Day 8 - Does Managing Diabetes Take 14 Hours a Week?

This post is inspired by a disability fund here in Canada in the time of tax refunds. There is a portion of the tax refund that states that if you have a disability you can get some money back with an income tax return. Diabetes is specifically on that list but it states that in order for a disability to be valid one must be in a fatal state, need constant attention, or with diabetes specifically, it states that the care and support that one provides themselves with must add up to 14 hours a week and this 14 hours must be `tangible`. Meaning that the time it takes me to record the bg results each day, count carbs, test for the bg results must take me 14 hours or more which does not take me 14 hours a week therefore with all `tangible` evidence I nor most other diabetics are able to receive this tax refund for the disability that is diabetes.

This post is about the time that it takes to manage diabetes, the time that diabetics must be aware of themselves regarding diabetes and it is much more than 14 hours a week. Diabetes is something that is on our minds, something that concerns us every waking hour, something that we must factor in within all of our activities, something that limits us from doing what we would like, something that limits us financially. Diabetes is not something that takes 14 hours a week of our life, it takes our entire lives.

Diabetes is a dis-ease of the endocrine system and the endocrine system is the system that regulates homeostasis throughout the body through process of specific functions. The Pancreas is the organ that regulates blood sugar through various processes. In diabetics the pancreas either doesn't or has limited capability of regulating the blood sugar. Since blood runs throughout your body it is going to affect the entire body when/as the pancreas isn't operational and thus diabetics must consider the entire body within their actions, must consider the consequences and affects of all choices that we make in a day and whether or not it is going to affect the blood sugar or affect any other part of the body through/as the movement of blood. Within this there are many times within a day that I/we must keep in consideration our actions, we must decide how much insulin we need based on any exercise that we are doing, we must calculate whether or not we need food before the exercise, we must consider if we have injected our basal rate insulin before we've done the exercise, whether or not that amount of basal rate is going to have `too much` of an affect if we exercise and whether or not it will cause a low. And If we are unsure of all these things, which many of the times we are, we need to expect the `worst`, expect a low, expect a high and always keep food and insulin on ourselves so that we can keep ourselves alive and `healthy`

Diabetes doesn't only affect our health, it affects our lifestyles as well. It affects the choices and decision that we must make regarding our jobs, our education, our relationships, our geographical locations. For example, when I decided to go back to school to get the credits I needed for university; diabetes was my main concern, it was also my main limitation. Since the job that I had has benefits which helps out extensively with paying for insulin, meters, test strips, needles, I needed to keep the job. I had to switch to nights so that I could attend school. If I didn't have diabetes I would've stopped working and focused on school full time, but I needed to have the money for diabetes which meant that it was a limitation on the choices that I was able to make regarding school and further education. I am confident that I am not the only example of this.

Again, within work I must consider so many changes in the day/year/month/minute and calculate what the body needs within that moment because there are a lot of factors that are going to influence the blood sugar, I mean even a climate change from winter to summer affects the rate of insulin sensitivity that I must recalculate each time the weather changes, and even if it is a cold cloudy day within the fall it is going to change and I must calculate that each time that I eat and inject insulin. If the calculations are not correct or if it is the beginning of a season I must be aware of myself within whatever I am doing which means that I must separate myself from the experience of socializing, or separate myself from the experience of watching a movie, separate myself from whatever I am doing within that moment and bring myself back here with the body and check up on it to see if what I have calculated is accurate, see if I am going low, see if I am running high and then accordingly adjust the calculations and make the corrections needed within that one moment.

This process is so redundant that when I asked my endocrinologist if she would `co-sign` or be the representative for myself within the tax refund she said that she would `look` at it, but had high doubts that it would follow through because she has `tried` before with other patients only to have the government deny the request for the disability refund.

Another perspective within this is when I was 14 previous to being diagnosed my life was basically being set out in absolution. Meaning that who I was when I was 14 I was basically going to live for the rest of my life. Who I was when I was 14 was a slacker, I already had the conditioning to be a person who goes out and drinks every night, who only looks for their `next high`. I would have had done `nothing` with my life other than party and indulge in sex, masturbation, drugs, alcohol, I had no aspirations to do anything `worth while` in my life. When I was diagnosed with diabetes all that changed immediately, and my `life` in that regards was destroyed because of diabetes…I am not complaining the slightest about that change. I am grateful for diabetes in that respect because looking at it now, I would not like to have been what I was becoming in those years and am much more `happy`/ satisfied with who I am now.

Just because the tangible evidence of recording glucose readings and testing and carb counting does not add up to 14 hours within a week does not mean that diabetes does not take up 14 hours a week of our life. It in fact takes up out ENTIRE LIVES, it destroys our life for the better or for the worse and we must change ourselves to adapt to diabetes so that we can take care of ourselves, change our diets, change our habits of that which will affect the endocrine system, watch our stress levels, stop ourselves from stressing ourselves out, and each of these things takes time. Consider taking out all sugar from your diet, all things that have sugar in them, bread, milk, crackers, cereals…the list goes on, and managing the reactions that your going to go through by stopping sugar within your diet because you have diabetes. It limits what we can do, no scuba diving because if we go low under the ocean we probably won't be able to surface fast enough to treat the low with food, no sporadic travelling because we must plan everything out before hand so that we know that we have what we need to support ourselves, no living in the woods because we are reliant on hospitals and medications from pharmacies, you get the picture.

It is an absurdity that the government has the audacity to suggest that diabetes must take 14 hours a week of our life in order to receive a financial benefit for having diabetes when the medications and test strips when taking proper care of ourselves are above $500CDN a month without insurance (I've been there). It is absurd that our doctors are not even willing to push this point for us because they find it redundant and a `waste of time`.

Diabetes does not take 14 hours a week, It takes OUR LIVES!

Day 2 - Should we Trust Nutrition Labels?

As a type 1 diabetic I rely on the nutrition food labels to be accurate and concise with the information that they put on the nutrition labels and I, in some ways, need to trust that information is correct on all packages and foods, but I've found that this is not the case on all foods…there is only one instance that I've found so far that the information is misleading, but I am sure that there are more - specifically with the foods being labelled "organic" or "Healthy"

 

There is a bread that I use to make sandwiches for lunches and on the nutrition label it says "per 1 piece (40g) there are 20g of carbohydrates in each slice". This information I need to rely upon to calculate an accurate amount of insulin that I need to inject to counteract the sugar being processed in the body from the metabolizing of the carbohydrates. This bread is a bread that is descending in size throughout the package, so like there are pieces that are larger and there are pieces that are smaller than the previous one.

In order to be much more accurate I decided to buy a scale a few months ago and start to actually weigh the food that I was eating so that I could be as accurate as possible - using the weight rather than the serving size - because like with boxes of macaroni it says per 1/4 box = 60g of carbs, so I mean how do I accurately measure 1/4 of a box or estimate what 1/4 of a box is, so weighing the food that I was eating made the calculations much more accurate because I could divide the amount of food that I was eating by the serving size in g written on the nutrition label and multiply that by the amount of carbs in each serving size in grams. So back to the bread - I started to weigh out the bread and found that each time I weighed the bread, each reading was far over 80g (2 slices), the highest reading I found the bread to weigh was 150g which is nearly double what the nutrition labels says each slice weighs and thus nearly double the amount of carbohydrates in those 2 slices of bread.

Before then I did not have a scale and was still using this bread for sandwiches for lunch as work, and this could have severely fucked with the sugar levels and insulin injections throughout work - luckily though my work is a physical job and during that time I was finding the right amount of insulin to inject because of the effect of the amount of exercise the job has on the bodies sensitivity to insulin, so I had to deduct insulin from the injection due to the physical exercise - but there were times when I would have this bread on the weekends or on days when I was not physically active and inject 4 units of insulin for the 2 slices that I was eating, basing my injection off of the information on the nutrition label - my carb to unit ratio is roughly 10g/1u - when really I needed was 150/40=3.75 3.75*20=75 <- 7.5 units of insulin for the 75g of carbs in those slices of bread, and thus this would cause my sugar levels to go higher than I had expected due to the misinformation printed on the nutrition labels, …each unit of insulin reduces the sugar level by 2mmol/l so each 10g of carbs increases the sugar level by 2mmol/l which  escalated the sugar an extra 7mmol/l above my target when calculating an accurate amount of insulin to inject for what I was eating, and if you didn't know, 7mmol/l is a drastic difference in blood glucose.

So then the question is posed can we as a society trust the information printed on nutrition labels? From this example the answer is no, No because there, more or less, is always a motive behind the labels or within/as the labels themselves defined in the word `nutrients`. This bread that I gave as an example is defined as a `healthy` bread and from the starting point of wanting to look and be perceived as `healthy` they do not give accurate information - they only give accurate information on the smallest slice of bread in the package - Why? To make it look healthy, to lower the carb counts and the calorie count in on the information presented, but this improper use of the information on the nutrition labels can have severe affects on those whom are diabetic, or whom have other food illnesses, such as celiac disease where one much look at the ingredient list for any substance that has wheat or wheat based additives, and there has been times where the information printed on the ingredient label is deceiving as well, I know this because my mother has celiac disease and when she consumes gluten she throws up violently for a few hours - meaning she has bought products that has no ingredient listed on the list that has gluten in it, yet from eating that product she has reacted in such a manner, physically proving that there was in fact gluten on in the product

The entire point behind the misinformation and mislabeling of nutrition labels or food labels is due to money, for the example with the bread, the company wants to market their product as healthy and for those who are `health nuts` to buy this bread. The company clearly has enough wherewithal to understand that their consumers will be looking at the nutrition label for the `indicators` of the product being healthy such as a low calorie number or low carbohydrate number and thus accordingly only place the `1 slice serving` as the smallest piece of bread in the package allowing the label to be `acceptable`  with the lowest numbers possible yet, quite misleading and quite dangerous for those who rely heavily on and need to trust that the information presented is accurate.

 

What is the solution here? The solution would to `govern` the labels much more severely and put the labels through much more testing before they are allowed to be placed on the product. The solution would to eradicate the point of profit from the companies so that instances like this do not cause harm to life as it has with myself and with any other diabetics who are unaware of this fact, remove profit because it is from the point of profit and greed that this abuse towards life exists, and this solution is presented with the Equal Money System which can be read further in detail at http://equalmoney.org

I also suggest to read http://mayaprocess.blogspot.com/2013/03/capitalism-joke-is-on-us-food-labelling.html for more of a perspective on this issue and on the solution presented.

Post #1 Day 55 - Diabetes

For Context of the title the "Post #" will be the order that I am posting from the other blog - and the "Day #" is the title from the other blog - I will start from Day 2 Once I start to post `new` content that I've written

Post from http://paulsjourneytolife.blogspot.com/2012/06/day-55-diabetes.html

"I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that there will be a cure for diabetes in the coming years because when I was diagnosed I was told that in my lifetime there will be a cure, in this hoping for a cure and not effectively investigating the cause of diabetes through going through my life and seeing what exactly triggered it and how I created it as myself

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to put faith in a cure when diabetes is a $90 billion a year industry, and within the capitalistic system, where profit is the goal of the game of money, the companies who manufactures diabetes medicines, machines and tools are not willing to let go of that money in order to support a cure - so goes with all disease and illness

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed a system wherein as a child we are bombarded with images on commercials showing happy, outgoing, cartoon characters that are the logos and mascots for high sugar cereals, wherein we as children connect these images to what we want because of the imagery within the commercials, only with consideration for profit and not the quality of life that the child lives as most children then end up becoming addicted to sugar without knowing it, and live their lives consuming foods that they were programmed to consume as a child

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed a system wherein the only consideration of value in this life is profit, allowing companies to justify feeding people sugary food that has no real support for the body, only support for profit, so that the companies can make profit and support the capitalistic system

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed a system wherein there are governmental institutions that regulate food, that are supposed to regulate food, but only have the real consideration for/as money, because if they actually had consideration for/as life within the food that we consume many of the products on the shelves would not exist

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed a corrupt system where the only value is money allowing ourselves to feed ourselves and to be fed mass amounts of sugar to keep us happy wherein we are not ever told to consider what we put into our body and the biochemistry that happens within the body when we consume what we consume with consideration of what is best for life as the body and physical well being of ourselves

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to support diabetes research funding that says that they are researching for a cure for both types of diabetes when really they are only creating new ways of monitoring diabetes for further profit within the capitalistic system and burying opportunities to find cures

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fail to realize that there already have been cures that have been reported in underground news but have been suppressed by the medicine giants that rake in billions a year from diabetics showing that there will only ever be real medicine as cures when life is valued within a new economic system that stops they interplay of money and value and profit, and gives money equally to everyone, where all are haves, and life is valued equally throughout the planet in equality and oneness, where life becomes equally dignified.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to put trust and faith in doctors and medicine to support me as life when in this game of money the only thing that they really care about is if I have money to support myself as life and they do not in fact care about myself as life at all or the doctors who really understand medicine would have supported a cure and not further monitoring devices and tools in which diabetics are dependent on for the rest of their lives. 

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that diabetes was caused due to an `auto-immune` disease, wherein the cause is easily defined without actual investigation as to exactly why and how I ended up creating diabetes within myself, or why and how the immune system started to attack the pancreas, in what and how I lived before having diabetes that lead to me being diagnosed with diabetes = what triggered diabetes within the body, and how to solve that problem.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not see and realize that I am my body in fact and only through the mind have I separated myself from the body as life and through allowing myself to be programmed into/as this world in accepting and allowing the system within and without did I accept myself as separation of/as the body, not realizing that I am able to communicate with the body in equality and oneness when/as standing equal and one to the body in all ways where I communicate using breath and being here as me as life in self-awareness as the body as the breath as all the inner workings of the body in equality and oneness

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to fear going through life with diabetes because of the constant necessity in having to manage diabetes throughout my entire life, and have to deal with the consequences if I do not manage it correctly as well wherein I am able to lose limbs, go blind, have the kidney's fail due to improper management of diabetes and in this fear of going through life with diabetes, fear seeing the evidence that I am not taking good care of myself as a diabetic through high blood sugar readings and in this fear not test but only go from how I physically feel allowing myself to compromise myself further and in this want to end my existence here because of the suffering I believe I will go through, instead of allowing myself to become a test subject of how and why diabetes manifests within the body so that I am able to support a cure as that is what I would like for myself.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize and understand that there is something completely fucking wrong with diabetes when I can test on two different meters and get two different blood test results using the same drop of blood wherein one will say that I am low when I am not and one will say that I am fine, causing one to believe if one were using the mis-calibrated machine since the start of diabetes that one is low when in fact one is not and that the blood sugar is fine when it is not, which end up causing more issues within the body of diabetics which further cost money to correct which in turn fuels the capitalistic system more

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to trust this world will take care of me because I am a diabetic and I need the insulin to live, not realizing that this world does not In fact give a fuck about life, it only cares if I have the money in which to further support this system, and that it will only care about me if I generate money, in this not realizing that some people have to pay outrageous amounts of money to get the supplies that they need because they do not have coverage for the supplied that they need to LIVE and in this lack of having coverage for the supplies, compromise themselves through using needles over and over again until they can no longer be used, which causes further problems, not test as often as they should to effectively monitor their blood sugar which causes more problem that inevitably lead to paying more money to correct or develop the ability to live with the problems

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to accept a system wherein if one does not have money to support oneself as life then one is left to die and starve in this world, and in this I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to state `this is North America, we don't allow this to happen to people` when we are in fact absolutely responsible for the starvation across the world, and absolutely responsible for the poverty even within our own borders, and that we only give a fuck about a person if they first have money, as shown through the stigma of/as being a bum

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to accept a system where life is not supported in any way what so every shown through the food that is accepted and allowed to be consumed by the human wherein it creates detrimental effects to the physical body and wherein the cause of such diseases relating from such diets is only said to have been caused by auto-immune deficiencies and that the bodies are to blame, not taking into consideration the diets that have been supported where everything of the physical is not taken into consideration of what is best for the physical, the only thing that is taken into consideration is money and sex where diets are supported for money and people go on diets to become slim and get sex

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that something is fucked up in this world where we allow children to eat food that we as adults would never allow ourselves to eat because of the high sugar content, and yet we allow ourselves to go out to a store and buy these products for kids because they are `for` kids, not realizing that the child has a body that is equal and one to as our bodies as physical life and it works in the same properties wherein it becomes programmed into/as a pattern through/as the input that is placed within it, allowing myself to be irresponsible at effectively raising a child in this world and in this I forgive myself that I have not accepted and allowed myself to not realize that the child is equal and one to me and must be supported in the same way with food as I support my body

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that when/as I consume fructose the liver breaks it down into a poison basically and that the only thing that is able to be consumed that has fructose in it are fruits because they have the fibre necessary to support the break down of fructose, making fruit drinks, that which have been programmed and supported as good, the worst thing that can be consumed as it is basically injecting poison into the body, because the fruit drinks do not have the fibre within them, only the sugar and juice of the fruit.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to  allow a system where disease and illness are not supported with cures and where the diseases and illnesses are purposely supported within the system in order to generate more money, in this I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to not realize that we are humans are absolutely evil because money is only the tools in which we use to express ourselves and we are evil in using money, in this I forgive myself that I have not accepted and allowed myself to realize that the human must undergo extensive change in order to ever be life itself instead of the destruction that it has become now.

I commit myself to show this world as a diabetic how fucked up the system has become wherein diabetes is actually supported in this world through diet structures and the foods that we consume as children and eventually become addicted to

I commit myself to live as an example of what can become of ourselves if we allow ourselves to eat what we want when we want, wherein I now fight with heaven every day where heaven tries to take me from this existence and only through the injections and management of the body do I delay the movement into/as heaven

I commit myself to standing in this world system as support for life in supporting myself as life as being a diabetic doing the best for me as life in monitoring the diabetes and researching what is in fact supportive for the body through what we consume, and not demonizing one food or the next as it is shown that all food types are essential, it is only what we as humanity have produced that has become fucked up as our starting point is fucked up = money, self-interest and profit

I commit myself to support an equal money system where the value in life is life itself and where life will then be truly supported to prosper and where actual cures will be produced because the goal will no longer be money but quality of life equally lived throughout the globe

I commit myself in supporting myself as life in doing what is best for me in monitoring the sugar levels and doing the best that I can in each breath here to care, not manage, but care for myself as a diabetic, and in this establish an effective communication with/as the body of/as what it needs to support itself through removing the mental distraction and sticking in breath."