Summer has arrived!

Now for those beach bums that are out there this is a very abnormal English summer. It's not raining. No, seriously, it's been sunny all this week. The temperatures have generally been at around twenty five degrees celcius. At work today we couldn't get below twenty five and a half degrees even with the air conditioning on. It must have been hellish outside.

Now, heat increases insulin sensitivity in alot of diabetics. I'm not an exception here. I've had several hypos because of it. The sensitivity increases because a raised body temperature causes something called vasodilation to occur. This is when blood vessels dilate to allow a greater volume of bloody to come into contact with surrounding tissues to disperse and escape the body thus keeping the body temperature at about thirty seven degrees celcius. What this means for insulin is that more of it is absorbed so the potency of what's in your system increases and sometimes results in hypos. Now when you're at work, and, in my case wearing a lab coat in a very warm lab this happens reasonably frequently. I cannot for the life of me work out why this is so. I just suppose that I can get there in the end by it's hellishly frustrating in the mean time. Thinking cynically here, this will help me to lower my HbA1C so it's a case of swings and roundabouts!

Now pasta. A food that I love but one that is a bugger to judge over how long I give my bolus for or for how I arrange my dual wave bolus for. Let's just say the first has been more successful than the second! However, tonight's story is a different one. I forgot to give my bolus for tea. Prior to eating I was at 5.7 mmol/L. I only realised this as I was looking at my pump to see how long it would be until I would have to do a two hours after a meal check. It showed me that my last bolus had been at 15:20 that afternoon for an ice cream that I ate to cool down at work. No bolus given for tea. Instant action of testing bloody glucose. I got a reading of 9.2 mmol/L. Thankfully pasta releases it's carbohydrate very slowly. I was lucky this time, if it had been anything else I reckon that I would have been alot worse off. Moral of the story, something to which I will almost certainly not adhere to is to check if I did actually give my bolus!

Next weekend will be bloody good fun. I am meeting with a group of raving mad folk otherwise known as fellow diabetics in that jewel of the south Brighton. This basically starts out with bloody good intentions but ultimately degenerates into a drinking session with a set of wonderful people. I'm waiting on the hangover and hole in the bank balance.

What I've also done this fine day is to order the forms for my provisional driving liscence. I'm going to be learn to drive this summer. It's high time that I did so. A word of warning, steer clear of the roads and pavements in Eastbourne. I may well be bearing down upon you with great speed in an out of control set of wheels. Look out!