Month: June 2012

Do I have diabetes burn out?

I just finished reading Ginger Vieira’s post “Do YOU Experience Diabetes Burnout?” and her follow-up post “Overcome Diabetes Burnout – Step #1”. After reading the post I started to wonder, “Am I burned out?” Ginger offered a number of questions to ask myself to help me find my answer.

Are you:

  • Skipping insulin at breakfast?
  • Not taking your oral meds when you’re supposed to?
  • Not checking your blood sugar before meals?
  • Eating blatantly high-carbohydrate meals?
  • Not counting your carbohydrates?
  • Taking your insulin randomly without thinking about the carbohydrate content?

While I never skip taking my insulin and I’m not on oral meds (I’m Type 1), I noticed that in the recent past I’ve forgotten to take my insulin before my meal; sometimes I remember a few minutes after I start eating, sometime I remember at the end of the meal.

Recently I’ve become sick and tired of the poke, test, inject routine and I think subconsciously my mind makes me forget to test my BG. Recently, I went an entire week without testing. Counting carbohydrates is a pain in the ass when you are hungry and just want to eat. For some meal nutritional information is not available - cafeteria at the mall or someone’s home.
I’ve been feeling burnt out on managing diabetes for about 6 months, and I’m expressing my burnout by checking my eating whatever the frack I want and checking my BG irregularly. I blame the medical industry - physicians and medical device makers - for making the whole thing so challenging. It’s too much work to do five times a day, every day for the rest of my life.

A part of me that asks, “Why the frack bother with all this”? I have diabetes. I have it right now. I’ll have it tomorrow and the day after that. Diabetes burn out? Yes. Burnt to the ground. I’m tired of doing this.

Rocky Hill Inn and One53

These were taken tonight with my DIY IR remote and DSLR.bot. As I mentioned in the post, the DSLR.bot software has a minimum shutter speed of 0.3 seconds. This makes it challenging for daylight HDR photography. This, however, works out well for night time HDR. Perhaps tomorrow I will walk down to the Princeton Boathouse for another attempt at using the DIY IR.

Rocky Hill, One53, Washington Road, HDR

One53, 153 Washington Road, Rocky Hill

Eno Terra

Eno Terra is one of my favourite restaurants. My wife and I have celebrated our birthday's and anniversaries here. When my dad was in town visiting a few years ago, he told me he wanted Italian food. I took him here.

My D40 does not have auto-bracketing. I manually adjusted the shutter speed of each of the five shots that were combined to create this HDR. The images (+4,+2,0,-2,-4 EV) were merged in Photomatix Pro and post-processed in Adobe Lightroom 4. I used Snapheal to remove a power line from the sky.