Yip, it had to happen. Two and a half months in, and although I’ve had disheartened days and sad days and bad diabetes days, I hadn’t had a freak out, till this morning.
Let me set the scene…
The last couple of days have been really interesting – we left the chaos and colour of Ho Chi Minh City on a late-night (11pm) overnight train to Danang, which was actually a lot of fun. We chose the soft-sleeper option, a four-bed sleeping compartment which we shared with two older American guys, who left at 5.30am so we had the whole cabin to ourselves for the rest of the day. Lovely! We could have flown for almost the same price, but we wanted to see some of the countryside, and I’m so glad we did…. It was stunning. Loads of rice paddies and local farmers and gorgeous scenery. I loved it (and just realised that I was so busy videoing it that I didn’t take any photos! How foolish of me). We arrived in Danang in the late afternoon, and headed to a beachside hostel that came highly recommended.
Not really our usual cup of tea – very basic accommodation and without doubt the hardest beds and worst water pressure we’ve had in any place so far – but we were won over by all the reviews of the lovely owners and the communal dinners. The dinners were fabulous, everyone heads down to the dining room and the family brings out big plates of food to share – incredible baby spring rolls, fresh grilled fish, tofu, a chicken dish, piles of vegetables, rice and noodles. YUM. What’s even better, though, is that because you’re all sitting at a communal table, it’s impossible not to start chatting, and make friends. It’s funny, most of the time I don’t really notice the absence of friends, but any time I do we meet some lovely people and make new ones – I suppose it’s one of the rhythms of travelling.
Anyway! To cut a long story short – we had a lovely two days in Danang, wandering around the town, swimming in the sea, and eating delicious communal dinners. Our room didn’t have a mini bar fridge (as most of our rooms do), so when we arrived I asked the lady at the front desk to put my bag of insulin in the fridge – and pointed at a fridge in the room. She nodded and said, “Fridge, yes, fridge, no problem,” then took my insulin off to another room – which they often do, to take it to a fridge with more space.
No problem! I thought, and sat down to dinner.
This morning, when we checked out, I asked for my insulin, and she went over to the safe, which was a cupboard, and took out the bag of insulin. So it had been sitting – unrefrigerated! – since we arrived two days before. Not only that, the room it was in wasn’t even air conditioned (as our bedroom was), so it had been sitting at room temperature or higher for two days.
I lost it. For two and a half months I’ve been carrying around this precious bag of medicine, making sure it’s kept safe and cold every time we stop anywhere, and now, because of a miscommunication and me believing that when a word was repeated back at me it meant that word was understood, it had all been put in jeopardy. I burst into tears, and it took me a loooong time to calm down.
I’m feeling better now, obviously, but I have yet to test out the insulin to find out if it’s okay… We’re about to go out for dinner now and I’m going to test it then. Please say many prayers to any god you know that it is, or I’m going to have to stock up from a doctor in town, and there goes any budget we have.
Ironically enough, yesterday was World Diabetes Day (we didn’t have internet, so I couldn’t blog), and this morning – before the drama – I was planning a blog post on why I’m grateful for diabetes. That will come soon, I promise!
… I get really sick of being diabetic. Today is one of those days, I’m afraid.
The last day or two I’ve had pretty crazy blood sugar – really high and really low, which is unusual for me. Yesterday, Border Crossing Day, was particularly bad. I was strangely high after breakfast, then strangely low a few hours later, low again before lunch and then high after lunch, despite having taken enough insulin. I couldn’t figure it out – I’d changed my short-acting (daytime) insulin a few days before, so I couldn’t blame that, and I was sure I was taking enough for the food I was eating. I actually started thinking I might have some kind of allergic reaction to crossing borders – that the stress of avoiding scams and waking up really early and figuring out a new country’s code of conduct made my blood sugar go haywire.
Not a particularly medically sound diagnosis but, you know…
It was only as I was lying on a garden lounger watching the sun set over the sea that I hit upon the answer. I think it was from watching a fishing boat bob in the waves – it made me think that my blood sugar readings didn’t seem to have an anchor, they were really up and really down. Anchoring blood sugar is the job not of your daytime (short-acting) insulin, but your nighttime (long-acting) insulin – the one I take every night before I go to bed. And that made me realise that although I’d changed my daytime pen a few days before, because it wasn’t working properly and had obviously been heat-damaged, I stupidly hadn’t changed my nighttime pen (extremely foolish, seeing as I carry them around in the same bag). D’oh!
But still , a solution! I went to dinner feeling rather pleased with myself, and made sure to take a fresh pen out of the cooler full of insulin I kept in the fridge.
And then.
I woke up this morning feeling like death-warmed-up. Exhausted, heavy and with flashing eyes, a sign that a migraine was just around the corner. It wasn’t a fully-fledged migraine, I must admit, but it was enough to send me back to bed, miserable, head pounding and feeling nauseous. Not a great first day in paradise!
I’ve just surfaced now, after 3pm, and I’m feeling somewhat human again, but pissed off at diabetes. I feel like it’s one of the only conditions that never gives you a break (this may be an emotional rather than a logical statement). If you work too hard and abuse your body, you’ll usually get a cold or flu or feel rundown, but if you catch it in time you’ll be fine. If you drink too much you’ll usually get a hangover, but sometimes you’ll be fine. But if you have a crazy blood sugar day, even if you figure out the problem and sleep 11 hours and do all you can to rectify it, it still punishes you with a bad health day the next day. I know, I know, you can’t look at it as punishment, but that’s what it feels like today. I want to say to my body: “Seriously, can you not give me one day off? Can the diabetes not take a back seat for one day? Please?’
But of course it can’t.
That’s the whole beauty of a chronic condition, it never takes a day off.
And just for today, I wish it were otherwise.
Tomorrow I’ll be chirpy and feeling well again, I’m sure. For today? I’m taking it reaaaallly easy. I think I’ll go for a stroll in the garden, check out some of the indigenous trees, and maybe take a dip in the ocean. Restore my perspective a little. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
PS – It’s a few hours later, and my blood sugar has stabilized, so I feel like myself again. I’ve also remembered that a side-effect of high blood sugar is that it makes me irritable… Something to bear in mind next time I’m blogging on a high!
As you can see from our photo, we managed to cross the border into Vietnam without too much bother. Compared to our Cambodian border crossing, actually, it was a breeze!
We woke up early yesterday morning, all prepped for the journey ahead from having read lots of accounts of the Ha Tien border crossing between Cambodia and Vietnam (it’s only been open a short while, so we tried to get as much info as possible – don’t you love the internet?)
The first stage of our journey was to get from the small seaside town of Kep to the Vietnam border, about an hour ride on a tuktuk. Tuktuks, as I’ve mentioned before, are charming little motorbike-driven vehicles, open-air and perfect for getting around town in short bursts. Not so perfect for traveling in with all your luggage for over an hour, most of the way on a bumpy dirt road, but our driver was a champ and took us all the way to the border (most of the time the tuktuks stop a few kilometers beforehand, and make you pile all your stuff onto motorbikes for the last haul).
Getting through Cambodian customs was no problem – surprisingly. We had to overstay our visas by a day because we could only get 30 days in Vietnam and our flights to Indonesia are on the 2nd of December, but they simply charged us the (official) nominal fee, and even gave us a receipt! Marvelous.
Then we hopped onto the backs of motorbikes and zooted off to the Vietnamese customs area. We filled in our forms and had our visas checked no problem (they don’t issue them at the border), and even got a 50% discount on the scam fee – most people said they had to pay $2 to get their passports back, we only had to pay $1! Bonus.
But then.
To pass over into Vietnam we had to get our visas stamped, and the stamping-visa-man was nowhere to be found. You would think that at a border crossing with only one conceivable restaurant and no other entertainment spots, it would be quite simple to find one man, but no. We waited over an hour (along with a group of ten other people wanting to cross the border) for this one guy to pitch up – never mind that there were at least five others who (surely?) could have stamped our passports. When he finally arrived (no apology) he proceeded to make three phonecalls before getting to our passports. I would have been seething, but I kept thinking that this was the last step before freedom…
And it was! We set off for the Ha Tien Bus Station, about fifteen minutes on the bikes, I think, to catch a 2 hour bus to Rach Gia, from where we would catch a two and a half hour ferry to the island of Phu Quoc (pronounced something like foowark), our home for the next few days.
The bus station was a patch of dirt with a small sign. No ticket office, no schedule and (more worryingly) no buses. We were approached immediately by a skinny guy with long neck hairs claiming to be a tourism official and telling us that we would have to wait two days (two days!) for the next bus, but luckily we’d read up on this bus station and were on red alert for ‘a skinny guy with long neck hairs who speaks good English’! The guy really needs to cut his neck hairs if he wants to further his scamming career.
Just then, as we were wondering what to do, a young Danish guy walked up, eating a baguette. One of the refreshing things about traveling in an Asian country is that you don’t need any excuse to talk to other Westerners – the fact that you both speak English is excuse enough. We started chatting, and it turned out he’d just come from Phu Quoc, and had taken the Ha Tien ferry from just down the road (the one that website forums had warned us was ‘un-seaworthy’ – so you can’t believe everything you read!) Thanks to our serendipitous meeting, we trundled down the road for a few minutes, found not only the ferry but a lovely booking office (hooray!) and managed to get onto the next boat, leaving in 2 hours, just enough time for an ice-cold freshly squeezed lemon juice (my new favourite drink) and to get some local currency and a local SIM card. Should have been enough time to eat, too, but somehow our fried noodles took 45 minutes to prepare, so we had take-away for the ferry. Which was, incidentally, completely seaworthy.
The two hours on the boat passed very pleasantly chatting to two other travelers, and we arrived at the hectic pier of Phu Quoc in one piece (hectic because of the crowds waiting to try and convince you to take their taxi / minibus / motorbike). Luckily we’d booked a ride ahead of time, and slipped out of the madness and into Vietnam.
So far, so beautiful. We’re staying at an eco-friendly resort right on the beach, with stunning sea views on all sides and natural indigenous forest. I’m having a bad health day today (more on that in the next blog), but it is a simply stunning entry into Vietnam.
… is really the message that we want to send with this journey.
That no matter what your chronic condition, you can take heart in knowing that it is possible to follow your dreams, just like I’m doing with my diabetes and our travels.
Part of our Take Heart Campaign is finding handmade hearts in each of the countries we visit, which we’ll auction off to raise funds for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, who are searching for a cure for diabetes.
I have to say, although Cambodia started off a little rough and hectic, we are really loving it these days – it makes such a difference to be in the South, where all is ocean and beauty (apart from the thousands of beach shacks selling beer and the kids trying to get you to buy bracelets wherever you walk).
This weekend, our Celebration Weekend (not only Mark’s birthday but also our 3 year anniversary – what an accomplishment!) we were lucky enough to go on a scuba diving weekend. I haven’t dived since I was certified in Lake Malawi, nearly two years ago, so I was a tad nervous… When you first learn how to scuba dive there are so many things to remember that I was worried I’d forget something crucial and panic underwater. Needless to say, I was worrying for nothing.
We set off really early on Saturday morning and took a two-hour boat ride to Koh Roh Samleng, where Eco Sea Dive have their wooden bungalows. We spent that day snorkeling around the coral reef and rocks right outside our bungalow (and seeing all kinds of beautiful tropical fish) and swimming in the clear turquoise sea, off the totally unspoilt beach… Magical! There’s a small village on the island, and the villagers were lovely – nobody tried to sell us anything and the kids called out ‘Hello hello!’ everywhere we went. The bungalows were really rustic – basically like camping on the beach – and in the space of an hour (just before bed) we saw a giant spider (the biggest I’ve ever seen) and a mammoth gecko, seriously, this thing looked like a small crocodile! Okay, well, not that big, but it was just hanging out next to the bed. Not the most soothing sight before sleep.
That night it poured with torrential rain, so we didn’t get much sleep anyway (tin roofs make a lot of noise), but luckily we had to be up at 5am anyway, so sleep wasn’t a top priority (I never seem to sleep properly on nights when I have an early wake-up call).
We set off on a big boat to the mystical island of Koh Tang – it’s too far from the Cambodian and the Vietnamese shores for most people to get there, so it’s only visited by the three dive schools in Cambodia, and then only on special occassions.
It. was. incredible. As I said, I was really nervous going in, but as soon as I was underwater I felt like I’d stepped into a National Geographic movie, or a fairytale. The most astounding coral in bright colours and crazy shapes, all populated by an abundance of tropical fish, sting rays, eels and of course an amazing array of anemones and flora. Words can’t really describe how extraordinary it was… A completely unspoilt reef, and our group were the only people there.
I’d forgotten how peaceful scuba diving is, too. When you’re under the water, time seems to stop. It’s just you and nature, and the steady sound of your breathing. It’s the most amazing feeling… I’m hooked!
We had two dives yesterday, and lunch on the boat, and then headed back to Sihanoukville – a five hour boat ride (phew) that left us totally exhausted, but happy. Today we arrived in Kampot, a charming French colonial riverside town, and found a most delightful guesthouse where we’ll be for the next few days, so we’re decidedly settled and cheerful. AND we found some birthday cake for Mark this afternoon! Bitter chocolate and espresso…yum.
Of course, the other reason I was nervous about scuba diving was because of my diabetes. Any exercise will cause your blood sugar to drop, but scuba diving – which seems like such mild exercise (really just paddling with fins) – is pretty intense. I decided, seeing as we were doing two dives one after the other, that I would take less insulin with breakfast and purposefully go high, and then I could always take more insulin after the dives. I didn’t want to risk going low underwater. Going low while you’re diving is really dangerous – it impairs your decision-making skills and your fine motor skills and makes you all fuzzy headed, which is the last thing you need underwater. My plan worked pretty well, after both dives I was still in an acceptable range, and it didn’t have any lasting low blood sugar effects. The other option is to come straight out of the water and have something sweet, to counteract the low, but I didn’t want to risk the low coming earlier – I’m not that scuba savvy yet.
All in all, a great success! We’ll be doing much more diving in the future. I can’t wait!
(Here’s our Best Moment from yesterday – on the boat. Check it out:)
Here’s our latest video diary (a Week 3&4 combo, seeing as we were away for almost a week of the last two)… Thought you might like to see snippets of all we’ve seen in the last few weeks, as well as hear what we have to say about it (in real life, not just written words!)
Here’s the embedded video, or you can watch it on YouTube here.
So now my blood sugar has stabilised and I’m feeling well and energetic and happy again… Sorry for the rants last week! I tend to turn into a bit of a Wicked Witch of the West when I’m exhausted and my sugar is acting up.
But now I’m back! Aren’t you relieved? (I know Mark is…)
Today we had an amazing day, exploring the ruins of Angkor Wat here in Siem Reap. Absolutely incredible. We left at 8am and our tuk tuk driver took us to Bayon, the ancient temple with over 37 pillars of Buddha heads facing four directions. From there we wandered around exploring Baphuon, the Terrace of the Elephants, the Terrace of the Leper King, and the Pyramid (which was not quite a pyramid, but which was terrifyingly high to climb up without help!)
Then we zoomed off into the forest to find Ta Phrom, the half-overgrown jungly temple that’s been left to crumble (to some extent) where we found a secret spot for a bread-and-cheese-and-watermelon picnic overlooking a lake. Stunning!
And then, finally, once we’d taken at least a thousand photographs, we went to Angkor Wat, the star attraction. It was staggering from a size point of view, and extremely intricate, and lovely. Here’s our Best Moment of the Day, from one of the spots we found high up on the temple:
I must say, I was surprised how many tourists there were out and about today. You’d think, what with it still being off season and the flood and all, that there wouldn’t be that many people but there were tons! By far the most tourists we’ve seen on this trip. Mark and I made a concerted effort to find small hidden nooks and crannies, little spots that didn’t seem to have been discovered by a queue of people that morning, and all in all I think we succeeded.
It was just such a wonderful deluge into Cambodian history and culture, and such a welcome break to be feeling well and energetic enough to fully enjoy it!
Hundreds of photos to follow soon, I promise. I just have to get them off my camera…
Can I just say that there is nothing, NOTHING more annoying than having high blood sugar when it isn’t your fault?
The last couple of days I’ve had strangely high numbers after taking enough (and sometimes more than enough) insulin, but not every single time, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of exhaustion / jet lag / new country / resting versus exercise / malaria medication / any other number of permutations that could make my blood sugar go high.
This morning, though, I ate a very normal breakfast (fruit, cereal, eggs) and took more than the necessary amount of insulin, thinking that if I went low I have plenty of snacks in my room. But instead of going low I am high. Abnormally high. Which means the last couple of days of bad blood glucose readings weren’t my fault – my insulin isn’t working 100%.
GRRRRR!!!
It’s the equivalent of getting a hangover without drinking anything – all the punishment without any of the fun.
And yes, I’ve put this one insulin pen through a lot in the last two weeks – travelling from the heat and humidity of Bangkok to the autumn sun of Vienna, via over 10 hours on a plane, and then back again, then on a long train and a long bus and in the flooded heat of Siem Reap. Perhaps this is too much to ask of a poor insulin pen… It’s used to staying in a stable temperature and environment, I can understand that.
But it still makes me mad!! I’m t.i.r.e.d today. And part of that is definitely because we’ve been traveling so much. But part of it is also because I’ve been high for the last few days, and I had to wait this long to figure out why.
Yesterday, 1st October 2009, exactly a month since we left, was HECTIC.
Allow me to set the scene before I give you a blow-by-blow… I arrived back in Bangkok, Thailand, from a really busy (and fascinating) 4 days in Vienna. 10 hour flight, 14 hours in transit, 5 hour time difference. My second dose of jetlag in a week. The idea was to spend 2 days recovering, catching our breath and resting before the trek to Cambodia. Except my flight landed late, we had to wait an extra hour for the bus, and the traffic in Bangkok was crazy. So we only arrived at about 5.30pm, and then found out that the only bus that would get us to Cambodia in one day (and thereby avoid sleeping in a dodgy border town) left at 5.55am. So let’s change that two days into one. The day after that one day…
* 2am: Woke up sweating, heart pounding, head floating, and craving sugar. A night-time low, my absolute worst (and as far as I can tell, without direct cause – I’ve taken notes trying to find the source of a night-time low. Anyone have the answer for me?) After a super-sweet juice and a couple of miniature bananas, my heart rate slowed enough for me to go back to bed and try to fall asleep again (now 2.20am)
* 4.30am: Alarm went off to wake us for the day. Dragged myself out of bed, showered, drank tea. Had stupidly decided in my exhaustion the night before that I could quickly pack in the morning. Baaaad idea. We both scrambled to get everything packed in time to catch a taxi at 5.20am, to get to the train station in time for our 5.55am train.
* 5.30am. Still in the hotel room. Torrential rain outside. Pitch dark.
* 5.35am. Run through the rain with a backpack and suitcase each, desperately trying to protect our electronic valuables with an umbrella. There is water everywhere – huge puddles every footstep. We’re too late to care.
* 5.40am. In the taxi, at last. Our train leaves in 15 minutes. The hotel recommended we allow 20 minutes to travel. Thai trains are notoriously punctual. I chant a prayer the whole way to the train station – we’ve already bought our tickets and transfer tickets and they’re non-refundable.
* 5.51am. Arrive at the train station, throw money at the taxi driver, and run to the train. Find a seat just as it departs.
* 5.55am to 11.40am. Train ride. 3rd class seats only, so they’re a little hard (and dirty), and all the windows are open. None of the cushioned air-conditioned luxury we’ve been treated to on Thai trains before, but the tickets were ridiculously cheap, the scenery is fascinating, and we’re too tired to care.
* 10.21am. High blood sugar, for no reason. Makes me feel emotional (let’s make that extra-emotional, given the exhaustion, the jetlag, the low this morning, and the inability to sleep on the train).
* 11.42am. Met at the train station by a very nice man from the company we booked our transfer with. He takes us to a songthaew (a kind of open-backed, covered truck) where another very nice man drives us to what is supposedly the border between Thailand and Cambodia, but is actually a ‘consulate’s office’, one of the famous border scams. Two men dressed in official-looking costumes sit behind a desk with Thai and Cambodian flags, hand you official-looking forms, and ask you for 1200 baht each for a visa ($36 US dollars). When you say that you’d rather just get a $20 visa at the border, they tell you it’s impossible, and that it will take 3 days. We’d read all about the scam, so we insisted.
* Noon to 1pm. Made our way through the maze of scams and false stories out of Thailand, across the stretch of mud to the Cambodian border, where we went through a ‘quarantine’ (had our temperatures checked) and got a $20 visa no problem. Then we waited at the ‘bus station’ (a couple of benches just around the corner from the border, next to a stretch of mud) for our bus, which we had paid for in Bangkok, and was supposed to leave at 2pm.
* 2.35pm. An hour and a half later, still no bus. Eventually arrives and takes us to the bus station, where we catch another bus, which will supposedly take us to Siem Reap Bus Station or Market, depending who you ask. Either way, no problem to catch a tuk tuk to our guest house, they assure us.
* 3pm. We are now officially on the road, and officially in one of the tourist scam buses we had read about. I’m not quite sure how, because we’d booked from the State Railways of Thailand information desk, so you’d think it was all above-board. You’d think wrong. Our trip will take us 4 hours, so we’ll arrive at 7pm, after dark and, we’ve now been told, at a guest house that offers a ‘special deal’ for tourists (the special deal being that any tourist who checks in earns a $7 commission for the bus driver).
* 5.15pm. Mark keeps saying that the landscape around us looks flooded (there was a typhoon in this general area a couple of days ago, but we’d heard that it was concentrated elsewhere). I keep telling him maybe that’s just what Cambodia looks like.
* 6.53pm. We finally pull into Siem Reap, and it is F.L.O.O.D.E.D. People walking down the street with water up to their knees. Our bus making waves that wash over motorbikes. No distinction between the river and the street. Water water everywhere.
* 6.58pm. The bus driver tries to convinces us that the area we’ve booked a guest house in is severely flooded, but we don’t trust him (the dirty scammer) so we get a tuk tuk to take us there anyway.
* 7.09pm. He wasn’t kidding. The water is so high that it washes up over our feet while the tuk tuk is driving. Eventually it gets so bad that we get out and walk (the water is up to our lower thighs) while the tuk tuk valiantly carries our suitcases to the door.
* 7.15pm. We arrive! At last. Our guest house is clean and comfortable, and above ground (i.e. no flood water, thank goodness!) We have made it through over 13 hours on the road, without sleep, with jetlag and, oh did I forget to mention? Our first two days on anti-malarial tablets, which tend to make you tired and a bit under-the-weather.
So all in all, I’m going to go ahead and say that was our most hectic day yet.
So I’ve spent the weekend (in Vienna, Austria, of all places!) talking about diabetes.
In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about diabetes so much in my life!
Together with 49 other journalists from all over the world (as far afield as Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Scandinavia and Turkey), we discussed all kinds of things relating to diabetes – what the best way is to get the word out about the condition, how to communicate with patients so that they realise the necessity of compliance, the differences between first and third world countries in their approach to diabetes and, interestingly for me, the stigma attached to being diabetic. I have to say, I’ve never felt at all discriminated against because I have diabetes. A couple of people were saying that it’s a big deal for the diabetics they know to inject in public – that they avoid it at all costs. I not only inject in restaurants and cafes, but, lately, as we’ve travelled around Thailand, in train stations, on buses, on the side of the street and in busy street markets. It’s not really a choice, you know – when I eat, I need to inject. And I think there are ways of doing it surreptitiously…
There was also a fascinating panel of diabetics (Type 1 and 2) talking about their daily lives – the challenges and practicalities of living with diabetes. Fascinating stuff, especially for me, because it gave me such a new perspective on the condition, on how other people live with it and how it has changed their lives.
We were all here for the workshop (run by Novo Nordisk, an insulin company who’s doing really impressive work with diabetes), but also for the announcement of the international winner of the Novo Nordisk Media Prize. I was holding fingers and thumbs that I would win (the money attached to the prize would have made the next 8 months a LOT easier!) but, alas, they chose a more traditional journalistic story – a newspaper article from Italy with a lot of practical, scientific information.
Although I was disappointed not to win the prize, the weekend has been so great for making contacts with people who know a lot about diabetes, and work in the field of diabetes outreach. I’ve met some incredibly passionate people, and a couple who are really excited about our journey, and want to help us make contact with diabetic associations in all the various countries we’re visiting. Very exciting stuff!
Physically, though, it’s been quite a tough weekend for me. I arrived at 5am (local time) on Friday morning, after having caught a 10 hour overnight flight from Bangkok, with a 5 hour time difference. The hotel room wasn’t ready for me by the time I arrived at about 6.15am, so I set off to wander the streets of Vienna as soon as the sun rose… It was beautiful, actually, wandering around getting lost and found again, looking at the incredible architecture and having a little breakfast picnic by a fountain in a park. The food has been AMAZING! I didn’t realise how much I’d missed bread until I bit into a roll on the plane and tears came into my eyes…
I’ve been eating a lot of bread.
So I wandered around till about half ten, and then I thought I was going to collapse from exhaustion – jet lag kicked in big time. I managed to check in and slept for a couple of hours, and then went to see a stunning Klimt exhibition (including the original of The Kiss – wow) in a restored palace amongst manicured lawns. A million miles from Bangkok, as you can imagine!
On Saturday I also spent the day walking around (pretty much all day), following some of the path of one of my favourite movies of all time – Before Sunrise. Jet lag has been a killer, though. A 5 hour difference doesn’t seem that bad, but I suppose combined with the amount of traveling I’ve been doing lately, and the late nights and poor sleep on the plane it’s all added up… I’ve been feeling really tired and quite headachey and fuzzy, and I’m sure it’s not doing my blood sugar any favours – I’ve had a couple of surprising readings. But not all surprising, so I can’t blame it on my insulin! It’s not hot enough for anything to have happened to my insulin, anyway, the weather has been lovely and cool.
This morning, for instance, I’ve been taking it realllly easy. I went downstairs for a big breakfast (of largely healthy stuff – cereal, bread, fruit and yoghurt) and then spent the rest of the morning lying down reading, gathering my strength for my late-night flight tonight… I just tested my blood sugar now, and although I took what I thought was enough insulin at breakfast, it’s sky high! Very irritating. So now I have to try and figure out what the problem is… Is it hormonal? Should I switch insulin pens just in case? Can I afford to do that seeing as I have a large but limited amount of insulin? Is it because I’ve been so active and now I spent a morning lying down? (I think that’s probably it). But that sucks, cause it means that I’ve somehow managed to turn into one of those fit people who need to be on the move for their blood sugar to stay down. No good! I liked the lazier version of me
Maybe it’s a combination of all of these, and some other unknown factors. That’s the problem with diabetes – you never really know. I’ll keep a close eye on it and if I stay strangely high I’ll take a new insulin pen out before I fly this evening.
For now, though, Vienna awaits! My last taste of the first world for a few months… See you back in Thailand.
