Wednesday, March 15, 2006

No appreciable difference

It's been two weeks since I saw the dietician and as preparation for my re-visit on Friday I've been assessing the correlation between BG readings, carb intake, insulin amounts and exercise, and it doesn't make for easy reading.
My BG numbers are no better than they were before. In fact I have had higher highs and lower lows than I have ever had. Although I have weighed everything carefully, the amount on the plate is still the same as before, which shows that after twenty years I had an accurate idea of what 15g of rice or bread looked like. Consequently the need for adjustments was not as great as the dietician (or even I) had thought. I actually eat the same amount of carbs, protein, fats and veg at lunch and dinner. Breakfast is always Total and skim milk, or a slice of toast. So the base number of carbs remains the same and I just have to make the adjustment for a high or low BG reading. But the adjustments I make now based on the mathematical formula the dietician gave me are not yielding any better results than my old method of whoa that's high I better add 2-10 extra units of Humalog, and pass the juice, I'll eat first and shoot up later.
The exercise, as it always has done, causes a delayed reaction hours later and it makes no difference if my BG is 160 before I exercise or 120, if I take an extra 15g of carb or not.
All in all, I feel extremely frustrated, which pushes my blood sugar up; which is the reason I stopped testing so frequently in the first place.
Oh and just to add to my frustration level, the endo's office can only take results that are faxed in and I moved to the 21st century six years ago and dumped my fax machine then. My dietician can get email but can only read the results in a MS Office format and I, of course, am an Apple sort of gal. So I have to transpose everything.
And even more frustratingly my HMO requires that my PHP sends a referral to the specialist every three visits. So I have to call the family doctor and remind them of this. I have better things to do, they have better things to do. And the HMO know they aren't going to refuse a specialist visit, it would risk a lawsuit, so folks at Oxford Health, why bother? Do you really think most people would set up needless visits to medical practitioners? Or do they think that specialists are requiring patients to go through more follow up visits than is good for them?
This is another reason healthcare in this country is so damn expensive. Too much time and money wasted on unnecessary administration.

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