“Smaller, smaller, smaller, less, less, smaller, less”

I hope you had a merry Christmas everyone. No doubt that some of your festivities may have been a little different in the year of 2020 with the new normal being face masks and temperature checks.  For me it was face masks, temperature checks and glucose checks.

On Christmas Eve we went to watch the new Wonder Woman movie at the cinema and for the first time ever I didn’t fall asleep.  However, question is, why was this?

1. The excitement of Christmas Eve?
2. My diabetes?
3. The novelty of the cinema being open after months of being shut as part of covid safety measures?

More excitement was to come on Christmas day as it was my first hotel buffet since being diagnosed with T1D and to complicate matters it was a COVID-19 proofed buffet. 

As some of you will know, T1D involves injecting insulin so that the carbohydrates you eat can be accounted for. Administering too much insulin will send your blood sugar soaring downwards and administering too little will send your blood sugar sky rocketing upwards. This is why giving yourself the correct dosage is important. I do this via an injection I carry around with me everywhere.

But it’s Christmas!  Today there was (almost) nothing holding me back.  I let my guard down and went for the carbs: Char siew baos (bbq pork steamed buns), pasta, noodles and roast potatoes with my Christmas Turkey.  And of course I had to hit up the dessert table because of my sweet tooth and worrying love of all things chocolate. There was lots of gesticulating and muffled masked communication trying to get my slices of cake and spoons of pudding smaller and smaller to reduce the temptation of devouring my entire dessert quota for rest of 2020 on a single plate.

I then had to estimate the grams of carbohydrates in each food item I was about to eat and then accordingly inject a specific amount of insulin based on this. This was the tricky part because there are a lot of foods that contain carbs. On that note, I’ll warn you to never challenge a diabetic to a game of “guess the carbs in this food item” because this is an area we specialise in or at least consider ourselves superior in.

I joked that by the end of the day I was a human pin cushion. I am however happy to report that my blood sugar was very well behaved on that particular day meaning that it was relatively stable and kept within the ideal range. A Christmas present in itself!

Glucose upon publishing: 5.9 mmol/L