Well I want to briefly take the time to wish everybody a Merry Christmas. I probably will not be online at all tomorrow because I have a lot to do not just with Christmas, but having to pack and get things together because I am going back home Saturday morning. Well, I will be back online most likely on Monday, so see you all then.
Month: December 2009
How Many Hours in a Lifetime Wasted On Hold with Insurance Companies?
You know how there are all these studies out there and all these dumb little facts? Well I have one for somebody to figure out. The average amount of time in a lifetime that a diabetic waits on hold with an insurance company. I’m guessing I can save pretty much half of my life this way. Today was worth the wait however. I had to first call my insurance company and find out the phone number to my mail order pharmacy. My insurance had switched in November, the day before I was fired, and I still have coverage through them, so I wanted to get an insulin re-order before that time. It took the guy on the phone 20 minutes to basically just give me the phone number to the mail order pharmacy.
Once I called them it became better. I spoke to a lady who walked me through the whole process. She recommended that I have my doctor call in my prescription because she said, “in all honesty, the fax will get tied up in an incoming box until probably tomorrow.” For once, somebody at an insurance company told me the truth about something. She will probably lose her job for saying such a thing. She gave me a phone number, fax number, what exactly to have the nurse say to the person on the phone, everything. After having a nice discussion with her, I then called my doctor’s office. I explained the situation to her and explained why I missed my last visit and why I don’t know the exact date of my next visit. I will explain that here tomorrow, it’s kind of interesting believe it or not. Anywho, I asked my doctor’s office to call and leave me a voicemail once this was all completed, well I received the voicemail, so I am happy.
The only scary part is that I am going to PA next week, so I asked for the insulin to be delivered there. Which now I regret because I have enough insulin for about a month, so I could have just had it shipped here and stored in the fridge. Now I have to have it shipped into the freezing cold weather, and then bring it back with my on the plane. It goes into my carry on, so it is going to take up a pretty fair amount of space on there, so we shall see how that turns out next Sunday. Well, time to sign off for the night again. I need to try and get my posts done in the morning again instead of 10:00 p.m.
It Feels Good to Feel Normal Again
Wow, this may be the first time all month that I have blogged in two consecutive days. It is cold down here in south Florida, about 50 degrees. I know that is nothing compared to the northeast where I am from, and where I am going next week, but for being down here, it is cold. But it is a good cold, not a bad cold. What do I mean by that? It is nice to sit outside, exactly what I am doing right now. I am sitting out back at Amanda’s house in a screened in patio typing up a blog. I am away from Monday Night Football, away from the Panthers hockey game (which is taping, so I haven’t escaped it completely), and just relaxing in the nice outdoors of her 1 acre lot (for those of you who live in south Florida, you know the annoying condo / highway life that exists everywhere else).
Today was a long day at work as well. It was tough and hard on my brain because I was doing things that I don’t think I ever did before in Excel. As a consultant, I am open to doing pretty much whatever is needed by somebody, you have a question and if I have the answer, I do it. Right now I am doing data analysis for Volvo Aero Service (pretty much sell jet engines and parts.) There are a lot of parts and a lot of numbers that go along with jet engines, so it can be a little stressful getting the numbers into the correct places.
How has this affected my diabetes? Not bad at all. I have gotten back into a normal way of life, working 8:30-5:30, eating lunch at the same time, eating dinner at the same time, being more productive with my life and back to testing my blood sugar once an hour or two hours at most during the day. I am eating better at breakfast and at lunch, dinner I am still trying to work on. I don’t eat fast food breakfast anymore, like I did pretty much every single day at my old job and I don’t pay for coffee anymore, which saves me between the two about $75 a month. I lost a little weight, but put some back on this past week because I was very stressed out about moving and getting out of my old house and into my new house. I will get into that blog tomorrow.
Until then, I am signing off tonight. Oh by the way, you may not see me tweeting as much, but I am still there in heart, I am reading, but not always posting. I can easily read tweets during work, but I don’t always have the time to write something and then I just usually read them at night, but by that time it’s too late to respond to them. I am finally back to living a normal life of a diabetic.
Done Moving, Finally Can Relax
I am all moved out of my old house and for now am living with my girlfriend’s family until after the new year. Reason being is because our closing date isn’t until after the new year, but I am going back up north for the holidays so it’s not that bad. Moving was so hectic because I had to move things into storage, so I was not only packing but trying to back things in ways that some would go to storage and some would go to the house. Obviously my diabetes stuff was going to the house, but not all of it because I have so much random crap that I don’t really ever use anymore.
I still feel that I put things into storage that I may have needed, but anyway onto more important things. I’ve posted recently that I am working again doing some consulting work. Right now it is only 25 hours a week for this client and obviously, no health insurance. My insurance expires at the end of December, so tomorrow all I care about doing is getting my insulin re-ordered before coverage runs out. I am also supposed to get my COBRA information tomorrow. So all this stuff that I have to do tomorrow and Tuesday, it never ends.
Have a great week everybody, hopefully it’s a short week for you as well.
So Tired from Moving
Damn am I tired or what! My roommate and I started to move last night and we just finished it today. I have never packed and moved that fast in my life. We packed everything and moved within 48 hours. I am so tired and drained of energy. I can’t even believe that I am typing this right now because I just want to shower and go to bed. Anyway.
I got good news today. I found out that my insurance coverage is still good until the end of the month so that means that I can re-order my insulin before the coverage actually runs out. This was such great news to me, especially when every bit of news that I have been getting has been bad. My blood sugars have been good the past few days though which is a surprise because I have been so stressed that it’s not even funny. Sunday is a relaxation day. No moving, nothing but watching football and catching back up. I used to be on my laptop for about 5-8 hours a day, I am now on it for about 20-30 minutes a day.
Well, I am slowly getting back into my blogging mode.
Take care.
I Almost Forgot How to Blog
Today was my first Monday working in over a month, what a long day it was. I started working again last Thursday, so with all the talking going back and forth I didn’t have much time to continue to blog. I had a lot of things going on with worrying about insurance and bills and being unemployed that I had to just take time off from blogging for a while. Now I am back. There has not been too much going on in my life, so there’s not much even to talk about.
I still haven’t even gotten around to downloading the USB Contour data onto my computer. Did I mention that I have to move this week and weekend, so that doesn’t help things that much either. The main reason that I am blogging today is because I received an e-mail from somebody telling me that they were sad to see that I haven’t blogged in a while because they read it everyday and they looked forward to seeing my blogs everyday because it made them feel comfortable with managing their diabetes.
That to me made me realize that I need to continue to blog. If my blog has influenced only one person, then that is more than I have ever thought that I would.
With that, it is pizza and Wii night at the future in-laws tonight.
I’m finally back to blogging
Wow, I haven’t even really been on my computer since last week, let alone had a chance to blog. Things have been hectic, well not really. My day’s have been filled with a lot of lazy / relaxing things. I start my new job tomorrow with introductions and meetings to get started. So, basically for the last week I was enjoying my last days before starting a new job again. The weather hasn’t been great for me, but I have been trying to spend as much time outside as possible and as little time in front of a computer. I guess I just needed this break to recharge myself and now I am ready to get back into things and get back to blogging and tweeting and Facebooking and Linking In, etc.
I am kind of scared about how little I now know about what has been going on in everybody’s life in the d community. I have a lot of reading to do to catch up on. So, enough with my blog I want to read about all your lives, mine is boring. More from me later.
I’m Tired of Diabetes Right Now
You may have noticed that lately, the past 2 weeks, my posts have been a lot shorter and not really that interesting. I am aware of this and I do believe there is a reason. It’s because I’m just tired of diabetes right now. I haven’t had a job so there is a lot more time to think about diabetes and all of the things that go along with it, and I’m just tired of it. At times I don’t really feel like talking about it. I just want a break from it. I can’t take a break from managing it, so I am just taking a break from constantly talking about it and typing 500-1000 words a day about it.
So, for this, you may see some different things come up in my blog that I totally not related to diabetes, things that will let you see the other side of me, the parts of me that have nothing to do with diabetes. More of Chris and less of the diabetic kid. If you don’t want to read about that stuff, then fine with me, send me an email and I will let you know when I write a post about diabetes if you want. Or don’t, either way.
Obviously everything in my life will be diabetes related because diabetes is a part of me and I live with it and must manage it on a daily basis. But I don’t have to talk about it every single day though. So for today, this is enough about diabetes. I will be over this very shortly, I get over everything quickly. So there will be some good interesting posts that come up again soon, I promise.
Until then, have a great day and weekend.
Do the People Around Me Have Diabetes?
There is so much on tv tonight, I’m not going to know what to watch. The Panthers game is on at 7, Oregon – Oregon St, the Bill-Jets, college basketball game, just too much to manage all in one night. I wonder how many people in those games are affected by diabetes. Have you ever thought about that while watching tv or people watching while out? Since I’ve been unemployed I go to a lot of coffee shops, primarily Barnes and Noble and when I need a quick little break I just do a little people watching and I always wonder if they have diabetes or know somebody with diabetes.
It affects so many people in this world, but how many directly around me. As I am typing this, I am at Barnes and Noble now and watching some guy count carbs on a calculator. I wonder if he is doing this because he has diabetes, or he is just a healthy eater and wants to know how many carbs he is eating. I think about a lot of weird different things now, and that makes me think also, I think I’m just weirding myself out with all this thinking stuff.
Well, I need to go think about more things, like where I’m going to get the money to pay my bills before I get back to the 9-5.
Take care.
Finally A Beach Day
Finally it was a nice day and I didn’t have anything to do and was able to go to the beach. It wasn’t very sunny, but it was nice out and wasn’t too hott, in the 70’s. But what would a beach day be without some sort of problem. Last night I put in a new set on my backside so you couldn’t see it if I took my shirt off at the beach. I went to breakfast and even used sugar-free syrup, but for some reason when I tested as soon as I got to the beach my sugar was 460! How the hell did that happen?
I have no idea what went wrong, but I did know that when I have a high, it takes a long time, sometimes never for the sugar to come down when my site is in that area. I went into the car because I knew I had another set in there, but didn’t think that I had my injector or iv prep pads. When I went into my car I noticed my golf bag in there that I never took out, so this time it paid to not have cleaned my car out. I went to the bathroom, which is disgusting because its a public bathroom at the beach, I’ve never seen a clean one, or one that at least smelled clean.
Once I left the beach about 2 hours later my sugar was down to 215, so I knew that everything was getting back to normal, but I’m still confused on why it went up so damn high.
Well, have a good day ya’ll.