Sugar Turned On Me

Anyone who was a kid remembers that when adults attempted to make something fun, it usually came out lame if not embarrassing. It’s not that their hearts weren’t in the right place, it’s just they weren’t connecting to the actual interests of their youthful audience. Trying to make medical stuff fun? Even worse.

It usually involved a musical number.

However, today someone pointed me towards a trailer for a video game targeting kids with Type 1 diabetes. It’s called The Magi and The Sleeping Star . It involves a character who is the chosen one, has to save his homeland, yadda yadda. He also is diabetic and has to periodically take care of himself.

The trailer shows a third person shooter gaming environment  similar to the Ratchet and Clank series or later Jak and Daxter games. There’s things to shoot and puzzles to solve, but mostly we see the shooting.

My fear is that someone tacked on a Blood Glucose mini-game to an existing property.  That said, it looks like it might have some entertainment value and I’m certainly not going to begrude a kid growing up with diabetes a video game that speaks directly to them. Also, all we’ve seen is one trailer and that’s not enough to form anything resembling a solid opinion.

So if you have a kid with Type 1 and you let them blow things up, keep an eye out for this one.

A friend of mine recently was told that she might be among the diabetic recently.  Knowing of my still less than a year old diagnosis, she called me and asked for tips. The call was educational, but I think more for me than for her.

My friend had already started changing her diet, eating better and working on carbs. The numbers that alarmed her doctor were borderline, not very different from what mine were like on the day my doctor got worried. So outside of pointing out that it’s not the end of the world, what was there to say?

Sadly, not a lot. I recommended a product or two that I like, reminded her to stay up beat. Thankfully, she had a handle on the situation to begin with, diabetes running in her family.

The things I was reminded of in that phone call:

• I’m am not the authority of all things related to diabetes.
• You can already be changing your lifestyle and still have blood sugar issues.
• …and that doesn’t mean you’ve failed.
•  Sometimes, solidarity is about all you can offer someone going through a bad time.

The good news is that she still has her A1C results coming, so there’s a possibility she’s not looking at diagnosis of diabetes even if she is kind of having a “come to Jesus” moment about her diet. She’s also got a great set of friends (not just me) and a good family at home to help her deal with whatever the doctor tells her.

As for me, I’m a little sad that after a year I didn’t have more to say to her (I should have this diabetes thing down, right?). But on the other hand, knowing that your knowledge isn’t complete is part of a path towards becoming wiser. And that’s something I’m pretty sure I can always do.

I work in a three story building. Nothing enormous as architecture goes, but enough to have an elevator in it. Often, that elevator prevents a challenge. And I’m not talking about the inordinate number of times it’s been down for repairs.

You see, right next to elevator is a door. That door leads to a set of stairs. The stairs, as they often do, lead up to my floor.

I don’t think about the stairs when I’m in a hurry as somewhere in my 21st century conditioning I equate “automated” with “fast”. But there are times that I think of them, often on rainy days. On rainy days, I can’t go for my lunchtime walk outside. But I’ve got my stairs.

The Stairmaster is a piece of gym equipment that sells for a fair bit of cash and demonstrates what we all pretty much had figured out: climbing stairs is exercise. The machine version of stairs has some advantages over regular stairs (less of a chance of falling, the ability to vary the depth of the step) but one of the best arguments against accquiring one or joining a gym just to use it is that you can get the same experience by just finding a nearby set of non-mechanical stairs and climbing them.

Back to rainy days.

When it rains, somewhere in the whiney-crybaby-I-don’t-wanna* part of my brain I figure I don’t have a means to exercise. But as there is a perfectly reasonable set of stairs in my building, I have to accept that I do have the means and bloody well should get off my butt and use them.

The moral of this tale is that there’s almost always a way to exercise, an environment that you can set yourself to task in even on days when you think you can’t.

And with that, I’m going to go stop talking about exercise and go do it.

*I can’t claim authorship of this adjective phrase. Thank you Ms. Alder.