Well, hello everyone, I’m back after a week of learning to be a better diabetic or as it is properly known Dose Adjustment For Normal Eating for Type 1 diabetics – that is those who have to inject insulin to stay alive. As I am a grumpy old woman and a very frustrated diabetic I think I jumped the queue to get on the course. They probably thought it would shut me up. They were right, it was a revelation. There were eight of us, mostly women of a certain age, plus Jodie, a young police officer. We all had the same problems, erratic blood glucose readings and a cerain amount of fear of all sorts of situations if we should have a hypo – that is when your blood sugar drops so low that you feel terrible and eventually lose consciousness. All of us thought our GPs and practice nurses knew bugger all about Type 1s and the particular problems that happen when you inject once to mimic a pancreas which is precisely pumping out insulin in tiny pulses to keep normal people up and running. All the people on the course were extremely nice and we had some good laughs. Every morning we looked at our diaries of what we had eaten, the amount of insulin we had taken and the resulting state we were in and spent an hour problem solving for each other. This was extremely useful as you start to identify patterns and how to solve any problems. I left on Friday feeling tons more confident! DAFNE originated in Germany and there is still lots of resistance to it and ignorance of it in the medical profession but it most certainly works. The drug companies funded it at first and then the PCT in Devon refused to continue so there was a year’s gap. Why you wouldn’t fund a course that would almost certainly keep people out of hospital beats me. They now have funding for six courses a year but the consultant Mark Daly is hoping eventually to get all Type1s on to it within six months of diagnosis. That would be so wonderful. Diabetes is very difficult to control and if you don’t have the tools to deal with it, every time you inject it is a shot in the dark – not any more!
One of the girls Lyn has lost quite a lot of feeling in her feet and is always cold. But we have the solution – alpaca socks. I gave her two pairs, bed socks and dress socks. Her full time carer and husband says she refuses to take them off so it worked, marvellous.