In part 1 of this post I told about my life when I got diagnosed with diabetes and how I reacted to it. And how I eventually stopped paying enough attention to it.
That was until the mid-life crisis hit me. This happened a few years back. I started to notice my life lacked meaning, and started asking myself what I really want out of life.
So I tried to get a grip. I cut down on traveling for work, and took more time for myself. I also got a doctor's appointment, and indicated I would now have more resources and interest to invest in managing my diabetes better. As my own meter readings failed to provide any useful information, my doctor proposed continuous glucose monitoring as the first step. That means wearing a blood glucose sensor attached to the body continuously for a week or so, with a monitoring device recording the value from that sensor every 5 minutes. For the first time, I was able to see how my blood glucose really behaved. No more shotgun charts. The resulting chart was rather a roller coaster, showing the glucose go up and down, sometimes fast, some times slower. Very far from the ideal curve, but providing so much more insight than the isolated dots of the meter.
I made other changes in my life as well. I got married, adopted a more static life style, started to eat regular meals at regular intervals again, traveled a lot less than before. I got an insulin pump, and with it a lot more information and education about diabetes. I'm making progress again! One of the important things I learned was that physical exercise only helps in managing diabetes when it is performed at least two times a week. Exercise taking place less often just causes the body to get confused, and stressed in a bad way. Still, what I have learned the most from, are the data from my continuous glucose monitoring sessions, of which there are now several, and all the information they have provided me with.
So that's where I'm coming from. Future updates to this blog will concentrate on my notions of what helps in getting most information out of that data, and, perhaps even more so, what prevents diabetics from getting the most benefits out of continuous glucose monitoring, insulin pump, or diabetes management in general. Specifically, I'll be planning a new software product for managing all the information relevant to treatment of diabetes, and keeping the internet posted on my progress on that.
Anything you'd like to comment on?
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