What Diabetes Looks Like: If I put cinnamon on it, does that make it ok?

Sunday night, I had the most divine French toast…

Just looking at it makes me drool.

…topped with JIF mocha hazelnut spread.

200+ calories and 21 carbs per 2 tablespoon serving–but totally worth it. (Especially since my sister picked up the jar unopened FOR FREE in the hallway. Score!)

But I topped it with sugar-free syrup and cinnamon.

Cary’s American Diabetes Association Approved Sugar-Free syrup…and Cinnamon! (Just ignore the butter.)

And cinnamon has been clinically proven* to reduce insulin resistance. So that means this meal was good for my diabetes, right?

*Somewhere at some time by somebody–but don’t ask me who or when or where.

What Diabetes Looks Like: The Bacon Cupcake

I vowed on Sunday that I would eat no sweets this week. I did well*, until I saw the cupcakes on the dessert bar today*: chocolate with cream cheese icing and interesting sprinkles that I thought at first were carrot shavings.

They weren’t carrot sprinkles.

They were bacon sprinkles. Yep, you read that right. I had a cupcake with BACON SPRINKLES.

Sound weird? You’ve clearly never eaten a bacon cupcake.

UPDATE: For those of you who are interested, this cupcake did NOT cause my blood sugar to spike. I’m currently applying for grants to research my theory that bacon lowers insulin resistance. I’ve also been told that October 26 is Bacon Awareness Day, but I’ve not been able to confirm this rumor.

*If it’s legitimate to say “I did well” when the next day I redefined “eat no sweets” as “eat no sweets in the dining common, but allow yourself to eat one itty bitty piece of chocolate while reading that dissertation for your Research in Education presentation.” I think it counts.

*I just remembered that I ate a brownie at lunch yesterday. But let’s ignore that fact, shall we?

How to Lower High Blood Sugar

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough (Photo credit: Live♥Laugh♥Love)

A Brief, Medically Questionable Guide to Fighting Hyperglycemia in Graduate School

1. Is your blood sugar over 300? Are you so busy that you barely have time to breath? Ignore the stack of papers on your desk waiting to be graded and go to book club anyway. Take some insulin and then laugh at two full-grown men discussing the love triangle in The Hunger Games trilogy. Just make sure that you drink lots of water and pass on the sugary apple crisp.
2. Has your fasting blood sugar been creeping up over the past couple of months due to stress? Just turn in your final project for that killer 8 week long online class and then go watch Thor with some friends. Don’t bring any homework and don’t think about any homework. Your fasting blood sugar will be 80 the next morning. Just don’t ruin it by eating a sugary muffin for breakfast, ok? Unless you really want to jump up to 250 something.
3. Eat a bowl of ice cream early in the evening with your sister and overcalculate the carbs to compensate for all the times that you’ve undercounted a bowl of ice cream. Make sure that use a combo bolus to stretch out the insulin dose. Your blood sugar will plummet just before you are about to go to bed, but you won’t feel the symptoms until after you eat a snack of peanut butter crackers. If you want to have a rebound high, make sure that you treat the low with glucose tabs even though you’ve just eaten crackers.
4. Go for a walk after supper and listen to an audiobook.
5. If a certain friend offers to drive you back to your dorm when you are leaving the office at midnight, say no and walk instead. Saying yes inevitably leads to eating chocolate chip cookie dough and gelato in the dorm kitchen at one o’clock in the morning. Or maybe just say yes and take a lot of insulin.
6. GRADUATE!

Looking Back

I have a notebook I keep on the shelf by my bed. I’m not sure what to call it: it’s not a diary, really, or a writer’s journal. I rarely write anything in it. I rarely flip through this notebook either. I value the process of writing it in more than the product.

A few weeks ago, however, I decided, for no particular reason, to browse through it.

As I did, I came across something that I wrote while studying a passage in Matthew 9. I was taking a class on exceptional learners at the time, and as I studied various disabilities and other conditions I wondered how I should approach disability as a Christian. I began reading through the gospels looking for Jesus’ response to people with disabilities. In Matthew 9, a bunch of friends carry a paralyzed man to Jesus for healing. According to parallel accounts, they take a lot of trouble to get this man to Jesus in the first place. And Jesus’ first words to this man are “Take courage, child; your sins are forgiven.”

Here is what I wrote:

“Jesus makes it clear that our primary problem isn’t illness or disability; it’s sin. . . .God is not less good to the person who He chooses to live with a [health] condition than He is to me because He has offered salvation to both of us.”

I wrote this entry last October. One year ago, before I had any shadow of suspicion that I might have a chronic health condition myself, I decided that God’s goodness to me was not dependent on my good health. That God could take it away and not be one ounce less good to me.

And one year later, I can still say that it’s  true. God is no less good to me now than He was a year ago, pancreas or no pancreas.

Grad School in Numbers

34 days

5 weeks of online class completed

20 classes attended

22 tutorials taught

63 papers graded

At least 203 fingersticks

Too many projects

Too little sleep

Only 72 days and 300 or so papers to go