So, once in the hospital, they are not as concerned about
his leg as they are his blood sugar levels.
And the levels are not going down very fast. It was quickly determined that he was beyond
the “take pills for it” stage and was taught how to check his blood sugar
levels and how to inject himself with insulin.
There were instructions that quite frankly I didn’t completely
understand but I figured that between the two of us we might be able to piece
it together. (I am such an optimist...) The hospital sent in the Diabetes Educator
to talk to us. I was trying to follow but I don’t think she
was ever given a lesson in talking to idiots.
She was perhaps a level or two above where we could comprehend. I
don’t think that she understood how panicked and stupid we felt. Basically we left the hospital with lots of
written information and not much completely sinking in. We knew that he had to keep his blood sugar
as consistent as possible but we weren’t really clear how to do that except
that he had to eat and eat the right things.
Interestingly, the right things for him were not the same right things
for me on Weight Watchers. Whereas I
could eat all the fruit I wanted, he absolutely could not pig out on
fruit. Really has anyone ever put those
words together? Pig out on fruit? Talk about a contradiction in terms!
A long 4 days later, we are going home with insulin (2 kinds) and
antibiotics, lancets, alcohol wipes, gauze, packing tape, sterile water, and
bandages. I have been trained to “pack”
his wound and he has been trained in taking his blood sugar levels and giving
himself insulin. I am not sure that
either one of us is confident about our new roles but we weren’t really given a
choice.
At home, we read a lot and worked on figuring out snacks. For some reason, snacks seemed very
involved. This might give you an
indication as to how out of it we were.
We were obsessed with snacks. It
was probably easier to concentrate on snacks than to look at the big
picture. Part of this is that snacks
were not what we thought of as snacks.
They were move of a “bite” than a snack.
And there seemed to be some mysterious balancing that needed to be
done. He sat at the computer and entered
in lots of information and I looked at cookbooks. I also went to the bookstore and picked up
some books. We played to our strengths –
he did spreadsheets and I went to the book store. Luckily,
we went to the endocrinologist the next day.
In my editorial fashion, let me say that the endocrinologist
is about 12 years old. I think this is great. Why?
Well, two reasons – she should be around for awhile and because she
should be up on the latest information. Another other positive thing is that she has
access to the hospital electronic medical records and therefore has access to
all his medical records. She knew all
his levels and what they had done in the hospital. She checked him out and issued her feeling
that he was in good shape and had probably not been diabetic very long as there
did not seem to be any damage. He has
complete feeling in his feet – an important indicator it seems. This is great news. Also, she indicated that he is an excellent
candidate to get off the insulin shots – IF HE LOSES WEIGHT! Then we were ushered into the dietician’s
office. Each time you see the doctor you also see the
dietician. This is brilliant. We really needed her help. And help she did. I will admit that I was not as smitten with
her as my husband. Since he was the
important one, that was okay. She
recommended a cookbook and another book for carbohydrate counting. (Oh goodie, I got to buy more). We left there armed with more information and
the knowledge that we did not know anything and were really sloppy in our
eating habits.
I promise I will explain about the 9 inch plate in the next
post!
Thanks for reading.
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