Year in review

Towards the end of 2013 I got it in my head to start and MBA Program. After meeting with the program administrator at the time I discovered if I did go to St. Kate's I would be the first male graduate of the MBA Program. Looking back on the first year its less of a big deal to me that I could be the first man to get the MBA there and more excited I made it half way.

I was supposed to have Fargo Marathon be my 6th marathon but then I was sick in February and March but also decided to not run because class was on Saturdays and I didn't want to miss class in fear of falling behind. Twin Cities Marathon was my 6th marathon. I almost didn't run it because I had been lazy all summer and a few friends said it was better to train for a last ditch effort vs. not even starting. I was able to finish the marathon on 7 weeks of training. As I ran the marathon I came across another couple that said its better to be a part of the DNF club vs. DNS. That is Did Not Finish vs. Did Not Start.

Seven year anniversary with my wife on the 29th of December!

January 4th will make 15 years at my current employer with 3 years at the current location. Longest time I've worked at one place in the same job, the longest I've worked in one place was 4 years but two different positions. Cray cray.

2015 should be an exciting year, this is what's planned:

Year 2 of the MBA, graduate in December but class done in January 16'

2 Marathons, Fargo and Twin Cities(if I hear back from Global Hero's I'll make it 4 marathons on the year because I want Twin Cities to be 5th TCM and 10th overall)

Make it a great year folks!

Douglas Scalia

Can't get the words out

Do you sometimes find a low blood sugar brings a bunch of random thoughts and its hard to get all the words out? You find yourself babbling inside your mind about all the things you are thinking and trying to find a way to say or do things but your'e worried about it coming out wrong? You're sitting there wondering if the thoughts are real or fake, are you imagining things or are they actually happening? Does this happen to you?

I wonder how things got to where they are now. How did my blood sugar just hit 66? I tested at what would have been a normal time of night and I was 175 and I took a 2.4 correction bolus, why am I 66? What if I wasn't up at 1:00 a.m. watching a TV show and I were actually in bed sleeping? How low would my sugar have gone? I am not wearing a sensor. I didn't feel low I just tested because I was about to shut my body off for sleep. 

What if I went to bed with out testing and didn't wake up? Why am I lucky and haven't experienced hypoglycemia? Some say its not a matter of if but when and that's bullshit! Should I not have corrected and just kept my 175 and fallen asleep?

#NeedACure 

The day my life changed forever

In May of 1998 I was let go from a job where I had benefits, 401K, and good career potential. I was always a good employee at my previous employer and didn't burn any bridges when I left so when I went back to see if I could go back they did hire me back. The job I went back to was McDonald's, and I went back as a manager. It was a salary position and I was making $23,000 a year, good money as a 19-20 year old. Eventually I got tired of the long hours and split my time between McDonald's and Perkins, I worked part time at both and got good tips at Perkins so I started to like it more there. At Perkins I remember a guy named Chris, he went to the same high school as I did but graduated a few years ahead of me. Chris was a type 1 diabetic.

While working between McDonald's and Perkins I recall loosing weight. I knew something was wrong with me I just wasn't certain what it was. I ended up looking for new employment again, I missed banking and wanted to find something in banking again. TCF took me on, I say they took me on because I was nervous I wouldn't get hired again because I got fired from my previous bank position. Luckily for me they took the chance and brought me on. I remember I was hired at $8.26 and hour, and that was 20 hours a week. 

I did good work at TCF and eventually I was promoted to more hours and a new position, this meant I got benefits! Benefits was really important to me but looking back why didn't I just go to the doctor? I started working for the bank in February and was promoted to getting benefits by mid May. May 24th is the day my life changed forever. 

I had a feeling I was a type 1 diabetic, I remember talking with Chris at Perkins about the symptoms of Type 1 Diabetes. He remained confident that I wasn't a type 1 but I had a feeling I was. Living in St. Paul with my buddy Mike Peterson I remember going down to the Super America near our home and buying one gallon of water, 12 pack of soda, jug of OJ, I was thirsty ALL THE TIME! Worse than being thirsty I had to go to the bathroom all the time. I remember early in my career at TCF I would be going to the bathroom at least every half hour if not more, it was annoying to say the least. 

Finally I have medical insurance and I think I'm a type 1 diabetic so I go to the doctor to get the results, I'm looking at those results tonight and honestly don't know what half of it says still. I can see the test were completed at 7:26 a.m., I must have had a 7:00 a.m. doctor appointment. The result of what ever tests were done was printed at 7:38 a.m. The doctor comes back into the office and says "Well Doug, I have good news and bad news" looks at me and says "The good news is you were right, the bad news is you were right." I went into the doctor telling him I thought I was a Type 1 Diabetic. 

May 24, 1999 at around 8:00 a.m. it was confirmed, I am diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. 

Strange Feeling

I'll see posts from friends in the diabetes community who have been diabetic all their life as in since they were little kids. I sometimes wonder if their life is worse because they've had it their whole life or is my diabetes less significant since I was 20 when I was diagnosed. My sister was diagnosed when she was 30 so does that make hers less severe?

Type one diabetes sucks, some days it occupies all your thoughts. Yesterday I went to the Twins Baseball game and I put a new CGM in. It took forever for the CGM to read as a new sensor and actually took six hours of unplugging it, charging it, removing it from the clip, blah blah blah but it finally worked! Then it was reading above 400 when it was actually 150, here comes the #calerror alarm.

So the real reason for this post was inspired by Alison Peters, a friend I met on Facebook at some point in the past. She asked a question about mixing insulin, man its been YEARS since I've done that! Below I'm going to talk about my treatment through the years, focus on the word I'm using, TREATMENT.

NPH - Twice a Day
Regular - a few hours before I ate

Here is how it would work:

Wake up and take a combination of NPH and Regular. In essence what you were doing was covering the following:

Breakfast, Snack, Lunch

Get home from work and take another combination of NPH and Regular but this time you were covering for dinner and evening snack.

What if you wanted to eat more or eat less? You could adjust your insulin intake on a sliding scale so you had a little room to work with but not quite as much room once I moved to the new insulin.

Round 2

Lantus and Humalog

How Lantus was first explained to me was you take it once a day and if you eat nothing you should be within 30 ml/d up or down from the start of the day.

Humalog was to cover anything I ate, the neat thing was I could eat when ever I wanted instead of a fixed time. I could also take the insulin right before I ate, I could eat 100 times a day and take 100 shots or I could eat nothing and take no shots. Life was so much better like this, funny i gained a lot of weight around this time but I blame metabolism and quitting smoking.

Round 3

Insulin Pump

I'd have to say insulin pump has been the best. Temp Basal, Bolus to the .1 unit of insulin, Correcting at .75 units...control you wouldn't get with regular injections. Don't get me wrong a lot of people do well with injections but personally I really prefer the pump.

All of this being said, all the above rounds are still just rounds of TREATMENT not a cure. (Sad Face)

Should I cry?

The other day I had a couple of people tag me in a post or mention something about the new Google technology and having the sensor somehow be able to work in a contact lens, here is that story:

http://www.ydr.com/nation-world/ci_24961841/google-develops-contact-lens-glucose-monitor

I'll be honest, I didn't read the entire article because I personally can't stand contacts and this would never work for me. One of the people whom shared the story with me mentioned "oh yes, I forgot its all about Doug" and I missed the point she was making which was this is another potential advancement for people with diabetes or as used in social media #pwd.

This evening I saw another blog article about the Google product and that is below:

http://techland.time.com/2014/01/17/googles-smart-contact-lens-is-cool-but-id-rather-just-have-my-diabetes-cured/#ixzz2r5ykEIcV

The person in the second article who I feel quite close to for two reasons, we're both type one diabetic and he has a pretty cool name, Doug. I disagree that there is too much money being earned to prevent a cure because too much money is being made to treat diabetes but you have to start thinking a bit about which is more important, the treatment or the cure.

A few weeks back on Facebook I asked the following question:

If you donated $1,000 for the next 5 years to help fund finding a cure and because of your good deed you would never be diagnosed with the disease, would you do it?

Today I had someone in my office telling me about all the complications one has in their family because of diabetes related issues, is fear going to help cure my diabetes?

The title of this article is "Should I Cry" but for those who don't know me, a cry could be needed here and there. A shout of frustration occasionally when you seem to be doing everything right and seeing nothing but negative results. Cry, bitch, moan, complain? What good would any of that do? For my college graduation my Mother, Leann Scalia, gave me a pretty cool gift. It was a desk weight and it read "what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"

I'll live another day, that's what!

Before signing up

Aren't New Years Resolutions fun? We hear a ton about people setting them, we hear about people missing them, but when do we have the opportunity to hear a success story? Welcome to my journey, I'm going to have to break up the story into bits and pieces because my mind things about a hundred different things and I'm not quite sure how to segment it all out unless I just write out part by part, so here is my short story, part 1:

Around the holiday season in 2010 I read an article online and I really wish I kept that article because I would really love to give the author credit for their story but it went something like this:

Even though weight loss is a positive goal, most people whom try to lose weight are setting themselves up for failure because its founded on a negative emotion. 

So most people that want to lose weight probably decide to join a gym, do some machines, maybe try some lifting, after all how hard could it be? But to tell you the truth I had no idea how, the article continued by saying:

Try signing up for a 5k or 10k in order to raise money for something near and dear to your heart, if you have a time goal as a part of your fundraising your efforts are yielding a positive result from positive behaviors and weight loss may be a positive side effect.

This makes sense, I'll run a marathon and not raise money for charity, after all this is what I just got done reading? Who the heck knows but as I see it this was my thought process though and eventually it was set, I would run a marathon. At first I was just telling myself, maybe I'd mention something to my wife, then I started telling other people. If you're going to tell someone you're going to run a marathon you better dang well do it right? As I continued to talk about it I had actually convinced myself I could do it.

I researched Twin Cities Marathon, my father George Scalia ran it when he was 50 and my younger brother Robert ran it twice. I remember going to watch my dad run but for some reason I can't recall when my brother did it, or at least I remember him doing it but don't remember going to watch him. Rob let me be my official apology, I'm a jerk and sorry I don't remember supporting you on your marathon ventures big time bad brother syndrom and I appreciate all your support the last three years at TCM. Back on track, I found out Twin Cities opened for registration on February 2nd so on February 1st I went online to sign up at midnight because again if I was signed up I had to do it, right?

I quick checked my email and I still have the auto reply from TCM Confirming my entry into the 30th running of the Twin Cities Marathon. 11:52 pm its time stamped, I could even wait for midnight for registration to open. Its confirmed, race day October 2, 2011 would be my first marathon.