Getting better

In the last week, my numbers have been slowly decreasing, along with the total number of insulin units per day. For the last weeks, I've had insane quantities of insulin injected (about 1 unit per kg and I'm no teenager) and still my numbers were high, high, high.
Well, hormonal changes will do that to you and I'm very happy to be back to normal again.
I didn't see this problem very debated in the DOC, so I'll write a little about how taking the pill affected my blood sugar.
In the first week, the changes in blood sugar weren't very dramatic, but I had to slowly make bigger boluses for the same amounts of food. That led to a weight increase, even if I don't think that I ate more than usual. I know you're supposed to have a greater appetite on pills but this didn't happen to me, I actually couldn't eat very much at the beginning.
I guess that if I would've closely monitored the numbers, I could have seen some steady pattern and I could have, in time, counteracted the effect of the hormones contained in the pill on the blood sugar.  But, as I've said earlier, the total amount of insulin was scary high, I ended up bolusing 1ui for every 5 carbs in the morning. In the evening, about 2h after taking the pill, I would always get a 200+ number, very insulin resistant too.
I was curious to have a HbA1c, to see just how much my average changed but I haven't gotten around to that. Hopefully, I'll have one this week, if not, my own averages show a definite rise.
It has gotten rather scary, at times, to bolus so much insulin but still see the food in front of me as a danger. I can see how, over the years, it's easy to develop an unhealthy relationship with food, as a diabetic.
So I had to give up taking the pill, even though I hate the fact that this would probably render my skin back to the awful state that it had before.
The effects on the blood sugar or the total insulin amount weren't the only ones concerning me. I've taken pills before having diabetes, and they definitely didn't hit as hard as they did this time. I know we're supposed to have weaker immunity with diabetes, but now I've experienced it first hand. The headaches, the stomach sickness, the weakness in the body, the increased appetite (that did, eventually, happen) are harder to bear with diabetes. You get used to this, in time, but it is something to take into consideration nonetheless.
Think about all the side effects before taking a decision, and think about them even after you've made your decision. It's definitely harder to adapt to birth control medication with diabetes, and it also isn't very appreciated by the endocrinologists (my doctor, for example, strongly disagrees with the pill).
This was my experience with the pills, anyway, and in the end I've decided to quit them. Adapting to the side effects has proven harder than expected, and plainly not worth it, for me. I would love to find more testimonies on the subject, it's very important to see more experiences before making this decision.

I hereby reclaim my independence

One of the things that bothered me after the diagnosis was my eagerness to please the endo with good numbers, to be the best person with diabetes etc. This has been a recurrent problem of mine, pleasing people even at my own expense. That lead me to believe that a good A1c (which I achieved, in the beginning, by waking up with a number of 60ish and being fine with that because it gave me a better mean and, hence, a better A1c, being that I was 60ish all night long). I felt happy mentally because I got this "good grade". I felt awful, physically because, well, I was basically low all night long and I couldn't sleep properly.
I had nightmares all the time, and if my desire to be a horror-story writer had been active at the time, boy I would've had the right material!
Now I'm dealing with reminiscences of this people-pleaser persona due to the fact that I have a meeting with my doctor tomorrow and my numbers have been awful lately (she would only look at this disastruous recent numbers).
For days I've tried to come up with arguments in my mind, arguing that I might have been a little sick, I was too busy to pay attention, food has declared war to me etc.
Which got me thinking that, again, I'm not worrying about these bad numbers. I'm just worried of how they make me look, like a bad student that didn't do his homework.
I'm not worried about the complications that I might be facing with these high and all over the place numbers, I'm just worried of being labeled as a bad diabetic.
And it hurts to be robbed of independence, to feel the need of explaining your decisions every three months. Sometimes we just get tired!
Sometimes food does declare war on us (Same food at dinner two nights in a row, same carbs, insulin, awaiting time, but a 2h test of 113 in the first night and 237 in the second; and I was eating beans. I didn't even know that beans could do that to me!).
Sometimes we just forget that the only judges of our diabetes behavior can only be ourselves.
So tomorrow I'm gonna march in that office without any excuses or explanations prepared. What I'm gonna do, instead, is work towards better numbers that would make me feel proud or guilty, and not necessarily the endocrinologist.
Note: I had to draw my own picture because Google couldn't find another image with a bad PWD. There's only me out there! And yes, stripes are back in.

Regrouping for the new year

I don't necessarily believe in the cosmic importance of the New Year's Eve anymore - it's just a date set by humanity for administrative purposes. But I can't help my urge to set resolutions, treat this new year like a new chance, new possibilities to be better, do better etc.
So I found myself thinking about what I want for myself for this new year (only for myself, I'm selfish that way; I understand that you're also supposed to wish things for your family and for the Universe; I just believe in self-control, how can I wish to control my family, much less the Universe? Ofcourse, I wish them only the best, but that's irrelevant; they have to want the wish in order for it to happen; moving on).
Diabetes takes up a lot from my resolutions. A lot. Like, 90 percent.
But it's also what makes most of my life nowadays, being merely a baby with diabetes (1 year on December 28th; present? Gary Scheiner's Think like a pancreas).
Just yesterday I was thinking that I would want to trust my abilities to control my diabetes better, to really trust my insulin to carb ratios and I was thinking that I could drop the 2 hours post meal tests, since I pay for these tests myself.
In the morning, my 2h post-breakfast is stellar, between 90 and 130. But that's just because it's slowly creeping to 140-150 before lunch. So I was thinking that I could drop that test, since it never tells me something new, and save some money. This morning my 2h test was 57.
It really is an ironic disease.
Going back to my resolutions, I still need to think about them, to organise them in neatly little bullets.
Obviously, they'll be the normal ones for people with diabetes: make better food choices, tighter control, more activity, yadda-yadda-yadda.
But they are already forcing me to have better numbers.