General Chat

Well that man is surely lucky you chose to let him stick around, Janey, after the temptations and possibilities of a while back, he could be even worse than he is now without you to watch over him and care! I hope he shows suitable appreciation as soon as he can, and that he will look after his health better and work with you in keeping himself as fit as possible so that you can continue to work and keep him in the manner to which he has become accustomed.
Don't forget to take care of yourself too,

Lizxx

Hiya,
I convinced my best friend to leave her diabetic husband. He was playing very silly mind games expecting her to deal with his diabetic foolery, calling ambulances and restoring his sugar levels, all very stressful and extremely selfish.
He was convinced he could eat and drink to excess and get away with it, leaving her to pick up the pieces, the poor woman was living on a knife edge and near to physical and mental breakdown. Of course once recovered he would forget all the abuse he had given her.....hmmmm convenient.
She moved into the flat above me, divorced him , got half of everything, and guess what ? He didnt die. He of course soon picked up with another woman, an ex nurse who wont stand for his nonsense .so thats put pay to his little power game.
Now I'm a full blown insulin dependant , and if that Mars bar kills me its my choice and no I dont want to be revived!Rather go out like a light than watch my toes dropping off, but thats my own decision and nobody will have to be responsible for me. Diet and exercise is the only way to manage it but the slightest infection can send sugar levels off the scale, so not an exact science. Theres nothing to beat home cooking to know there is no added fat salt sugar.
So as long as he knows you will pick him up each time he will continue to eat badly, I take it you have heard of tough love ? Only have the good foods in the house so there is NO tempation around, its not a diet, its eating for life!

Oh Lyndsey, he's a bit like you with his KitKat bars. ;) But no, this really wasn't of his own doing. Believe it or not, nobody had ever told us this business about infections and what they can do to glucose levels. We just had no idea -- him any more than me. When he first went to hospital, we just thought he had some sort of hideous flu.

When they ejected him from hosp, they didn't provide any genuine instruction -- just more haranguing about testing and testing and testing. Well, when your instructions are all about testing before meals and adjusting and testing after meals and adjusting -- and *you're not eating*, which he wasn't because he was too sick -- what do you know?? He was doing his NPH (morning and evening "background" insulin) and did test and adjust for the two meals he ate between Friday evening and Sunday evening (a cup of macaroni and spaghetti sauce Friday night, and two slices of whole-grain bread with egg salad Saturday morning). So why would he think his glucose was back to crazy? -- and he still wouldn't have known what to do about it if he had!

No, I'm not worried that he's playing manipulative games. Whatever denial etc. there is, it's all his own, not aimed at me. What you describe, Lyndsey, yes, that really is abusive behaviour.

Btw, his blood sugar was at 49 when he was admitted to hospital on Thursday last week, just in case you want goose bumps. It was 20 when I took him back Sunday night. DKA again, but caught it in good time.

I shouldn't make myself out a martyr, you know. ;) The Delia Whosit side loves to cook! And the obsessive-compulsive side loves counting carbs. If it were just me, I'd be living on chicken salad sandwiches and Miss Vicky's potato chips. ;) I cook, he washes up -- and does the laundry and cat farming and gardening and snow shovelling, and half the grocery shopping, and the banking and bill-paying, and looks after all my computer needs (for my work). And is pretty good company. We really are amazingly well suited!

But the danged thing is that as a result of *my* deciding some time ago he was going to take on some more responsibilities to lift some weight from my shoulders ... I'm feeling dependent. I wouldn't know how to reset the router if it needs it while he's languishing in hospital!

Yes, Liz, I'm looking after me -- I'm up at 6am to try to get some work done so I don't get in deeper hot water with the vicious clerks and their bosses. ;)

My brother's marriage finally broke up when he was diagnosed as diabetic in his early 50s. It had always been a volatile marriage, but his wife stayed regardless, I think she was basically uncertain about living by herself.

But after F was diagnosed, he would apparently really get mad at her because she wasn't cooking the "right" foods ..... this is hearsay from both of them as they lived in the UK. Finally, she left.

F managed his diet really well after that, managed to avoid having to inject himself with insulin, but he did have problems with meals out. He travelled a lot, driving all over the UK, as part of his business. He discovered that split pea and ham soup was safe to have at lunch in a cafe ......... until the day he nearly fell asleep at the wheel on an A road (luckily not a motorway). Turned out that SOME split pea and ham soup was not as safe as others!


BTW ........ after about 6 months separation the two began going out together once or twice a week, and even had weekends away together! It was at the start of one of those weekends in 1990 that he had a massive heart attack, and was probably dead before he hit the ground. He was 61.




I am checked every year for diabetes as a result of his history.


I am just listening to an interview on the radio with a US academic who went dumpster diving for 6 months ....... in those big garbage cans behind restaurants looking for labels on food used in the restaurant industry. He's found the incredibly high levels of carbs, sugars etc that is in the food they prepare. He's just published a book on it ....... but they've not yet said the title!!


Janey ............ he's saying that Canadian restaurants are better than those in the US!

The book is called The End of Overeating, author David Keppler

US restaurants ... ooh, nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there! ;) They compete for who can pile the most sugar and fat onto a single plate -- a Denny's breakfast fer example. And then there are the all-you-can-eat places, and the sad sight of people eating all they can eat, plate after plate.

That is the thing. Once you start reading labels, you can never go back. A package of Kraft dinner (c'mon, who eats a third of a package of Kraft dinner??) has as many carb grams as two real meals worth of my homemade whole-grain macaroni and cheese! The ratio is even better when I take the suggestion Jean (Monmouth) gave me last year and replace some of the macaroni with cauliflower. (And I thought about it, and what other veg goes with cheese, and now my macaroni and cheese is 1/2 macaroni and 1/2 cauliflower and celery.) Thanks, Jean!

Have you seen/read the documentary/book about the guy who ate exclusively at McDonalds for a month? "Super Size Me", that's it. No.1 was quite impressed by that one.

But no, really, he doesn't try to lay off any of his responsibility on me. He even makes his own giant batches of lunch chili these days. He just needs to buckle down.

Speaking of him, time to find out whether they're really planning to evict him today as I heard mumbling of this morning. I'm not having it.


edit to add -- it seems my carrying on this morning about not sending him home til he was fixed did the trick. They have finally agreed that this is virus-related and not non-compliance-caused, and that he needs to stay in another day. He ate his whole sorry lunch, too. ;)

Glad you find that idea with the cauliflower cheese useful.Another thing I do is an omelet filled with grated cheese and usually peas.OH has difficulty picking up peas as a side veg. I usually serve with home made bread that I know has only the sugar needed to grow the yeast. We have a sugarfree jelly with fruit and a small amount of ice cream, lowest sugar I can find ,tesco's cheapest!
My main problem is getting him to eat at all!

Hi Janey - so sorry for you, but glad you are insisting that the patient only comes out of hospital when stabilised!

(PS thanks for replying to my pm) Jx

n

Did you miss the part about the 2x4??

I care that much. A 2x4's worth is a fair bit, I'd say.

Imagine, coming onto my life-and-death thread and cracking jokes!

;^)


I was dragging my feet and now that you've popped the thread up, I must report.

Yesterday morning I'd let his nurse know plainly that I was not taking him home yesterday, when she said they might be discharging him again. Not accepting delivery until they had fixed him, which they had not done last week, and I simply was not going through what I'd been through again. (I should have said I'd accept a refund or exchange though ...)

That apparently did the trick, and they kept him. So I'm sitting here at 11am (what's that these days, 4pm funny Englishy time?), and an email comes in reporting that a certain on-line financial transaction has just been completed. An email from No.1.

I hadn't been able to get through to him yesterday evening after they moved him from the acute monitoring whatsit room to a regular room and didn't transfer his phone, and so I was waiting this morning until after shift change (7-8) and rounds (9-11) to try to get hold of him. He got hold of a cab first. There he was next door, sending me emails.


So the 2x4 will be kept in reserve. Since starting all this, it's become clear -- and the pros have finally agreed -- that this wasn't to do with non-compliance, it was to do with the virus that attacked him. But if he doesn't get with the program anyway, it won't be a virus doing the attacking.

The same diabetic nurse was having her second go at haranguing him today about testing, adjusting, eating, testing ... and he said Fine, exactly how does that work when all I have done for two days is sleep and puke? What's the correct adjustment for that? Er, she said.

So he's set up with an anti-nausea prescription drug -- it's apparently the shutting down of the digestive system that starts all this -- and his appointment at the endocrynology department. And life can go back to its dull normal self.

I'm just going to have to come up with some other amusing tale of woe to entertain y'all now!

glad to hear himself is home




I leave tomorrow for NS

.......... so do try not to have any more entertaining catastrophes until after I get home on June 13!!

Please!!

Hey, I thought you were going to stop by and bring me an authentic west coast 2x4!

Everybody drool -- Sylvia is flying cross-country (this country, Canada) and taking the train back. One side all the way to the other. The thing every Canadian kid dreamed of doing in the 50s ... and this one has never done.

Hitchhiked a fair bit of it, though!

Really, Baffin Island? A military connection? Not many Canadians have ever been to Baffin Island, for sure.

I've been to Winnipeg. Portage & Main in February. Classic Canadiana -- Portage & Main in February is the synonym for COLD. ;)

Oh, you disappoint me. I thought you were saying you had been there, Baffin Island. You don't get to meet many people who've been to Baffin Island.

Given a choice between Baffin Island and Las Vegas (all expenses paid for both, of course), I'd take Baffin Island. Maybe that's because I've been to Las Vegas. ;)

Like cold ... or not like Las Vegas. ;)

http://www.baffinislandgcc.com/weather.html

Baffin Island Golf & Country Club Weather Station
The weather network had to relocate its reporting station 800 miles south from Pond Inlet to Iqaluit after the bottoms froze out of the recording thermometers 12 days in a row.


It's -2C there, in Iqaluit, at the moment, the weather network tells me. Not much worse than where I am. Danged cold wet spring in Ontario this year!

Hey Janey, cuz.

Best wishes for your OH recovery.

MIL (Myrtle) is living with us and was diagnosed diabetic a few months ago, but is just on a careful diet. But at 88 with vascular dementia setting in, a bit too much sugar makes her more confused.

Keep in touch.

I'd love to go to the Far North!!

Furthest north I've been is Dawson City .......... maybe Fairbanks is a little further still, but that's in the US and we only spent enough time to fill the gas tank having discovered the guy we had hoped to see wasn't in town!!

Our dream is to ride the train to Churchill to see the polar bears.



............... and I always, but always, notice the temperature in Iqaliut!!


I'll wave as we pass through Ontario .... so long as I am not asleep!!! I think we leave the great metropolis of Toronto at 10pm on the new schedule.

Take care


~~~~~~

Fancy seeing you here, Brian. ;)

I think if you're going to get diabetic, doing it as an oldster is the way to go. Even No.1 should be able to live out a good part of his 3 score and 10, or however that goes, without drastic consequences.

The kind you can control with diet, type 2, is definitely the best kind. Unfortunately they dangled that in front of No.1 for two years and then took it away.

Say hello to Myrtle too, from me and me mum!

Thanks for the thought! Somebody in hospital said something about what I needed to do regarding my husband and I said I would, if I had one! ;)

He's got anti-nausea prescription drugs he takes before eating, but I'm not sure whether he grasps the concept here. I doubt that was intended to be for more than a few days ...

And he's testing and adjusting and testing and adjusting -- and he's got an appointment with endocrinology sometime in the very near future. And he's feeling fine, and back to being a sullen lump when forced to watch the very last edition ever of CBC Sunday Morning yesterday -- call me a sentimental fool, but I've spent most Sunday mornings in the last eight years watching it, one of the best current affairs shows on TV, and two hours of flashbacks and audience appreciation was just fine with me. He was welcome to go twiddle with a computer or a guitar, or his thumbs.

The 2x4s so generously offered can have more than one use.

Now you be careful. Did you read the wiki article?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetic_ketoacidosis

Should be required reading before they hand out the insulin / hypoglycemics to anybody with a new diagnosis. Nobody told us.

Spent the weekend shopping and cooking and counting carbs. That's generally good for a day of rising sullenness as the pots and pans pile up in the kitchen (actually I'm extremely efficient at minimizing pot and pan use) for poor old No.1 to wash, and he gets to feeling overwhelmed by the stock of food in fridge and freezer. I do wonder he hasn't figured out by now it doesn't materialize magically in the microwave when he's hungry.

There, there's my whine. Back to work with me. Seriously, you be careful!

so


I hope all is well with you and the OH?


I brought the 2x4 piece of cedar back here with me ... figured I might need it this summer!