Racing Diabetic » Treatment http://www.racingdiabetic.com Living, eating, racing, traveling as a diabetic Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:44:40 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.3 en hourly 1 Insulin Pen 101 http://www.racingdiabetic.com/insulingpen/ http://www.racingdiabetic.com/insulingpen/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:18:52 +0000 Racing Diabetic http://www.racingdiabetic.com/?p=150

I remember clearly when I received my first insulin Pen. I was going to a camp for kids with diabetes in Sweden (this was my first being in Sweden as a diabetic experience) and was intrigued to see that everybody there was using totally different gear to take care of their diabetes. As opposed to using an insulin syringe and a vial of insulin as I had been doing for the last +/- ten years of my life, they were all using pens.

The pen was a much slicker way of taking insulin. It was designed to look like a normal pen, could be reused for a long time and most importantly allowed the treatment of diabetes to become much of a lifestyle-changing event than a purely medical thing involving syringes. It made a big difference to my life and to this day I still use insulin pens.

I have been trying to gauge how many people use insulin pens today vs. plain old syringe OR the pump. If anybody has any solid numbers I would really like to know what those numbers are.

Either way, I love my pens.

]]> http://www.racingdiabetic.com/insulingpen/feed/ 0 The night of training http://www.racingdiabetic.com/the-night-of-training/ http://www.racingdiabetic.com/the-night-of-training/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 21:57:43 +0000 Racing Diabetic http://blog.racingdiabetic.com/?p=114 I have been training at what a consider to be a fairly consistently tough regime for the last 3-4 years of my life (totally self-inflicted) however I still struggle with being able to figure out exactly what I need to do in order to control my blood sugar in the best possible way – I always get low right before I go to bed.

The general schedule is (assuming I am running):

  • 6:00-8:00 pm – Exercise (Running, cycling, kick-boxing)
  • 8:30-9:00 – Dinner (rich in carbs + protein- more on that in another post)
  • 11:00 bedtime

What always happens is that around the time I go to bed I always start getting a low blood sugar, despite reducing the amount of Humalog insulin that I take. I suppose the balance is trying to figure out the ideal amount to take, but I am having a difficult time matching the amount of exercise I do and food intake with the ideal amount of insulin to take.

Any comments on a smart system to do this that somebody is using successfully?

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