and got my results at 8am this morning. No need for numerous phone calls to surgery or lengthy wait in a call queue. Although the result wasn't as good as I'd hoped for ( Christmas got in the way). I just need to wait now to see if nurse contacts me or if she is happy with the result

 

[JoKalsbeek]

I was actually diagnosed a year ago - HbA1c of 56 - but it sent me into such a flat spin it was some months before I could bear to look here. At the time it felt full of rather macho 'I will beat it into submission' posts and I simply looked at them and closed the browser window.

However I did change my diet to very little carbs and more pulses, fish, fruit & veg. Luckily I live on my own so don't have the pressures of family catering, luckily I can afford that diet and luckily I've rarely eaten ready meals, convenience foods, pastries & cakes, sweeties and so on, luckily I've never taken sugar in my tea since laziness got the better of me when I left home and luckily I like an active lifestyle.

Also luckily here in Scotland there is the horribly named MyDiabetesMyWay website. It took quite a bit of time to get signed up - that is once I could bear to apply - but now I think it should be renamed to 'MyHealth' or similar and opened to all. I have a record of all prescriptions back to some time in 2008 apart from those in hospital, ditto my weight. Blood was taken on Friday and I saw the results yesterday afternoon. I can add my own weight & blood pressure records. So apart from the name and the poor admin when I was trying to join, I rate it.

A year on my HbA1c is down to 46 and I'm about 12 kg lighter. I don't feel any different probably because I lost weight very gradually, but I have a lot of rather baggy clothes and the metatarsalgia I had had gone, though exercises for Achilles tendon issues are partly to do with that.

However there is still 8kg to go to a BMI of 25, and I'm interested to see what the HbA1c will go down to.

That does indeed sound like an excellent app. Here in the Netherlands, every practice/hospital has a different app or site, and while you have to give permissions all over the place, none of them seem to mesh. Which is, to say the least, impractical.

...I do feel like I have to apologise for when you came here a year ago. I'm one of the "let's do this!" people, mainly because, well... When I went onto the Dutch patient forum, it was all doom and gloom, everyone was as lost, scared and neck-deep in high blood sugars as I was. So much desolation was terrifying and depressing. Then when I got on here, I found people who actually got this thing into remission, which was claimed impossible on the Dutch forum. When I mentioned there that I got my blood sugars down through diet I was told to shut up, in no uncertain terms, because I was giving out false information and false hope in equal measure. (!?!?!?) So yeah... I stuck with this place, because they made a lot more sense and were quite a bit more open minded when it came to dietary experimentation. After a while I got stuck in with giving advice. I didn't realise it gave off a macho vibe. (Being riddled with panic and anxiety disorders, I'm anything but, haha). It certainly wasn't intended as such, sorry it came across that way none the less. Just trying to give some hope, is all, and I am very sorry that mission backfired.

But hey... You've done an excellent job with the diabetes so far, and I'm sure you'll continue to do so down the road. And I'm keeping my fingers crossed the Dutch medical folks will clue in and get an app going like the one you have!
Jo

 

[CatsFive]

<snip>

...I do feel like I have to apologise for when you came here a year ago. I'm one of the "let's do this!" people, mainly because, well... <snip>

No need to apologise, you were by no means the only one at that time. It felt like the Andrex puppies had been let lose! The macho vibe was because it seemed to be mostly men treating it that way.

I've not really looked much for the past year and I see now it's mostly people with my reaction - 'you cannot be serious!'. And I still feel rather that way, but I think that if at all possible it's important to start making changes despite the feelings.

BTW your written English is fantastic, I suspect your spoken English is just as good. I went on a camping holiday to Brittany in 1981 (year of THE Headingley test) and was invited into their caravan by some Dutch people to 'practise their English'. I think it could only have got worse if they used me as an exemplar!

 

[JoKalsbeek]

No need to apologise, you were by no means the only one at that time. It felt like the Andrex puppies had been let lose! The macho vibe was because it seemed to be mostly men treating it that way.

I've not really looked much for the past year and I see now it's mostly people with my reaction - 'you cannot be serious!'. And I still feel rather that way, but I think that if at all possible it's important to start making changes despite the feelings.

BTW your written English is fantastic, I suspect your spoken English is just as good. I went on a camping holiday to Brittany in 1981 (year of THE Headingley test) and was invited into their caravan by some Dutch people to 'practise their English'. I think it could only have got worse if they used me as an exemplar!

Andrex puppies... Now you've put it that way, I can quite see your point! (I do love their paper's pattern, especially when I come across it in cat cafés of all places. )

As for making changes that seem unlikely, well, I hear you...! At the time I just figured I had nothing to to lose, really. My blood sugars were high, my liver was shot, and according to the endo, I wasn't going to live for much longer anyway. (Thankfully, he was wrong!). Due to the meter and the pounds dropping off, I could see results rather quickly, so I stuck with it. In spite of a lot of naysayers at the hospital. I'd tried it their way and got worse, so it was time for a new tactic. I don't know if I would've had the courage (or rather, sheer desperation!) to try something as against-the-grain as LCHF, if that hadn't been the case. The disbelief and skepticism would've won out, I think. But it did the job, and it wasn't until later that I wandered in here and found others who were doing what I was doing, just with more knowledge about how to do it properly. But there's plenty of people who are new on here who think we're pulling legs left and right.

Thanks for the compliments by the way. I lived in the Greater Toronto Area for a bit, so I sound like I come from around there, with lots of "Eh"'s peppered into my speech, aside from speaking faster than a speeding bullet. All that, in spite of growing up on It Ain't Half Hot Mum, Dad's Army, Only Fools and Horses, Keeping Up Appearances, Are You Being Served and 'Allo, 'Allo. The BBC tried to teach me the Queen's English, (and a bunch of accents) anyway, for which I am eternally grateful. In the '80's the average quality of the Dutch person's English was nothing short of abominable, so apologies for what my countrymen put you though, haha! Trust me, we've come a long way since. Well, most of us anyway.

 

[CatsFive]

I've never been to a cat café - I have four at home so it seems superfluous! And I got diagnosed as a result of one of the cats biting me. He had an abscess on his tail, I picked him up and he sunk his teeth in good & proper. Went to the local walk-in as cat bites should ALWAYS be treated with antibiotics and they took my BP. Took it again, and again, and again, rung my GP. Got called in for a massive pile of bloods, so a few days later there I was having what I found was a really shocking conversation with the doctor. They didn't give me meds for the T2, they gave me a referral to a dietician and she was fairly helpful. And since the A1c was coming down there has never been any mention of meds for diabetes. The meds for the BP are a whole other story!

As to the cat - he ended up costing me over £300 at the vets. He had fractured one of his canines and it had to come out. But he is adorable, and often sleeps on my pillow or under the bedspread. He wants to sleep on my legs but that gives me a bad knee - he weighs almost 5kg.

Before diagnosis I had a fairly good diet - a reasonable amount of veg, almost no alcohol for the previous 2-3 years, the only sugary thing I ate at home was home-made marmalade and honey. So really all I was left with to cut out was carbs, though I have also upped my intake of fruit & veg, now am upping my pulses & fish as well but that I'm finding harder as although I like them they weren't something I often ate.

Edit: To add, I found it so shocking as apart from having my gall bladder removed and exceedingly well controlled asthma I've hardly been ill enough to trouble the GP for most of my life. It completely contradicted and undermined my sense of myself.

 

[JoKalsbeek]

<supersnip to see whether it'll help with the errormessage I'm getting when I try to post - J>

Oh, I have plenty of kitty love at home, but I love photographing them.... And Charlie and Vicky hate a camera! Unless I'm shooting something else, then they're suddenly interested. So I'm a regular at a bunch of cat cafe's, a hobby I thankfully share with my husband, and there's a few neighbourhoods here in Baarn where a whole lot of them are usually walking around. (I have no idea what the names of their owners are, but Moos, Tjibbe and friends I do know!). Your story reminds me of our previous cats, Night and Mouse. Mouse bit me once right through the ball of my thumb so I needed a bit of surgery and a tetanus shot. We'd only had them a week and they needed to see the vet, which she didn't agree with. And Night, well... He was a T3c diabetic, so on insulin. When I found out about the non alcoholic fatty liver disease and did my research, I thought ruling diabetes out as a cause would be easy enough with Night's meter. I was sky high at that moment, and I knew exactly what 18.-something-or-other mmol/l meant, so yeah... Considering no-one bothered to look further into the NAFLD, he made all the difference. My little one-eyed hero. You don't want to know what his pancreatitis and subsequent T3c ended up costing us... Let's just say I'm very glad we had him insured. (Just add a zero to the abcess costs and maybe double it from there...). The lengths we go to for our kitties, eh? Anything to make them happy. Draining bank accounts, busting knees...

A lot of people come in here thinking their diet was a healthy one, but that's usually a generalisation... It'd be healthy with a metabolism that's working correctly. Sadly, as you've found out, "healthy diet" is a relative term. You might want to be careful with the fruit and pulses, as both can be high in carbs... Much of what people assume is only found in fruit can be as easily found in vegetables, or liver for example. (Vit C in liver, who knew?!). If you eat something new, add stuff in or swap something for something else, just test and see what the effects are. You never know what works for you unless you try, and what works for me, might not work for you.

Your sense of self? I've been at various doctors all my life, bit of a revolving door patient. I don't know if you remember the movie "Twins", but Danny DeVito was basically the result of "junk DNA", while Schwartzy was supposed to be perfection. That's how I've felt all my life: I got every single hereditary thing my family could load onto me. All the bad stuff, very little of the good. But even coming at it from a different angle, I do realise it can be quite the shock, a diagnosis of something chronic that requires you to adjust your entire life to cater to it. Or not, of course, as some rely on a pill to fix things, or just deny its existence, and hope it goes away when ignored long enough. So many people, so many choices. But still. A diagnosis is traumatic, to say the least, so I can see your point. In the meantime you've done quite well for yourself though. You could've curled up in the dark somewhere and hid from this thing, but you've faced it head on. There's quite a bit of heroism there, even if you felt shaken at the start of it all.

 

[CatsFive]

I don't watch movies unless it's 'Some Like it Hot' or anything with Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire and any of his dance partners! Oddly my asthma diagnosis didn't have the same result even though it also is life-long. I think that's because I was so ill with coughing at night that once I was on the right medication (inhaled steroids) I was so rapidly back to normal I didn't care!

Cats can inflict very nasty bites, some people have wound up having amputations. Mind you a chap I used to go out with ended up in hospital on a plastics ward after pricking himself on a rose thorn! Sadly it turned a Prince into a frog... And that bite from Dennis got me a tetanus shot as well.

I've not changed my fruit intake over the past 2-3 months, so it doesn't look like a problem from the Hb1Ac. I'm trying to eat more pulses as they contain fibre, and I'm on two BP medications that have 'constipation' as a side effect. All I can say is it's marginally better than swollen tonsils or massively swollen ankles. As far as I'm aware pulses are relatively slow to absorb compared to (say) white pasta or rice. I'll see when my next blood test comes along.

I have never been one for ready meals, convenience food, take-aways and so on. Just that I think leads to an improved diet, and I'm decidedly into cooking from scratch which I think also helps. It must be so difficult for people who have those as their mainstays, especially if hard up as well. I'm lucky, I can afford a good diet.

Heroic? Moi? No. I'm one of those people who tries to get on with things even when all around seems to be going pear-shaped.

It looks like I can't message you - I was going to send my Facebook handle as there are lots of photos of my cats (past & present) there. However here are a couple to be going on with - Basil is my former stud boy and one of the very special ones. I hope to get him registered as a Pets As Therapy cat in late Spring. Although Basil is a registered pedigree with a title I'm now showing him as a Pedigree Pet, and this photo was taken last August at a show by a very talented photographer - not me! The chap he is with is a dog person really, but apparently Basil didn't want to go back in his pen! Dennis that bite me is on the left in the second photo. He was brought as a stud, and the cat on the far right is his son. The chocolate & white in-between is the mother.

 

[JoKalsbeek]

I don't watch movies unless it's 'Some Like it Hot' or anything with Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire and any of his dance partners! Oddly my asthma diagnosis didn't have the same result even though it also is life-long. I think that's because I was so ill with coughing at night that once I was on the right medication (inhaled steroids) I was so rapidly back to normal I didn't care!

Cats can inflict very nasty bites, some people have wound up having amputations. Mind you a chap I used to go out with ended up in hospital on a plastics ward after pricking himself on a rose thorn! Sadly it turned a Prince into a frog... And that bite from Dennis got me a tetanus shot as well.

I've not changed my fruit intake over the past 2-3 months, so it doesn't look like a problem from the Hb1Ac. I'm trying to eat more pulses as they contain fibre, and I'm on two BP medications that have 'constipation' as a side effect. All I can say is it's marginally better than swollen tonsils or massively swollen ankles. As far as I'm aware pulses are relatively slow to absorb compared to (say) white pasta or rice. I'll see when my next blood test comes along.

I have never been one for ready meals, convenience food, take-aways and so on. Just that I think leads to an improved diet, and I'm decidedly into cooking from scratch which I think also helps. It must be so difficult for people who have those as their mainstays, especially if hard up as well. I'm lucky, I can afford a good diet.

Heroic? Moi? No. I'm one of those people who tries to get on with things even when all around seems to be going pear-shaped.

It looks like I can't message you - I was going to send my Facebook handle as there are lots of photos of my cats (past & present) there. However here are a couple to be going on with - Basil is my former stud boy and one of the very special ones. I hope to get him registered as a Pets As Therapy cat in late Spring. Although Basil is a registered pedigree with a title I'm now showing him as a Pedigree Pet, and this photo was taken last August at a show by a very talented photographer - not me! The chap he is with is a dog person really, but apparently Basil didn't want to go back in his pen! Dennis that bite me is on the left in the second photo. He was brought as a stud, and the cat on the far right is his son. The chocolate & white in-between is the mother.

Ooh, what a handsome bunch! I did disable private messages a long time ago. There were some people on here a year or two back who got a bit.... Pushy, let's say. I should've asked the mods for help, but I was too timid to and didn't want to bother them, and some followed me over to Facebook, where no mods could've helped anyway, so ah well. I'll have to keep it that way, I'm afraid, before that sort of thing happens again. When someone's scared, they'll assume anyone is a lifebuoy, even if they're dragging said person down with them. Nothing personal, it's just... It got scary back then. BUT, that said, they are absolutely stunning cats...! What I wouldn't give to have such charmers in front of my lens. Those eyes... <3 (Besides, I really like bats, and their amazing ears do cater to that as well, haha). I'm attaching pics of Charlie and Vicky (Charlie being the solid black, Vicky the tuxedo; they're previously feral kittens, brother and sister), who were unwanted moggies over at the SPCA. They were there for 7 (!!!) months... When we met them and they were just terrified of us, that sealed the deal. They needed a home where they could just be who they were, and we'd had cats like that before, so... There we went. Technically speaking I'm more suited to Ragdolls, or Blue Russians as they're so relaxed, but I always end up with the underdogs no-one else wants... And when they get a little bit of time and patience, they're the best friends I could've wished for. I do have an Insta, where you can see all the cats we meet on our walks, and visit with in kitty cafe's. https://www.instagram.com/josephakalsbeek/

Yay for Ventolin and associated steroids eh? It's so nice to be able to breathe. Our Charlie needs an inhaler twice a day, (flixotide) and since it's one usually used for people, I can get a puff of his if my Ventolin's run out before I realise I'm low. He doesn't mind sharing, thankfully. As for constipation, a lot of people here use psyllium husk in their yoghurt for instance, to keep regular. So far I haven't had much luck with it due to IBS, but I'm about to try again with some very, very finely ground stuff. Or, well, I want to try a supplement with extra fibre and plant protein due to other issues (kidneystones for example, what joy they bring!), and that just happens to be in there. Curious to find out how that'll work out. And yeah, pulses are the better choice when it comes down to it. It's a bit of a puzzle sometimes, but such a triumph when something works.

Ah, just heard from my husband, he's headed home for the day so I'll go get his (late) lunch ready. Sorry to cut this relatively short, but.... It's been a pleasure with the multitude of cats on top of everything else.

 

[CatsFive]

Beautiful cats. I love all black, and black & white cats. I think one I lost last year had mild asthma, but he never accepted the mask on the spacer. As to my own asthma, I normally never need the salbutamol inhaler, nor the full dose of the steroid one. Every 4-5 years I get a virus that upsets it, but thankfully I've never had a classic asthma attack.

I'll try the psyllium husk in yoghurt idea - or indeed I guess I could put some in my porridge, along with some extra liquid. It worked well for one of my cats! Thankfully I don't have IBS, or kidney stones.

Enjoy lunch with your husband.