Getting back in the saddle...

I’ve been gone a while…real life sometimes gets in the way of cyberlife, ya know?
There’s a spinal condition called “lumbar facet syndrome” and I’ve had it for some time now. Some x-rays that were taken five years ago showed some problems and ever since then, it has gotten progressively worse. Now, it has progressed to the point that I cannot stand up long enough to chop an onion without having to sit down to relieve the pain.

As you can imagine, this has put a bit of a crimp in my lifestyle. I like to go and do and run around, I like to cook, I like to explore my environment…and being unable to walk for more than a few minutes at a time really gets in the way of living my life. So, doc put me on some muscle relaxers and anti-inflammatories and told me come back in two weeks. Right.

So, for the next two weeks I took my pills religiously, did the stretching exercises she recommended and Hubby and I hied ourselves off to a nearby resort, Sun City, for a few days. It was not what I had hoped. Oh…Sun City was cool and we are planning to go back…but the meds did next to nothing for me. By the time I returned to the doctor, I was eating our local version of Tylenol and Codeine (no prescription needed) like they were jelly beans and just barely functioning.

This time it was a cortisone shot in the butt, physical therapy, more muscle relaxers and some prescription pain killers. That worked…kinda sorta…until I had my first physio appointment. Eina! as they say here in South Africa. Ouch! All the gains made from the meds were kicked out the window after just one physio appointment, and the therapist said she took it easy on me!! I have another appointment in three hours and I can tell you, I am not looking forward to it!

So, with my sore back I am still trying to live as normal an existence as I can, taking meds to allow me to move around and accompanying Hubby on our various excursions around town. I’m still not terribly fond of Johannesburg…it’s kind of a wannabe New York, with all the rudeness and self-absorption but none of the theatres, restaurants, museums and shops that make New York worth putting up with its otherwise crassness…but it is a new place with lots to see and experience that I haven’t seen before.

Mother’s Day saw us at Monte Casino for lunch. Monte Casino is…well…a casino. It is also an entertainment complex, or so it bills itself. Casinos in South Africa are plentiful…but they are very small, compared to Las Vegas or even Lake Tahoe. Most of them are themed, and Monte Casino looked kinda like a Tuscan village (faux Tuscan architecture is very big in South Africa…its everywhere you look, from apartment complexes to housing tracts to shopping centres to casinos). If you’ve been to the New York, New York casino in Vegas, Monte is rather the same style: you are indoors but in a faux outdoor setting with cobbled walks, building storefronts that house shops and restaurants, meandering walkways, a stream with pedestrian bridges, and a ceiling painted to look like the sky at twilight. I think it is Hubby’s favourite casino although I’m not as keen on it as he is. And, Monte boasts the only legal crap table in the whole of Africa.

Well, it has some decent restaurants, I’ll say that for it, and because we belong to their “loyalty club,” we get to see movies at the theatre complex for only R10 (less than $2)…and these are movies that are current—we recently saw Thor. So on Mother’s Day we went to Monte for lunch and we went to the “Gourmet Garage,” a place decorated like a ’50s American café on Route 66. I had ribs and Hubby ordered a steak. Unusually, he ordered a steak and salad rather than his usual steak and chips (French fries) and I remember thinking “there’s no carbs in that meal” but then decided not to be a nag…he a big boy, he’s been a diabetic for nearly ten years, if he doesn’t know what he is doing by now, he never going to.

I should have been a nag.

Two and a half hours later we are home, I am struggling to open the concertina security gate to the patio, and I start to hear strange noises coming from the TV lounge. I look inside and there is my husband in the middle of a grand mal seizure! We don’t have a central number in this country, like 911, to call in emergencies and I made no less than six telephone calls, including two to the police (who would not send me an ambulance but, instead, tried to give me a ten digit telephone number to call—WTF??) before I found the number of an ambulance/paramedic service on a handy list on my fridge (from a local real estate agency---thank you Pam Golding!!). A paramedic arrived in advance of the ambulance but by then, Hubby’s seizure was over and he was sitting, dazed and confused, on the sofa. I checked his blood sugar once he stopped seizing and found it to be 0.5 (on a scale where 6 is normal, 12 is high and 20 is diabetic ketoacidosis). He was in danger of falling into a diabetic coma due to low blood sugar, so I quickly gave him a Coke (with sugar) and instructed him to drink it.

We spent five hours in the emergency room before they agreed to let me take him home. The doc booked him off from work for the week and it took him most of that week to recover. A seizure is a violent thing: it locks up all of your muscles rigidly and when they finally relax, they are painful, like doing too much exercise when you are out of shape. Your brain is deprived of oxygen the whole time of the seizure and when you get your oxygen back, the brain is reeling from the shock. It can take days for your ability to think clearly and react quickly to return. Hubby also bit his tongue and when the seizure relaxed, he fell backwards on a soft, cushy sofa, causing his now completely slack body to collapse…and his tongue fell back into his throat, blocking his airway. Let me tell you, I was scared. I was still trying to get an ambulance to the house when this happened, and to allow him to breathe, I had to put my finger down this throat and depress the back of his tongue in order to clear his airway. So, there I was, one hand busy keeping his airway open, the other one frantically dialling number after number, trying to get some help.

He’s ok now and went back to work this week, but none of this helped my back at all. Trying to shift him (he is much bigger than I am) didn’t help, and the tension surely didn’t help. For the next five days or so, I could not sleep worth a damn and every time he moaned or snored, I would bolt upright in bed, checking to make sure he was ok!

On top of all of this, the baby Yorkie was frightened by the whole thing and ran off to hide. I eventually found her in the back of Hubby’s walk-in closet, hiding behind a box, shaking in terror. Poor thing…less than a week later she had to have oral surgery to remove some baby teeth that hadn’t come out on their own and were causing the adult fangs to grow in at an angle that would eventually pierce her palate. While she was at the vet, they bathed and brushed her…two of her least favourite activities…and my normally hyper little Yorkie pup spent the night dozing on the bed next to me, wrapped in a fleece and occasionally opening those big brown eyes and looking at me as if to say “What did I do to deserve this?”

So, that week passed and this most recent week has been one of catching up with lost sleep and recuperating from the shock of my husband’s seizure. I don’t think anyone realizes how much the closest family member suffers from this kind of an event…my husband asked me a few days after “Do you think I suffered any brain damage?” while, during the seizure I was thinking “Don’t die! Don’t die!”

It’s been a rough couple of weeks…

Injecting some common sense along with the insulin…

My husband is diabetic. He’s been struggling with it for about six years now, never seeming to be able to get the upper hand even with privation so extreme that he simply cannot keep it up. Some of us would rather trade quality of life for quantity, and a life lived eating tasteless cardboard food washed down with nothing but water just seems to lack some essential element for joy.

Curiously, even when he was being religious about his diet, his blood sugar would go up during the night when, in fact, it should be dropping (the morning meal is not called “break fast without reason, after all). After five years of struggling with diet and pills as a means of control, Hubby was finally put on insulin. That first night taking the long-acting insulin at bedtime was one of great anticipation. Imagine our disappointment when, in the morning, the blood sugar was still elevated. After more months of struggle and ever-increasing dosages of the bedtime insulin…and no improvement in his glucose control…he was prescribed a moderate dose of short acting insulin before each meal in addition to his normal pills and long-acting insulin doses.

His instructions from his doctors, both when he was just taking tablets and later, when the insulin was added, was the same: test on rising and again two hours after each meal. For the longest time this made no sense to me but, being neither diabetic nor a doctor, I didn’t make much of it. But when Hubby was put onto the insulin injections before meals, I spoke up.

“Why not,” I asked him, “check your glucose level before you eat…that can help you choose what to eat if we are out, it can help me plan meal preparation. If I know your blood sugar is low, I can cook a meal with more carbs, like spaghetti, but if it is high, I can go for a higher protein, lower carb meal.”

At first he demurred. The doctors were very clear that he should test two hours after eating and write down the results. But I persisted. What was to stop him from testing before and after? He agreed to try it...and the results have been nothing short of astonishing.

In the past he would choose his food rather blindly, going by his appetite, tastebuds, and a vague sense of what was ok to eat and in what quantities. Two hours later the finger prick would tell him if he had chose well or not…usually not. It was always a case of finding out just how incorrectly he had chosen, but without knowing what his blood sugar was going into the meal, failure was practically inevitable.

Now, he tests 30 to 60 minutes before dinner is ready to be served, usually as I go out to the kitchen to prepare it. If his sugar is above a certain level, I increase the amount of veg in the meal and decrease the amount of carbs. If it is below a certain level, then more carbs can go into it. He can make choices knowing high sugar means no potatoes, lower sugar dictates how many (baby) potatoes he can put on his plate. And not only has his glucose remained within acceptable bounds during the day, his morning readings are now approximately half of what they were before he started this before-meal testing.

So if you or anyone you know is diabetic and struggling with blood sugar levels, stop shooting in the dark. Take a blood sugar reading immediately before a meal and then choose both your foods and their quantities according to that reading. It won’t cure your diabetes, but it can give you so much more control over it!