This Saturday I will be going to the Phillies and Marlins game in south Florida because it is the last time that the Phillies come down here. I will be watching the Virginia Tech game in the early afternoon and head down to the game directly afterwards. I am so happy that football is back, college this week and NFL next week. Anyway, on to what I’m trying to get to. I will be going down to the game a little earlier to tailgate. It is great to tailgate at Phillies and Eagles away games because there are so many Philly fans no matter where you go. When deciding to do the tailgating, we obviously had to plan which games we would be bringing with us. Beer pong table, cornhole, washers and of course a football. But then this got my thinking. What if it was a diabetes tailgate?
So, this post is going to end pretty fast, with a simple question.
What type of diabetes games do you play, and please explain how you play them? I am interested in learning some d-games.
So a few months ago I wrote a post about Medtronic winning a customer service award from me because how well they handled my situation when my insulin pump was not working. I was scared, clueless, and had no idea where to go to for help. Medtronic was there to ship me a new pump the next day and I was ready to go. And they even sent me a new Carelink, because I’m an idiot and threw mine away when I got a Mac because it didn’t work.
Anyway, I was trying to log into my Medtronic account online because I needed to re-order test my infusion sets and din’t feel like doing it on the phone because it takes too long. Well, I couldn’t log in and I couldn’t reset my password because it kept saying that my username and e-mail did not match or exist. I knew that was not the truth because I had my username saved. I had to call in my order to Medtronic and it went pretty fast. I told them about my username and password not working and not being able to reset it. They put me on hold for like 10-15 minutes and I’m starting to think…ok, here we go, nothing is going to happen. So I hung up.
About 30-45 minutes later I received an e-mail from Medtronic and I thought that it was going to be a default e-mail to follow up on the call or to give a status update of my order. Nope, it was a personal e-mail from somebody in customer service to follow up with me on the online login issue. I did what they told me to do and it still didn’t work, so I let her know. She had the IT department do some sort of reset on my account and told me to log in with a temporary password. So I did, and it worked. The customer service experience was not over yet.
I was waiting on my doctor to fax a prescription in for my order to be shipped, so the customer service agent who was e-mailing me back and forth faxed another request to my doctor. This happened on Friday, so I e-mailed today to follow up with her and see what the status of the order was. She said that they got a prescription, but it wasn’t enough for what I had ordered, so she said that they could only ship what the prescription said. That was fine with me.
So, after this experience, Medtronic has officially won me back over. This is two times in a row that they gave me the best customer experience that I can ask for. This is a diabetes company doing things right.
Yesterday was one of those days. You know, the days where you blood sugar goes from like 160 to 450 within a few hours and you have no idea. Mainly because you didn’t test your blood sugar for almost 6 hours. Sunday’s are my relaxation, cleaning, and shopping for the week day all in one. I ate lunch and bolused and my blood sugar was fine. When dinner time came I realized that I was out of my insulin in my pump, which is weird because I never let that happen. Thinking back on it, I do remember hearing the warning beeps several times throughout the day, but I didn’t do anything about it to check and see how much insulin was left.
In a sense, I pretty much just told myself that I knew I was getting low, but that didn’t have to do anything about it right then and there. Not a good idea. This is what leads to blood sugars of 450.
Luckily it came back down. I am writing this post now at about 6:30 in the morning and my last sugar level was 219. A hell of a lot more acceptable.
Well, have a good day everybody. I am very close to making a few huge announcements. I can’t make them yet, but soon, hopefully, very soon.
The agency that I work at has a pretty large free library of business related books, so I have definitely been taking advantage of this lately. I like to read these business books because they give me a lot of motivation, not just for the business world, but in my personal and diabetes world as well. I just recently finished, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs.
This book was awesome. Let me give a quick background. About 3-4 years ago I could not stand Apple. I hated everything Apple, I hated Google, I hated all that hip stuff, I thought you were a douche bag just because you owned it. Well, I purchased an iPhone 2.5 years ago and my entire life changed after that. I still own an iPhone, an iPad, a MacBook Pro, and am purchasing an iMac very shortly. I am now part of the Apple culture. And with that, Steve Jobs is now one of my idols. The book is about his presentation skills and how powerful his presentations are. When he speaks, people listen. He gains people’s attention, their lives stop to hear what he has to say next. There were a few quotes that stood out to me in this book. The first one was when Steve Jobs had said, “Doing the right thing can never be the wrong thing.”
At first, I was like…well yea, duh, if it’s right then it can’t be wrong. But then when I thought about it more, doing what you feel is the right thing to do does not always turn out with the best outcome, but that does not mean that it still was not the right thing to do. I related this to my diabetes by saying that eating ice cream at my niece’s birthday party is the right thing to do, no matter the outcome. Testing my blood sugar and eating healthy foods is the right thing to do. Even if my blood sugar spikes after a perfect meal, I am not going to let it get me down, because I did the right thing, and that can never be wrong.
The next quote that moved me, which there are plenty of quotes similiar to this, especially from Gary Vaynerchuk (this is a link to a post on my other blog about why I was fired because of my passion for owning my own business several years ago). But Jobs had said, “I’d rather live my passion then be buried a rich man, if you are not happy, make a change.” This doesn’t just go for money and wealth, but it relates to my health as well. You know what, I have been extremely unhappy with the way my health has been going down hill, and 2 weeks ago, I made a serious change in my life and I have lost weight, and I can see the differences in my body. I wasn’t happy, so I made a change. I stopped bitching and complaining and hoping for a change, and did something about it.
Finally, my last piece of motivation for this post has nothing to do with this book, but something that I go back to all the time, whenever I need a boost of motivation is this amazing video. Please, it is 5 minutes, just watch it:
And for me personally, where he says cancer, I say diabetes.
Yesterday I talked about the only real stress about diabetes that I get is when it comes to re-ordering my pump supplies. Of course there is other stress involved, but I don’t allow myself to stress for very long. Except when it comes to one major thing, football. That is right, my Philadelphia Eagles stress me the f*ck out! This year is going to be even more stressful because of all the off-season acquisitions that we received. I am not going to speak too much about football here, but basically every year that football starts my blood sugars get a little out of control.
I go to the bar to watch the games and I am constantly snacking throughout the whole game. But not this year. I am challenging myself not to snack throughout the game and I am also going to try and eat before I go to the game and then after the game in order to save money while I am there. I am also working on my mental toughness that I had in high school and was very disciplined and not lazy and it was all about mental toughness.
I don’t ever bring my meter with me to the bar. Once again, this is changing as well. It will go into Amanda’s purse and I will test my sugar after the first 3 quarters and then the fourth quarter, well, it’s the fourth quarter and I am just going to have to tough it out.
There are a lot of things that I don’t like about diabetes, but none of them really stress me out. The only thing that stresses me out every single time is re-ordering pump supplies. It is also the most rewarding thing to me when I open up that fresh new box from UPS and open up all the goodies. Why is this the most stressful? Because I re-ordered them in February, when my deductible was nice and fresh, so I owe the entire deductible when I order them. It is now August and of course I have not paid off that deductible yet. But guess what? I can’t re-order these supplies until I pay up what is currently due. Well that kind of money is not just laying around in my pocket where I can just easily pay that bill.
So, this is where it becomes stressful. The good thing is that I have made some decisions in my life recently that will save me some money. First and foremost, no more eating out at restaurants or fast food. Fast food doesn’t hurt me too much in the wallet, but going to dinner and spending $30-$50 every time I go was hurting me, and that was once a week. By cutting out those dinners, I am able to save myself almost $200 a month, so I will be good when I have to re-order my supplies.
I also want to order them soon so I can get another order in before the end of the year before my deductible restarts. Ahh, the life of a diabetic, figuring out exactly what day you have to re-order your supplies so you can re-order just in time before a deductible starts over and also get the maximum length and time out of that re-order.
Well, anyway, I know that I just re-designed the site a few months ago, I am not happy with it and I am going to re-do it. Should be up and running soon, maybe even a first draft of it tomorrow.
How many times have you all come to this blog and read that I was going to make changes in my life and lose weight and create a lifestyle change and stop eating unhealthy, and begin exercising and get healthy again? I recently looked back and did some site searches to try to find those kinds of posts and I was able to find about 20 different times that I said I was going to do this. Well, guess what I am going to be writing about in this post? You guessed it, I am going to be making lifestyle changes.
What makes me think that this time it is going to work? Because I have had some harsh realties lately, and I am not afraid to talk about them. The more I deny and hide them the longer this is going to happen. So, here is my confessional post.
I have blood sugars that are consistently high. When I test my sugar and it is under 200, I am happy. I count my carbs in my food and take a true bolus only about 30% of the time. I guess the other 70%. I have gained 60 pounds since I was diagnosed 7 years ago. At the time of diagnosis I was a size 34-36 waist for pants and shorts. I have recently been buying size 42 waist pants and shorts…. this weekend, none of those fit, I had to wear my size 46 shorts that I wear to golf in. When I walk up one flight of stairs, yes just one flight of stairs, I am out of breathe. Let’s remember, I used to be play college football (Quarterback).
I spend way too much money on fast food because I am too lazy to cook and clean up the kitchen after I get home from work. I make excuses not to walk the garbage down to the dumpster because I am too lazy, so sometimes I put it on the hood of my car and drive it to the dumpster. When I have a stressful day I eat Pei Wei, plus Amanda’s leftovers. Then usually follow that up with some ice cream.
Who is this hurting? This is hurting myself. Me being lazy is not doing me any good at all. I am making myself live a shorter life by doing all of this stuff or lack of doing these things if you want to look at it this way. And you know what? I am tired of it! I am tired of not fitting into clothes. I am tired of spending hundreds of dollars a month on fast food. I am tired of buying coffee in the morning instead of making it, and then eating a breakfast sandwich along with it. I am tired of eating a huge, carb filled lunch with fatty foods and then drinking 4 cups of coffee in the afternoon to keep myself awake.
Starting tomorrow, there will be a new me. I will be motivated. I will be driven for success. Things are not going to stop me. I will lose weight. I will stop spending dumb money. I will get more done in the diabetes world.
I wrote last week how my company was nice enough to give my blog a shot out in the company newsletter that goes out every Friday. If people didn’t know I was diabetic, then they do now. It is great to hear so many people telling me that they were inspired by the blog and that they didn’t know these things about diabetes. I respond with thanks and thats why I do this.
Yesterday I was having a conversation with one of my co workers and diabetes got brought and she said, “My 7 year old cousin just found out he is diabetic 🙁 “. Of course there is going to be that sad face at first, but I know that we can all help turn that frown upside down and help out his family.
I asked her to share my blog and email with them so they can get introduced to the DOC and learn all the great information and support that is online. I am going to ask my co worker to share this post with her family so I would greatly appreciate if you could please leave some words of encouragement and share and have others leave comments as well. I want to make sure that they get all the infomation they need. I was diagnosed at 19 and I dont have a child with diabetes so I would appreciate if would leave comments.
Next month I will be visiting and touring the Diabetes Research Institute for the first time. I have been wanting to do this for so damn long, but haven’t had much of an opportunity to do so until now. My parents are coming down to visit next month so I thought that it would be a perfect opportunity to finally take the tour and take my parents along with me. They will enjoy it a lot. Amanda will also be going to.
I can’t wait to take pictures and videos and report back on everything that I see in there. I have heard nothing but awesome things about this tour and I am so excited! Did I mention before that I am excited?
On to some other news. I received an e-mail from the JDRF Promise to Remember campaign today because I had signed up to volunteer to be a campaign coordinator, but unfortunately, well maybe not unfortunately, but somebody else has already taken this position. They also sent over a list of events that our local Members of Congress will be at during their August recess. This is awesome, I can’t wait to try and get to some of these events and attempt to get 5-10 minutes worth of of the Congress person’s time.
If you would like to see this list also and see find out where your Congress reps will be during their recess send me an e-mail or just send me a note in a comment or on the contact me page.
Way to go JDRF, thumbs up on this one. Way to help.