Of course it's true that not every diabetic has it easy. Everybody is different and everybody's body behaves differently Sounds like your brother is getting insulin resitance, and that's a bit of a problem, and his endocrinologist I hope is working on the situation.
blood sugar levels in excess of 250
That's about 14 mmol/L. Not great if that's an average, but not bad really if it's just an occasional spike.
very treatable and predicatble ailment
It is very treatable (in the majority of cases), there are treatments (insulin) which, when applied properly can provide a very normal quality of life to an insulin dependant.
It is predictable (in the vast majority of cases) provided that the subject maintains control, a controlled diabetic predicts that when she eats it will increase her blood sugar and she predicts that by taking n units of insulin it will counter that increase. Similarly she knows that if she goes running it will decrease her blood sugar and she predicts that eating a certain food will counter that. So it is predictable (again, in the general case), you can predict "going low", you can predict "going high", and you can predict the results of treatment (insulin or sugars) readily - provided you keep things in check. And you can quickly verify those predictions.
But again, this is all the general case for the majority, there will always be those like your brother who have a harder time with it because thier body just reacts differently.
Yes. Yes, I have. And he (not me by the way) is now getting things back on track after he passed out a couple of times due to neglecting his diabetes for too long and developing hypoglycemic unawareness.
While I was sitting in church I did feel my sugar was getting low, I went to my car and checked my sugar, it was 19.
Exactly, you detected it, it wasn't hard for you to detect it, you didn't even have to think about it, you just knew.
Depending on how quickly you got to the car I'd say you detected it around 2 or maybe even 3 mmol/L (19 mg/dl is about 1.5 mmol/L), that's quite low but not so low as you are incapacitated, when I fall low I will start to detect it around 4, and won't be able to ignore it any more at 3 because it affects my mental accuity too much.
In my case my control isn't particualy good, but to say it's a treatable and predictable ailment in all cases(as you appear to be saying) would be way out.
But don't you see that it's precisely because your control isn't good that it can be unpredictable for you.
How many hypos do you have, less than 4m/mol readings? The more you have, the less aware of them you will become.
When you have a hypo or hyper glycemia do you ask yourself why that happened? Did you take too much insulin, did you not take enough, did you just not eat as much, or more than you thought, do you need to reduce the amount you take next time?
When did you last re-evaluate your therapy? Lots of us try to go through life sticking to a regime that is inappropriate for our lifestyles, trying in vain to stick to a regime that "the doctor" has set that just doesn't work anymore.
Sounds to me like you need to take a long hard look at your current treatment plan, which is obviously not working for you. When did you last re-evaluate it? You have to ask yourself, do you tailor your insulin daily to suit your life, or tailor your life daily to suit your insulin?
If there is one thing I've learnt in treating my diabetes its that you must base your insulin around your life, not the other way around, and be flexible about it.
The minute you start thinking "I have to take z insulin units and eat x carb units at or close to y time of day" you are going to rapidly decrease your quality of life.
In another study, researchers in Mexico transplanted cells from the testes and pancreas of newborn piglets into teenagers with diabetes without having to use anti-rejection drugs.
Dr. Rafael Valdes, MD, and colleagues from the Children's Hospital of Mexico in Mexico City transplanted encapsulated islets that were taken from customized, disease-free piglets. The islets, produced by Diatranz of Aukland, New Zealand, are protected with an alginate coating. Researchers transplanted the islets into 12 teens aged 10 to 15 who had had type 1 diabetes for at least three years. According to Dr. Valdes, who announced the results of the study at the International Xenotransplantation Association Congress in Chicago this October, two of the teens recovered completely from diabetes, three lowered their need for insulin by more than 40 percent and the other teens improved slightly.
You, and the parent both need to go see your endo. Really, you have some pretty lack lustre control going on there.
In 10 years I have *never* blacked out due to hypoglycemia, nor have I ever needed help to recover, if I did, then that would be a big wakeup call to get things back on track. And my control over the last 10 years is nothing to write home about.
I'd be interested to know what sort of insulin regime you are both on, and what lifestyles you have.
I have a very irregular lifestyle, I work for myself from home as a programmer and that means I'm constantly "changing shifts" I eat at widely different times, I sleep anything from 2 to 12 hours etc etc. yet still I manage to keep my Hba1c at 8% or so.
Living with diabetes shouldn't be a chore, it shouldn't even be hard. It sounds to me like your insulin regime is wrong for you both. I believe in the states there is some sort of fanatical devotion to "conventional therapy" where you have specific set amounts of insulin prescribed (self or otherwise) to take a specific times of the day, and must eat specific amounts of carb at specific times of the day etc.
What you should consider functional insulin therapy, where you use a long lasting insulin to provide a "basal" insulin dose (a "background"), and then when you eat a meal etc you take a rapid acting insulin to provide a "bolus" dose (or use a pump to handle both basal and bolus).
This allows you a much greater flexability with much less attention in my experience - no set dose, no set times, no set meals, everything is "played by ear" as to what you need at the time - which you will know from experience.
Whatever the case, you've only been diagnosed for a couple of years, and sounds like you might be teenage. If I can give you a some advice - don't worry about it so much - better to keep your BG higher than normal rather than end up hypo often, if you want to eat something sweet go for it, everybody needs something nice - just don't do it too often (and if you use a rapid acting insulin you can counter the effects of eating that custard tart, or fruit muffin every now and then).
Try and get away from "conventional" treatment schedules and go with a "functional insulin therapy", it is much more flexable, especially for young people who have irregular lives.
And go see your endo, you really need to get those blackouts knocked on the head.
Diabetics learn very quickly how much insulin they require and to adjust it as they see fit.
On the insulin side, we have a wide range of available, from very rapid acting ( taking effect within 10 minutes to provide "bolus" (peak) insulin for when you eat) to very long acting (lasting up to 24 hours to provide "basal" (background) insulin). Using different insulins diabetics can get a remarkably precise control with little effort.
As for hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) leading to diabetic coma, this is easily avoided by any diabetic with even "rough" control due to the fact that they will readily feel blood sugar levels dropping far in advance of danger and a quick ingestion of some sweet substance will solve the problem in a matter of a couple of minutes - actually, it's quite remarkable how quickly the sugar is absorbed and works it's magic.
It's not hard these days to keep your diabetes in fair control, and within or close to the "normal" range that will keep problems later in life at bay. Diabetes is in essence a very treatable and predicatble ailment once detected.
Detecting it in the first place is probably the biggest problem these days - so many people don't recognize the symptoms...
a) Excessive thirst and urination - this is the biggie, classic and very telling symptom. Your body is working hard trying to flush itself, but it can't keep up. b) Tiredness - the higher your BG gets, the more tired you get c) Weight loss, dehydration. d) Sweet fruity smell on the breath - your body is having to break down fats to get at sugars and as a result it's producing some pretty nasty by products - your getting keto acidosis. At this point you are extremely ill and must get to a doctor very quickly. I mean VERY quickly... if you delay then you may fall into a coma, your brain will swell, and rather soon, you will die.
People often leave it much to late, not getting diagnosed until they are in a state of acidosis - I know, I did - almost too late, but once diagnosed, a couple of days in a hospital and some home visits by a diabetes nurse educator I was fine - 10 years later I'm still fine, and I expect to still be fine for another 40 to 50 years at least.
Taking insulin is no problem really, and it's only really new diabetics who worry about thier blood glucose too much. It only takes a few months before you just "know" what your BG is doing, and almost automatically adjust to suit, constant BG testing is not something that the majority of diabetics do for long.
I've been Type 1 for 10 years now, most of the time I don't even conciously know how much insulin I take - it just comes down to dialling (with a pen injector) what I subsconciously know I need, and injecting it. Sure I have to do it several times a day, but it takes probably 5 seconds each time at the most.
I think that taking immuno suppressents would be much more unpleasent in the long run.
All this said, the real big thing in diabetes research is xenotransplantation of pig islets which are coated in a substance which makes them invisible to the immune system.
While the research is very promising (and has been trialled in humans in the past) it is currently on hiatus due to the "concerns" some people have with xenotransplantation.
Unfortunatly WINE (well, cxoffice at least) won't run the current DWMX due to the crappy copy protection MM has stuffing things up.
It does run pervious DWMX versions just fine though (if a little slow). You'd think MM would put a developer on it for a week and sort the problem out, it's not like it would be a big outlay for them.
It's pertinent because this small fiasco has the ability to radically destabilise kernel development.
Pretty much everybody except Linus is in agreement that Tridge isn't doing anthing untoward, nothing different from the work he did in writing Samba.
Everybody see that Linus is being hypocritical at best, and perhaps a bit nepotistic as well.
That sort of attitude doesn't go over well in the OS community and if he keeps it up then it's going to be a major destabilising influence on kernel developement specifically - this is how unnecessary forks begin.
Almost everything you could possibly want is in the Debian repository. Very seldom to I ever install something locally (stow'd without deb).
Re:That's what I like about Gentoo...
on
Gentoo 2005.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
On Gentoo, you don't even upgrade from release to release, you just install stuff when you can be bothered and one day you find yourself on 2005.0 accidentally.
With Debian...
apt-get install packageyouwanttoupgrade
no fuss, no muss, gets what is needed no more no less.
The only two real options are a) Paypal - sure a few people get turned off by it, but they are probably not your audience. This is the easiest way if you want to accept payments in USD/CAD/JYP/GBP/EUR or AUD.
b) Moneybookers (moneybookers.com) - like paypal with a few differences. If you sign up for thier merchant program you can use them to accept CCrds in the same way as you can with Paypal, except that.
1. No chargebacks. Moneybookers is "hard" currency, once you have it it's yours to keep.
2. More currencies. Moneybookers allows you to accept payments (and hold balance) in more currencies than paypal.
3. To pay via credit card your users will (the first time they do) will either need an SMS capable cellphone handy (they send a confirmation code to it so they at least have a known-good cellphone number) or a fax machine.
The other options (2checkout.com, a real merchant account etc..) would likely be too expensive and too much trouble.
Perhaps they're just cheap and never win auctions.
I signed up on New Zealand's local auction site when it first started, I'm number 283 out of nearly a million registered accounts, in that time (6 years) I've purchased only a couple of things, and sold only a couple of things.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's true that not every diabetic has it easy. Everybody is different and everybody's body behaves differently Sounds like your brother is getting insulin resitance, and that's a bit of a problem, and his endocrinologist I hope is working on the situation.
blood sugar levels in excess of 250
That's about 14 mmol/L. Not great if that's an average, but not bad really if it's just an occasional spike.
very treatable and predicatble ailment
It is very treatable (in the majority of cases), there are treatments (insulin) which, when applied properly can provide a very normal quality of life to an insulin dependant.
It is predictable (in the vast majority of cases) provided that the subject maintains control, a controlled diabetic predicts that when she eats it will increase her blood sugar and she predicts that by taking n units of insulin it will counter that increase. Similarly she knows that if she goes running it will decrease her blood sugar and she predicts that eating a certain food will counter that. So it is predictable (again, in the general case), you can predict "going low", you can predict "going high", and you can predict the results of treatment (insulin or sugars) readily - provided you keep things in check. And you can quickly verify those predictions.
But again, this is all the general case for the majority, there will always be those like your brother who have a harder time with it because thier body just reacts differently.
Have you ever met a brittle diabetic?
Yes. Yes, I have. And he (not me by the way) is now getting things back on track after he passed out a couple of times due to neglecting his diabetes for too long and developing hypoglycemic unawareness.
While I was sitting in church I did feel my sugar was getting low, I went to my car and checked my sugar, it was 19.
Exactly, you detected it, it wasn't hard for you to detect it, you didn't even have to think about it, you just knew.
Depending on how quickly you got to the car I'd say you detected it around 2 or maybe even 3 mmol/L (19 mg/dl is about 1.5 mmol/L), that's quite low but not so low as you are incapacitated, when I fall low I will start to detect it around 4, and won't be able to ignore it any more at 3 because it affects my mental accuity too much.
In my case my control isn't particualy good, but to say it's a treatable and predictable ailment in all cases(as you appear to be saying) would be way out.
But don't you see that it's precisely because your control isn't good that it can be unpredictable for you.
How many hypos do you have, less than 4m/mol readings? The more you have, the less aware of them you will become.
When you have a hypo or hyper glycemia do you ask yourself why that happened? Did you take too much insulin, did you not take enough, did you just not eat as much, or more than you thought, do you need to reduce the amount you take next time?
When did you last re-evaluate your therapy? Lots of us try to go through life sticking to a regime that is inappropriate for our lifestyles, trying in vain to stick to a regime that "the doctor" has set that just doesn't work anymore.
Sounds to me like you need to take a long hard look at your current treatment plan, which is obviously not working for you. When did you last re-evaluate it? You have to ask yourself, do you tailor your insulin daily to suit your life, or tailor your life daily to suit your insulin?
If there is one thing I've learnt in treating my diabetes its that you must base your insulin around your life, not the other way around, and be flexible about it.
The minute you start thinking "I have to take z insulin units and eat x carb units at or close to y time of day" you are going to rapidly decrease your quality of life.
Research along the same lines (averting rejection of foreign islets)... http://www.diabeteshealth.com/read,1024,3456.html
In another study, researchers in Mexico transplanted cells from the testes and pancreas of newborn piglets into teenagers with diabetes without having to use anti-rejection drugs.
Dr. Rafael Valdes, MD, and colleagues from the Children's Hospital of Mexico in Mexico City transplanted encapsulated islets that were taken from customized, disease-free piglets. The islets, produced by Diatranz of Aukland, New Zealand, are protected with an alginate coating. Researchers transplanted the islets into 12 teens aged 10 to 15 who had had type 1 diabetes for at least three years. According to Dr. Valdes, who announced the results of the study at the International Xenotransplantation Association Congress in Chicago this October, two of the teens recovered completely from diabetes, three lowered their need for insulin by more than 40 percent and the other teens improved slightly.
You, and the parent both need to go see your endo. Really, you have some pretty lack lustre control going on there.
In 10 years I have *never* blacked out due to hypoglycemia, nor have I ever needed help to recover, if I did, then that would be a big wakeup call to get things back on track. And my control over the last 10 years is nothing to write home about.
I'd be interested to know what sort of insulin regime you are both on, and what lifestyles you have.
I have a very irregular lifestyle, I work for myself from home as a programmer and that means I'm constantly "changing shifts" I eat at widely different times, I sleep anything from 2 to 12 hours etc etc. yet still I manage to keep my Hba1c at 8% or so.
Living with diabetes shouldn't be a chore, it shouldn't even be hard. It sounds to me like your insulin regime is wrong for you both. I believe in the states there is some sort of fanatical devotion to "conventional therapy" where you have specific set amounts of insulin prescribed (self or otherwise) to take a specific times of the day, and must eat specific amounts of carb at specific times of the day etc.
What you should consider functional insulin therapy, where you use a long lasting insulin to provide a "basal" insulin dose (a "background"), and then when you eat a meal etc you take a rapid acting insulin to provide a "bolus" dose (or use a pump to handle both basal and bolus).
This allows you a much greater flexability with much less attention in my experience - no set dose, no set times, no set meals, everything is "played by ear" as to what you need at the time - which you will know from experience.
Whatever the case, you've only been diagnosed for a couple of years, and sounds like you might be teenage. If I can give you a some advice - don't worry about it so much - better to keep your BG higher than normal rather than end up hypo often, if you want to eat something sweet go for it, everybody needs something nice - just don't do it too often (and if you use a rapid acting insulin you can counter the effects of eating that custard tart, or fruit muffin every now and then).
Try and get away from "conventional" treatment schedules and go with a "functional insulin therapy", it is much more flexable, especially for young people who have irregular lives.
And go see your endo, you really need to get those blackouts knocked on the head.
Diabetics learn very quickly how much insulin they require and to adjust it as they see fit.
On the insulin side, we have a wide range of available, from very rapid acting ( taking effect within 10 minutes to provide "bolus" (peak) insulin for when you eat) to very long acting (lasting up to 24 hours to provide "basal" (background) insulin). Using different insulins diabetics can get a remarkably precise control with little effort.
As for hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) leading to diabetic coma, this is easily avoided by any diabetic with even "rough" control due to the fact that they will readily feel blood sugar levels dropping far in advance of danger and a quick ingestion of some sweet substance will solve the problem in a matter of a couple of minutes - actually, it's quite remarkable how quickly the sugar is absorbed and works it's magic.
It's not hard these days to keep your diabetes in fair control, and within or close to the "normal" range that will keep problems later in life at bay. Diabetes is in essence a very treatable and predicatble ailment once detected.
Detecting it in the first place is probably the biggest problem these days - so many people don't recognize the symptoms...
a) Excessive thirst and urination - this is the biggie, classic and very telling symptom. Your body is working hard trying to flush itself, but it can't keep up.
b) Tiredness - the higher your BG gets, the more tired you get
c) Weight loss, dehydration.
d) Sweet fruity smell on the breath - your body is having to break down fats to get at sugars and as a result it's producing some pretty nasty by products - your getting keto acidosis. At this point you are extremely ill and must get to a doctor very quickly. I mean VERY quickly... if you delay then you may fall into a coma, your brain will swell, and rather soon, you will die.
People often leave it much to late, not getting diagnosed until they are in a state of acidosis - I know, I did - almost too late, but once diagnosed, a couple of days in a hospital and some home visits by a diabetes nurse educator I was fine - 10 years later I'm still fine, and I expect to still be fine for another 40 to 50 years at least.
I'd much rather take these than insulin.
Taking insulin is no problem really, and it's only really new diabetics who worry about thier blood glucose too much. It only takes a few months before you just "know" what your BG is doing, and almost automatically adjust to suit, constant BG testing is not something that the majority of diabetics do for long.
I've been Type 1 for 10 years now, most of the time I don't even conciously know how much insulin I take - it just comes down to dialling (with a pen injector) what I subsconciously know I need, and injecting it. Sure I have to do it several times a day, but it takes probably 5 seconds each time at the most.
I think that taking immuno suppressents would be much more unpleasent in the long run.
All this said, the real big thing in diabetes research is xenotransplantation of pig islets which are coated in a substance which makes them invisible to the immune system.
While the research is very promising (and has been trialled in humans in the past) it is currently on hiatus due to the "concerns" some people have with xenotransplantation.
Unfortunatly WINE (well, cxoffice at least) won't run the current DWMX due to the crappy copy protection MM has stuffing things up.
It does run pervious DWMX versions just fine though (if a little slow). You'd think MM would put a developer on it for a week and sort the problem out, it's not like it would be a big outlay for them.
It's pertinent because this small fiasco has the ability to radically destabilise kernel development.
Pretty much everybody except Linus is in agreement that Tridge isn't doing anthing untoward, nothing different from the work he did in writing Samba.
Everybody see that Linus is being hypocritical at best, and perhaps a bit nepotistic as well.
That sort of attitude doesn't go over well in the OS community and if he keeps it up then it's going to be a major destabilising influence on kernel developement specifically - this is how unnecessary forks begin.
WTF? You think U2 was legal? The US government continued to deney it's existance even after the Soviet Union caputured one.
For somethign to be illegal, it has to be in breach of a law. So what law did the US government breach by denying the existence of the U2?
not that I like the US government, but I don't think what you are saying is correct.
It's NOT tv ON the internet, if you RTFA it's tv ABOUT the internet. Big difference.
Which government exactly? The US doesn't OWN the internet (anymore) you know.
If you want to upgrade everything that can be upgraded, yes dist-upgrade.
emerge -uD world.
apt-get dist-upgrade
Except that it's harder to find Debian packages
???
Almost everything you could possibly want is in the Debian repository. Very seldom to I ever install something locally (stow'd without deb).
On Gentoo, you don't even upgrade from release to release, you just install stuff when you can be bothered and one day you find yourself on 2005.0 accidentally.
With Debian...
apt-get install packageyouwanttoupgrade
no fuss, no muss, gets what is needed no more no less.
The only two real options are
a) Paypal - sure a few people get turned off by it, but they are probably not your audience. This is the easiest way if you want to accept payments in USD/CAD/JYP/GBP/EUR or AUD.
b) Moneybookers (moneybookers.com) - like paypal with a few differences. If you sign up for thier merchant program you can use them to accept CCrds in the same way as you can with Paypal, except that.
1. No chargebacks. Moneybookers is "hard" currency, once you have it it's yours to keep.
2. More currencies. Moneybookers allows you to accept payments (and hold balance) in more currencies than paypal.
3. To pay via credit card your users will (the first time they do) will either need an SMS capable cellphone handy (they send a confirmation code to it so they at least have a known-good cellphone number) or a fax machine.
The other options (2checkout.com, a real merchant account etc..) would likely be too expensive and too much trouble.
Did you hear that? It was the sound of the joke going right over your head.
Freeform is all very well, until you have to use the address programatically.
The classic example would be calculating accurate shipping costs, in that case typically you would want to know country, region, and maybe even city.
In a freeform field, it wouldn't be possible to distinguish these.
I don't think you got the joke.
See here for enlightenment.
You've confused KDE with Gnome there.
Your chance of getting diabetes has nothing to do with your calorie intake, it's all to do with the amount of sugar you eat
You are being VERY broad there.
Wikipedia has as good a breakdown of the types and possible causes of Diabetes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes
PNALEV can't be pronounced
Na-Lev, silent P.
Perhaps they're just cheap and never win auctions.
I signed up on New Zealand's local auction site when it first started, I'm number 283 out of nearly a million registered accounts, in that time (6 years) I've purchased only a couple of things, and sold only a couple of things.
But I do regularly bid on stuff. I'm just cheap.