Back in the mid-90s was when I started having some signs of complications. In 1995, I had an upper GI that showed slow stomach emptying – at the time, I didn’t realize that I had the beginning stages of gastroparesis. In 1995 and 1996, I also had a lot of laser surgery for retinopathy. During that same time period, I started getting neuropathy in my feet that got progressively…

I saw this on e-patient Dave the other night and wanted to share. The Department of Health and Human Services is having a contest about medical records – you have to submit a video that is less than 2 minutes. I am sure a lot of us have some good stories to tell! My personal favorite of mine was when I read that I had end stage kidney disease – I didn’t panic because I knew I did not have kidney disease let alone end stage kidney disease.

Since e-patient Dave was the one that took the…

Today is Day One of the Wego Health Writer’s Challenge. The prompt for today is “Pretend you’re making a time capsule of you & your health focus that won’t be opened until 2112. What’s in it? What would people think of it when they found it?”

The first thing that I thought of when I read the prompt was the song In the Year 2525. Of course I had to find a YouTube video and stick that in here so you are singing that song along…

I have been having some problems with my blood sugar lately and thought that I should do some basal testing. I think having your basals set correctly is important for anyone – I feel it is the foundation for your control. For me it especially important because besides all the other whacky things that can screw up my blood sugar, adding food to the mix with gastroparesis can really make things unpredictable. I haven’t done basal testing for a few months so yesterday, I decided it was time and…

This month’s Blog Carnival subject is about finding humor in things to help us cope. We are supposed to fill in the blanks for, “If I didn’t laugh about _________ then I would ________. “ My first thought was that this will be easy. I have a sense of humor, so this will be a fun one to write. Then I started trying to fill in the blanks and I thought this is not as easy as I thought it would be.…

For those of you that think what happens to Medicare won’t impact you, stop and think about how many people you have seen say that their insurance company follows Medicare guidelines. If you use a local supply store and that store closes because of what is going on with Medicare, that impacts you. Even if you mail order your supplies from a company and that company has to close up shop, you will need to find another supplier. The way Medicare is implementing this program is causing a lot of…

The lack of diabetes education is a huge pet peeve of mine. The lack of education is not just a problem with those dealing with diabetes, but also with those medical providers that are supposed to be helping us. I frequently see people coming to message boards with some very outdated information. People are still using a sliding scale instead of learning how to carb count – to be clear here, I am not…

You killed the ice cream truck!











I am sure everyone has heard about Wendell Fowler’s attack on diabetics eating ice cream at a fundraiser sponsored by the Diabetes Youth Foundation of Indiana. I first read about “the problem” at Mike Hoskin’s blog, The Diabetics Corner Booth. Last weekend, an…

1) I beep. Every time I turn around, I beep. I beep in the middle of the night. I beep when I am trying to have some quiet reading time. I beeped when I was trying to write this post. I even beep in my dreams now.

Anyone that has read my blog before has probably read some of my rants about doctors, especially when it comes to gastroparesis. It wasn’t even the fact that they did nothing to help me; it was the fact that they treated me like I was causing the problem even though they knew I had gastroparesis.

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Over the weekend, I received a message thru the Contact Me form on my blog. I cried when I read her message. She…

I started using my Ping on June 28th. The first few days were great and I really loved it but then I started having a lot of site problems. My sites were breaking down fast and after a couple weeks, I started getting hives – I apparently have a Teflon allergy. I stopped using the pump and let the hives clear up and when I started the pump again, they came back so I knew for sure it was the sites and not something else. I switched to steel sets and that problem went away.

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I have…

I posted this on my WordPress blog & thought that it was worth sharing here. We could all use a good laugh!

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I mentioned in my Funny Searches post that someone had searched using the term “what does a diabetic look like.” Unfortunately, I lost that screen shot when my computer died. Yesterday, someone was searching again…

Although I don’t remember the exact date that I found out I had diabetes, I have narrowed it down to the last week in January, 1984.

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I suspected that I had diabetes – I had the usual symptoms of drinking a ton of water, running to the bathroom and losing weight. My grandmother and an aunt were both diabetic and my mother told me that I should get checked. I did not have a doctor at the time…

I posted the following article on my WordPress blog yesterday but also wanted to post it here in case anyone was not aware of the upcoming changes to Medicare.  Medicare is making changes to the DME portion of Medicare – that includes stuff like test strips, wheelchairs and oxygen.  Starting January 1^st, Medicare…