Very busy week

Adele and Chris Jarvis at the support group Curling event

The JDRF Research Symposium was really interesting. Awesome I should say! Canadian rower and olympic medallist Chris Jarvis was very inspiring. As a lifelong athlete who can only dream of competing at this level, I have tremendous respect for anyone with enough talent and dedication to not only reach the olympic level but also win a gold medal. And on top of that have to achieve this while playing the Type 1 game. To me that is simply amazing! Chris Jarvis is a true hero and role model.

I was quite nervous doing my presentation at the symposium. I presented Islet transplant recipient Jason Turner. Apparently I didn't seem as nervous as I felt for those who were listening. I am very happy and proud to be able to contribute in any way possible to help find a cure for Type 1 Diabetes. Attending the symposium has also made me very, very motivated for our Mike's Bike Shop Cyclebetes 200 bike ride to cure Type 1 Diabetes on September 12th this year. I can't wait. It will surely be even bigger and better than last year!

I also had the chance to discuss with Chris about Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM). The Minimed pump has an integrated CGM. A sensor inserted in the skin continuously mesures glucose levels and a transmitter sends this data at regular intervals to the pump. A graph displaying these glucose values over time (in a 3 hour window) appears on the pump screen. The insulin pumping functionality of the pump doesn't take the glucose level into consideration when delivering insulin though, but you can set alarms that indicate low and high levels. It's not a pancreas, but it gives real-time values that you can use to better predict highs and/or lows. It's still very new technology and still needs to be tweaked in my opinion, but still very promising.

Last weekend Adele came down with a cold which caused her blood sugars to shoot up dramatically. She climbed to 23.2 from 6.9 in a few hours after lunch on Saturday. I had to be much more aggressive with insulin to bring these higher numbers down. I guesstimated on how much more she needed and we checked every hour for the rest of the day to see if it was enough or too much. Adele's cold got better as the week went on and as expected I needed to be less aggressive with insulin to avoid subsequent lows. That's how the Type 1 game goes, as soon as you get all insulin scales right, it all changes again and you have to start over. Thanks for reading...