Here are a couple of news tidbits sent in by my ever-alert brother, who has indeed found a 25^th hour in the day.

The first story concerns Randy Gallmeyer, a Type 1 diabetic who died after apparently not being given his medication while incarcerated in a Minnesota county jail.  

Story number two is about Diabetes Response Service, “the first and only pro-active emergency response system, (that) launches in the United States and Canada December 1st, 2007 providing scheduled daily phone call support from live operators who monitor the subscribers to prevent hypoglycemia and complications such as seizures, brain cell death and physical death.”

Lastly, another reader suggested that I should include a reminder to have a look at some of these  (which are updated a couple of times every week) before you log off and head into the weekend.

Have a great one, everybody!!

Laughter is the best medicine - unless you're diabetic, then insulin comes pretty high on the list.
--Jasper Carrott

I'm fine, but I'm bipolar. I'm on seven medications, and I take medication three times a day. This constantly puts me in touch with the illness I have. I'm never quite allowed to be free of that for a day. It's like being a diabetic.
--Carrie Fisher

About ten years ago, outside my parents' home in rural Rhode Island, a high pitched "distress" meow caught our attention one evening.  We followed the pleas down the driveway and into the woods, where a much smaller version of the kitty pictured below was all by his lonesome and hurting from a scraped lower lip.  He asked if he could stay, and we were glad to have him.  Tonight, he gets the spotlight.  Ladies and gentlemen, our feline from the forest, Tiger Woods!!

Cleaning up around the house before Thanksgiving, I pulled my old high school yearbook off the shelf to kill a few minutes reminiscing. What fell out from between the pages made me snicker. In this book was a piece of sophomore biology class memorabilia that I had thought about over the years, but was sure that I would never see again. It was from a lab experiment in which the assignment was to determine our own blood type.

Needless to say, there were a few in the class who were not looking forward to that day. Brother Daniel, the teacher, assured us all that no one would be exempted; we were all going to determine our own blood types, using our own freshly drawn blood, and there would be no exceptions.

What had fallen from my yearbook was an extra blood lancet that had survived for three decades among the images of me and my ninety-four classmates.

My dx came when I was 23, several years after graduating high school, so this story predates my first diabetes-related experiences with lancets and lancet devices. I’ve taken a little good natured heat over the fact that I still use a very old Ames Autolet lancet device in 2007, but these crude, paper-wrapped implements that were distributed to my high school pals and me to use on our own fingers make my Autolet look like space age high technology.

This evil looking tool is 100% sheet metal, stamped by the thousands from coils of thin gage stock on an industrial punch press, and sandwiched inside a paper wrapper. It might have been considered advanced technology around the time when the last Whig occupied the White House.

The class assembled in the lab that day, and Brother Dan instructed us to pierce our fingers quickly, and not linger like frightened grade school children. Hesitating would only make matters worse. He also said that if any of us could not accomplish the task, we were to go to him for help, and he would draw our blood for us. I still remember his exact, French-Canadian accented words.

“I do it . . . (he paused to look us in the eyes) . . . painlessly.”

Before long, one squeamish kid who could not bring himself to pierce his own fingertip sought help from our pedagogue, and I’ll wager a month’s grocery money that kid remembers what happened in excruciating detail. Brother Daniel laid the lancet flat onto the meaty part of the student’s fingerprint, and literally “can opened” the flesh like you would a can of broth. As the room filled with the poor kid’s tormented cries of anguish, and Brother Dan’s order that he not be “such a sissy,” every last one of us immediately mustered the courage to come up with our own little sample of our own blood on our own terms, thank you.

“. . . painlessly.”

So the lesson of the day was learned quite well. And no, it had nothing to do with blood types – I sincerely doubt if any of us could recall what we looked at that day through our microscopes. Rather, this class of sophomore biology students learned unexpectedly about the sometimes chilling consequences of believing everything we hear.

John Howland needed air. Everyone did. After weeks of a miserable existence inside the smelly ‘tween decks of the Mayflower, he decided to make his way up to the outside deck, hoping for at least a brief respite from the foul and claustrophobic confines he shared with about one hundred shipmates. But escaping into the atmosphere of the open sea, he got more than he had bargained for.

A native of the landlocked town of Fenstanton, Huntingdonshire, the twenty-five-ish Howland was hardly a man of the sea. The gale force winds that greeted his arrival above decks quickly forced him to the ship’s rail, and ultimately banished him overboard into the merciless Atlantic.

John Howland’s fate was not to end with a tragic drowning in 1620, however. In the water, within reach of his strong grip, was a loose halyard, a line used for lifting and dropping one of the ship’s sails. Howland found the rope and, literally holding on for dear life, was able to be pulled by crew members back to safety aboard the ship.

Today, Howlands can look back nearly four hundred years to the determined grip of their patriarch, knowing that his powerful yearning for life, and for a new life, averted not only his own death, but ensured life for his future ten children, eighty-eight grandchildren, and generations of Howlands to come, all while in the most real sense, at the end of his rope.

References for this story of John Howland include Mayflower, A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick, and this web page.

Have a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving, everyone, and please know how thankful I am for each one of you in our diabetes online community.

1. I emptied George Goble’s ash tray when I was fifteen and to this day I still smell like a cigar.

2. I own a 1978 Ford E-150 van that I bought brand new. I was at the dealership to take delivery between noon and 1:00pm on May 6, 1978. So I will always know exactly where I was and what I was doing at 12:34 5-6-78.

3. I have held my knife and fork like drumsticks since I took lessons in grade school, and that will never change.

4. Left shoe goes on before the right. No exceptions, ever. Especially in the shoe store.

5. I still have a piece of pencil lead embedded in my right hand since first grade. My father has one he got in the sixth grade. Apple doesn’t fall far, I guess.

6. My childhood doctor was Rupert von Trapp, of the family of Trapp singers from Austria. On his waiting room wall hung a little metal skunk with the inscription, “Why be nasty, when you can be a real stinker?”

6 ½. I would like to own the autographs of Louis Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, and Lance Armstrong.

7. It would really make my day to receive a comment from Mary Tyler Moore or Bobby Clarke.

My Taggers were Amylia, Jillian, and Mandy. My Taggees are

Alison http://thegreensneakers.blogspot.com/

Denise http://shotheard.blogspot.com/

Kendra http://sugarsick.blogspot.com/

Cory http://www.trixiefirecory.blogspot.com/

Beatriz http://betizuka.com/reddot/

Nikki http://nikki-diabetes.blogspot.com/

That's only six, but it ain't easy finding untagged bloggers.

1. Link to the person’s blog who tagged you.

2. Post these rules on your blog.

3. List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.

4. Tag seven random people at the end of your post.

5. Let each person know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

Have you ever had to recreate your pump’s entire basal life from scratch? Mine flashed before my very eyes this weekend.

As usual, I waited until the last possible second to get ready to go out to dinner with my in-laws on Saturday evening. We had twenty-five minutes to fit in three quarters of an hour of stuff. Not to worry. Been there before.

But this night was different. Just as I was about to jump into the shower, I suspended the old Paradigm and noticed the LOW BATTERY warning. NancyTW has taught me not to procrastinate so much, and to deal with things (the mail, returning phone calls, tests under 30!!) as soon as they come up. I used to be much worse, and developed a habit of leaving non-life-sustaining issues until tomorrow. Life-sustaining ones only got pushed back to the afternoon. But I am better now.

Sometimes “better” still gets me in trouble.

I grabbed a nickel and unscrewed the battery cap on my pump. After tossing the old battery, I took the brand new one that I keep in my meter kit, slipped it into the housing, and snugged the cap back into place. Then the fun started.

After some hesitation and beeping, my little blue amigo told me in no uncertain terms that there had been a FAILED BATT TEST, that delivery had been stopped, and that it really wanted me to do something like “replace battery now,” or words to that effect. I don’t really remember. There are, after all, a thousand ways to say, “Your screwed, pal.”

“Replace batt . . . yeah, right. I just did,” I muttered.

With about ten minutes to go before we had to leave, and me still looking like I just did a brake job, I needed this little setback like I needed poison ivy. My brand new battery wasn’t brand new enough, apparently. No problem. I can replace battery now. I can do that. Sure. I’ll just replace battery now.

You already know what’s coming, don’t you?

That’s right. There were no more AAA batteries in the house. You’d think that a guy running a diabetes junk drawer might be able to put his hands on a battery, wouldn’t you? Wrong. For the first time in nine years, I was watching my MiniMed starve. It was spewing out what seemed like louder and more continuous beeping gasps for energy than ever before, and all I could do was watch. My pump was fading into its own version of hypoglycemia. I thought about giving it juice.

So I fished through the trash for the old battery, knowing that the good folks at Medtronic had very smartly programmed their LOW BATTERY indicator to begin warning users approximately one full hockey season before a battery actually runs completely out of power. But as I fished I knew full well that those same nice @&%#^$&!* folks had also programmed my little insulin buddy to accept nothing but a fresh, new, fully charged battery. The old battery would be of absolutely no use, and I might as well have jettisoned it into outer space, for all the good it was to me.

So, of course, I popped it back into place and tightened down the hatch, knowing exactly what was about to happen.

FAILED BATT TEST.

“$hite!,” as my Irish ancestors must have said when their insulin pumps went down. More beeps and buzzers and bells and cries for help. And it was time to leave.

We drove to my in-laws, in whose home you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a TV remote control. They must have fifty of them (remotes, not dead felines.) Surely I would find a supply of batteries from which I could scavenge one to tide me over. That pump didn’t shut up for the whole ride. I yelled at it, “For something that’s tired, weak, and has no energy, you make an awful lot of noise!”

What I most worried about was the possible loss of all my basal rates, which, after years of tweaks and adjustments, now add up to ten. Plus there was the extra pattern buried in there that I haven’t said hello to in a while. I have all this info on file at home, but we were going out for the evening, and any reconstruction would have had to wait until we returned late into the night if all that data was lost.

Fortunately, there was no further disaster on Saturday night. I got myself a new battery at my in-laws’ home for wayward remotes, and none of my precious basals had been disturbed. Based on previous experiences, I probably could have gone through the whole night and into Sunday with the LOW BATT warning and done just fine. But no, I had to deal with the issue promptly. Anyway, seven of us all went out and enjoyed wonderful meals that included swordfish, fillet mignon, and a freshwater grouper fish called scamp, which I was not familiar with.

I guess it’s fitting that I start Thanksgiving week as a real Energizer Turkey.  That's me, by the way, up there in the picture, crossing the road on my way over to my in-laws'. 

Does anyone know if all basal info is lost when a 512 is completely run down and in a totally powerless state? 

Leave a message because I’ll be out buying batteries.