17w2d First Kicks

Our little Tiny Fish has made his/her presence felt. About 16w4d I felt what I thought might be a kick. It was not some subdued flutter or bubbles. It felt like a tapping finger, but inside. The most similar feeling I could describe would be if you tap the inside of your cheek with your finger.

A couple of days after that I was quite sure of what I was feeling and Hubby could feel it too!

Two nights ago I was doing a site change and I suddenly sneezed. I got a right strong internal thumping, and due to my excited yelping Hubby got a nice strong kick on the hand too :)

I'm now getting either kicks or rolling movements every 2+ hours or so. It gets easier to feel when I'm sitting up in bed, or in the recliner with my feet up, or wearing my pants done up (rare, now lol).

It's Sunday night and we've just had a lovely summer BBQ with my parents and the step kids. The two youngest go back to high school tomorrow, with it being the first day of secondary school for the youngest. Eldest step son has finished school and goes to college in April.

My first day of work is tomorrow and although Thursday is a holiday (Waitangi Day) I'm still not sure how I'll handle getting back into the whole work routine - I quite like being able to nap from 2 - 6pm if necessary.

Get to meet the OB on Wednesday, and Tuesday is a training day so it should be a bit of a wasted week.

I did my first ever basal test this morning. My diabetes nurse advised me just to have a carb-free breakfast I think cos she knew a complete fast would be a bit impossible for me - hungry pregnant lady raaaarrr!!! I had 2x boiled eggs, a spoon of peanut butter and a cup of tea. Looking back the peanut butter probably wasn't a good choice cos I went from 5.8mmol to sit around 10 for the entire morning. It was great to see how flat it was on the Dexcom, but I was frustrated not being able to do a correction. I think I should probably repeat this morning segment of the test just to check that the basal is fine and the pb didn't screw up the test too much. Oh well. It wasn't too much of a drama and I'm not worried to repeat it, it just too four mornings to start as I kept going low!!

In other good news, my good friend who has been trying for a baby for ages has just discovered she's pregnant. Very exciting to have someone close to me on this journey too!

I'm just so pleased that Tiny Fish is kicking away in there - it makes me feel so reassured and it just feels so, right. Before, all the weird machinations in my abdomen felt rather alien and strange. Now it finally physically feels like it has purpose.

Here is a belly shot for you. I'm tall, so I'm not sticking out much yet.

11w3d Christmas Eve-Eve

Christmas shopping is all finished (hooray) and this evening I put up the tree and then we wrapped all the pressies. Including the first thing ever for our one on the way:



Here is the tree, with massively oversized tinsel star that keeps threatening to tip the whole lot over:



Pregnancy symptoms at 11 weeks seem to be settling down a bit. Over the past 3 or 4 days I've gotten a lot of my energy back. A week ago I set the record at 3 naps in one day, not including the 11.30am sleep in. Then I got a horrendous head cold that featured loud sneezing with nose like a tap.

I have given my cold to Hubby and his Mum, and now I'm feeling better lol :P

Breathing is feeling a bit weird at times, kind of like the feeling you get when the cat is sleeping on your chest.

I've upped my breakfast to be one slice of gluten-free toast with lashings if crunchy peanut butter, a cup of decaf-tea with raw sugar and trim milk, a handful of prunes and a nectarine or a couple of fresh apricots.

I still haven't gained any weight (57kg) but I have reorganized what I've got: arms and face seem a bit skinnier while belly may? Seem? Rounder? we are taking photos but even though I'm frustrated at being stick with hardly any pant to wear and still being a long way away from maternity clothing, there is no obvious "popping" yet.

Getting a lot of lows at the moment, and they generally seem to take double the amount of carbs to get me back to fighting fit. So two juice boxes instead of one. I got so frustrated with juice that I've started eating glucose tablets again :-/

Getting what may be a few food aversions to beef, some chicken dishes that I normally love, and generally being slightly nauseated by awful smells. No real cravings but I do find I must snack or eat meals every 2hrs or so otherwise I feel slightly weird/ill. When I go low I go pale and get tired needing to sit down immediately.

Still having mild trouble with constipation, but can't really complain since I've been doing idiotic things like swapping my pre-natal vitamins from bedtime to morning (not cos I forgot! Honest!).

I got out in the garden for two days and tidied things up in preparation for hosting Christmas lunch for our parents. Kids will be here for breakfast and back for dinner at my parents house.

After over a month of waking at 4am for a low blood sugar that would haunt me until dawn, I finally remembered to actually so something about it. Cue messing with nighttime basal rates at 1am the other night! Result? Flat as a pancake from midnite to 8am woohoo!!! Very proud of me self on that one. Guessing it won't last too long before things all change again.

So, Merry Christmas to all you lovely readers. Have a wonderful day and I hope Santa brings you what you asked for!

P.s. Can I ask you all to say a little wish/prayer for a good friend of mine who is doing clomid treatment right now and has, 2 days before Christmas, got another negative result. She's battling on but getting a little overwhelmed and considering IVF. I really hope her next cycle works and she gets what she's been dreaming of! Thank you! :)

I want OFF this damn rollercoaster! Can you help?

Next week the students come back and I will be in teaching mode again. That will be exhausting but challenging work which I'm looking forward to.

The week just gone has been absolutely frenetic, with last minute course prep (still not done, and it's Sunday!), moving the entire Art department into a newly refurbished facility, oh yeah, and 3 days of compulsory academic staff training!! It's been super nuts.

I know my diabetes control has been degrading. It's like, seriously crappy at the moment. Here's the last 7 days for you:



(Apologies for having to twist your neck to see that!)

As you can see, I'm all over the map. There are some trends, which I guess are a blessing as it may just mean the Lantus (basal) dose is screwed up:




Massive peaks and troughs = massive headaches, tiredness, grumpiness, and brain-fogginess :(

So what I'm doing about it is some intensive tracking and analysis to see if I can figure out where the hell I'm going so wrong. I've just purchased Diabetes Diary for iPhone and that's where I got the pretty graphs. Have to say that so far, I'm liking this app the best of all. And I've tried most of them!

I'd been using the Insulin Calcilator app, made by the same folks (http://www.fridayforward.com/) for nearly a year now and I credit it with a 1.5% drop in my HbA1c, so I figured their diary app was worth a shot too. I like how the two apps work together. I can take a bloodsugar test, enter the results into the Insulin Calculator, then just press a button and it transfers all the data across to the Diabetes Diary, where I can add more info and make adjustments. Cool eh? :)

I think it's really good that I'm back in intensive analysis mode, because if 10+ bloodsugar tests a day aren't giving nice smooth control there must be something else going on. And I can't find it without graphs, averages, and data to help me.

Let's be clear: I test constantly. I inject semi-religiously, and I track it all in my paper log book:



But that doesn't give the instant clarity of a graph, or the insight of weekly averages. I hope this system helps. I suspect it will. I've done this intensive analysis thingy before and it has always had positive results, even if only minor.

BTW, if you can spot any major issues for me by looking at the graphs, please let me know in the comments. All help on nutting this one out is appreciated. :)

I take Lantus twice a day (11u breakfast, 9u dinner), and bolus with Humalog. I'm incredibly sensitive to changes in insulin, and am on child-size doses of Humalog. My I:C ratio is 1:14. I eat between 90 - 180g carbs per day including emergency food like juice and stuff. I walk, weather permitting :P And I work hard and get pretty stressed out at times, which never helps. Anything else you would like to know so you can help, let me know in the comments. Cheers everyone.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Sesame snack attack

Last night I had racehorse syndrome. And I couldn't figure out why.

I wasn't too high, I wasn't too low.

And then today it clicked. It was these:

Dark Chocolate Sesame Snaps from Golden Days

Oh my how they are tasty! And according to the nutritional info each pack of three slices was only 7g carbs! Yay! A tasty treat I can eat as a true snack!

NO.

That is not the case at all. Because you have read the pack wrong. For a whole week. Dummy. It's not 7g of carbs per pack, it's 7g PER SLICE!!! That means 21g carbs per pack! Oh woe!

On closer inspection, I also found that each slice has a whopping 10g of sodium, so that explains the racehorse: extra sugar, extra salt, extra tasty, extra-needing-to-pee!

*Marketed as a very tasty and nutritious, healthy snack. Unfortunately their website doesn't actually reveal the high levels of sugar and salt in their products. :(

Have you ever been tricked by food like this?

A sort of anniversary

So this will be short and sweet, but I just wanted to mark the start of October since it's roughly one year since we started this journey of diabetes and infertility. My bloggiversary occurs next April - I can't believe it's so far away, I feel like I've been writing for ever! haha  I will have to think up a special celebration for it.

Oh well, to mark the day, here is one of my favourite paintings. I actually made a reproduction of this work, in my student days (no, you can't see it!)   :)

Girl with a Pearl Earring - c.1665 -  Johannes Vermeer

My lovely hubby took me out for Indian for dinner tonight. Yum yum! Butter chicken my favourite (predictable, I know - but I only choose it about 50% of the time I eat Indian, honest!) Lots of poppa dams, naan bread, white rice, and fried tandoori things on a hot stone. Ooh food heaven!

I have to say, I am a very useful person to take out to dinner. You see, whenever I take out my test kit, the wait staff ALWAYS come over. It might be coincidence, but it's happened so many times (more than 100) that I think the waiters are just curious! What is she doing? hehe - anyway the upshot is that we get served pretty quickly!

The downside, with indian food, is I have no idea how to carb count it. :(

Actually, it would be helpful if I knew exactly how much I ate :P  But I just wolf it down, so hungry!

I had my first day back at work today after mid-semester break, and with a good breakfast test, and not much food (no grazing at the biscuit tin today!), and plenty of walking between classrooms, I went quite low during a staff meeting this afternoon. After treating that, then eating Indian for dinner meant a nice high just now. Ah well. Bolus. Then the painful part - staying awake long enough to know if it's "just right" and not going to send me plummeting overnight.

I also don't want to be high all night, as that will ruin me for the exhibition opening tomorrow (so excited!) Oh, question for you: do you get incredibly hungry when you are high sometimes? Like, ravenous? It's weird, my symptoms seem to have done a flip-flop over the last couple of months. I just want to eat the cupboards bare when I'm high, and (TMI warning, advance apologies, avert your eyes etc) I need to pee like a racehorse when I'm low. Weird I know - I've never been one to do things by the book :P

It's the little things

So, I've been a bit slack this week. My poor blog got a bit neglected, but I hope you will all forgive me with this post!

I went to see my dietician on Thursday. It was fantastic. Absolutely, I couldn't have asked for better. She understands.

She looked over my log book, which is jam-packed with my tiny scribblings, and assumed that I was on a pump due to the sheer amount of information I collect. And how often I test. And how I'm trying to get my carb counting down pat. I took that as a Good Thing, since she followed up by saying I was doing all that was possible without a pump! Finally, can I get a hell-yeeah! :D

Looking over the book, she was able to spot some wonky high numbers in the past week and a half. I explained that I couldn't explain them, so she explained that in each instance they were caused by me having a meal with high fat content. This meant that I would give my insulin, get a low cos the food hadn't "kicked in" soon enough, and then go high about 2 - 4 hrs later when the fatty meal got digested, by which time there was no Humalog left in my system. What a great explanation! Actually helpful! :D She was able to sort out what ALL of my wonky numbers were caused by.

The other reason was when my carb counts were a bit off, and this would always be caused by eating a meal that I didn't cook - restaurants, bakeries, hubby's cooking etc. Yummy but unpredictable. :P

I feel so empowered to know these two little piece of information. It's like everything has just slotted into place since seeing her. Here is a day of test results from

BEFORE: 12.6, 15.4, 12.1, 8.6, 2.5, 16.3, 15.5, 11.7

OK so that day was nothing special, a couple of highs and only one low. But look where I'm at now!

AFTER: 5.4, 9.0, 6.7, 6.6, 8.2, 5.4, 6.6, 6.1, 6.3 - this is today :D So steady, nothing above 9.0, no hypos, no lows. Wahoo!

At the end of the appointment, she enquired about my next visit to see my nurse educator, and then she offered to share our next appointment so I get to see both of them at once! I love getting my docs in the same room together. Especially when one of them seems to understand me so well, and the other sometimes seems to mistrust my ability to a) carb count or b) dose insulin correctly. For the record, I think I do rather well, considering I've never actually been formally taught either topic. :P

Meeting with my dietician has just proved that a well trained sympathetic eye can spot issues that need refining. I finally feel like I'm getting a handle on this. I mean, honestly, I haven't had a day as stable as today in years. I feel great. :) It's the little things that make me happy. See also:

In other news, you may not be aware but I am a photographer. Or at least I'm trying to be. I've joined up with my local camera club, and got myself a shiny piece of camera apparatus. I entered a competition "people, portraits, stories", and won an honours with this image of my gorgeous little sister:

So that's my happy post for this week :) It's a long weekend here, which makes me even happier!

To carb or not to carb

I eat a pretty normal diet. An average of 150 - 170 grams of carbs per day. It's not a low carb diet, but it's getting close. It just happens to be the amount I eat which makes me feel neither hungry nor too full.


I tend to follow the advice of my Mum, and my first diabetes nurse educator, and dietician. They all recommend something like this:



It's worked for 27 years, and kept my weight at a healthy 60-65kg. Good for my height.

My only food problems came when I got really depressed. Unfortunately for me, my main symptom was nausea, so I stopped eating cos I couldn't face it. And lost weight... so much that I was diagnosed as anorexic, and sent off for counselling (and gentle anti-depressants, which moderate the lows, but also the joys, like putting a dampener on your emotions).


It worked, thank god, cos managing T1 diabetes with an eating condition was just awful. Now I watch myself carefully, if I get depressed, I take note that my eating is not gently dwindling away, and I can catch it in time. :)


My hubby is getting interested in vegetarian cooking, so I have been treated to some wonderful vege meals over the past couple of months :) Lots of chilli, tumeric, cumin, nuts, spice! Yummy! I don't mind not-eating meat, however I still say that the best vegetarian meals are the ones with bacon added! hehe


If food is in front of me, and I'm hungry, I will probably eat some. If I end up in a cafe, I always look for something with adequate carbs. If it's a restaurant for dinner, I might end up with a plate full of chicken and salad, but no carbs... that means I get to eat dessert too!

I don't count calories, but I have started logging the number of grams of carbohydrate I eat this year. Everything.


Food should be enjoyed, and I hate having to "emergency-eat" for lows, but on the whole I enjoy planting, growing, cooking and eating. Like it should be. I won't let diabetes ruin one of the great joys of my life. :)

This just proves how random my diabetes really is

I thought I could best describe it with a picture:

Click to see a larger version

Notice the little "average" icon on the right. Yes, 8.7 - is that awesome or what!? (The green indicates my target range, between 4 and 8mmol/L).

I'm normally an average of about 10 mmol/L, so that little number makes me very happy to see :) (Thanks Log for Life!)

But it has come at a cost, as you can see from today's graph, I've been low three times already.
Trust me when I say I am starting to feel the effects of it. Getting tired, brain is just a constant fog and I can't concentrate on anything for more than a minute. I've been eating fruit bars like there's no tomorrow, and even switched to having sugar in my tea today instead of Equal, but I keep going low. Must be because I had a very light dinner last night - hubby is learning to cook vegetarian and he made a delicious cauliflower soup. Don't make that face! It honestly was delicious, with potatoes, celery and almonds. Yum! But not many carbs.

I normally eat about 150 - 170g carbs per day, and I don't know whether that counts as a low carb diet or not, it's just what I eat. I try to eat sensible food, but if you put something tasty in front of me, I will probably eat some of it. And test and inject to cope with it. No strict meal plans or anything. Which makes life...interesting. :P

And yes, I am blogging while low. haha. I will probably need to cull this post tomorrow!