Living Well With Diabetes

I’m having trouble sleeping these days. One reason for that is that my turn to be on-call for my work group came up and I’ve been the “first-responder” for any issues that might be reported on the web sites and web applications that we support.

There have been a couple of late-night and early-morning calls, but that’s not really what’s been disturbing my sleep recently. The real reason for my restless sleep is a statistic from the International Diabetes Federation (IDF). Earlier this month, at the World Diabetes Congress in Cape Town, South Africa, the IDF announced that worldwide, diabetes now claims more lives per year than even AIDS. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always considered AIDS as the most-feared disease of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Well, I guess I can stop thinking that now. The IDF reports that diabetes affects 5.9 percent of the world’s adult population and accounts for 3.8 million deaths a year.

You can read more about this here:

Diabetes Affects 246 Million, Kills More Than AIDS

and here:

Diabetes Has Surpassed AIDS!

Despite the news, I’m having a very happy holiday season at home this year. (The most important phrase in that previous sentence is “at home”.) I hope all you Living Well With Diabetes viewers out there are having a very happy and healthy holiday season as well.

Comments(1)

A couple days ago, I was browsing through some of the diabetes web sites that I visit now and then. There was an announcement of a “dramatic diabetes breakthrough”. For some reason, titles like that catch my attention.

The announcement described a surprising discovery by scientists at a Toronto hospital. They injected diabetic mice with a neuropeptide substance and capsaicin (the active ingredient in hot chili peppers) and this caused a reversal in the symptoms of diabetes.

There’s much work still to be done, the scientists admit, but the reason this is such an important announcement is that it represents a whole new way of looking at diabetes. The traditional way of thinking of diabetes is as an autoimmune disease. This new approach looks at it as a disease of the nervous system.

You can read more about this on the following web sites:

• Diabetes Daily: Dramatic Diabetes Breakthrough
• Diabetes Mine: Diabetes Breakthrough Today
• National Post: Diabetes Breakthrough

Comments(2)

Recovery from my bicycle crash back on October 28 is progressing slowly but surely. The splints I had on my left hand and arm are gone now! The finger splint went over two weeks ago and the arm splint went on December 7.

While I’ve been healing, I’ve been trying to stay active by doing a lot of walking with the dogs and occasional sessions on the indoor stationary bike. Now that I have the arm splint is off, I think I can get more serious about those sessions and, if the weather is good and the roads are dry, even consider a ride outside.

I’m also doing quite a bit of reading these days. I’m catching up on the reading I didn’t do while I was out bicycling on The Dream Tour. Some of the reading is research though. I’m trying to get myself organized to write a book about the adventure of visiting each of the forty-eight contiguous states by bicycle.

These are the most recent books that I’ve read and enjoyed:

• Miles From Nowhere by Barbara Savage
  This is a story of a married couple who decided to take time out from modern life and ride their bicycles around the world. As far as books about traveling by bicycle go, this is a classic.
• The Tour by Dave Shields
  Dave Shields is a local (Salt Lake City, Utah) writer. The Tour is a fictional account of the pressures experienced by a rider in the Tour de France.
• Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo
  This is a fictional story about life in a small town in upstate New York. On The Dream Tour, we spent a lot of time in upstate New York, so I can remember bicycling through towns exactly like the ones he describes. This is a book that Pat and I both enjoyed. How’s that for a recommendation?
• Heft on Wheels by Mike Magnuson
  A non-fictional account of how Mike, a self-described 255 pound lummox, did a “180″ in life. Through cycling, he stopped smoking, quit drinking, gave up junk food and lost 75 pounds.
• The Rider by Tim Krabbé
  This is a cycling classic by the author of The Vanishing and The Cave. This 150-page book tells the detailed story of a single, 150 kilometer race as experienced by one rider, the author. I felt like I really experienced what bike racing is all about. From speed, strategy, and teamwork to danger, pain and sacrifice, it’s all there in the space of one 150 kilometer race. “Racing is licking your opponent’s plate clean before starting on your own.” Great stuff! I loved this one.
• 28 Days Behind Bars by Harold Wagoner
  One man’s adventure crossing the United States by bicycle in 28 days.

Comments(1)