Living Well With Diabetes

I took off on a bike ride on Sunday towards the closest stretch of remote country road I could find. I was remembering from my recent bicycle tour how calming and peaceful a quiet road can be.

There’s a 15 mile or so stretch of frontage road along I-80 west of Salt Lake City and that’s where I was headed. It’s flat, it’s mostly well-maintained, it’s quiet (except for the I-80 traffic), and it’s perfect for an easy, nothing-to-accomplish, meditative spin — the cycling equivalent of “navel-gazing”, I suppose.

I passed a few cyclists as I headed west on the frontage road towards the Salt Lake Marina. There was the occasional solo cyclist out for the same kind of relaxing afternoon in the saddle I was in search of. I passed one group of five or six riders headed in the opposite direction.. I remember them because they were yelling and screaming and swerving in the road and seemed to be having entirely too much fun.

I didn’t think about this group again until I was headed back towards Salt Lake City. The frontage road, like I said, is long, straight, and flat. I could see a good distance ahead of me. In the distance, I saw what looked like a car stopped in the middle of the road. As I got closer, I realized it was a group of people. I wondered if it was the group of too-happy cyclists fixing a flat — that’ll take some of the fun out them! Closer still, I realized they were huddled around something. Oh no, I thought, somebody crashed. That would be bad. I kept approaching and saw that whatever they were huddled around, it wasn’t moving. That’s not good, I thought. Then I got close enough that I could see it wasn’t a person after all. It looked like cloth or a bag. Were they covering something up? That’s really not good.

I finally coasted up along side the group and could see it was a large duffel bag. I thought, “Hmmm. What a strange place to open up a duffel bag.” I asked “What’s going on?” thinking I could offer some help if they needed any. Except their response made it clear they didn’t need help at all. One of them said “We found this duffel bag on our way out to the Marina, so we stashed it here. Now we’re seeing if there’s anything good in it.”

I thought back to my recent bicycle tour and how vulnerable I felt carrying all my possessions in four small panniers, none of which could be locked or secured in any way. I would have been devastated if somebody had walked up to my bike while I was in a store or something and taken one or more of my panniers. Depending on which ones they took, it could have been the end of my tour or it could have been a medical emergency. If I had some place to securely store my belongings, I would have done it. But, I didn’t and that’s part of the adventure of a bicycle tour, I suppose.

I couldn’t help but think about one of our fellow human beings who owns that duffel bag and how he (or she), like me on my tour, would have stored the bag in a secure place if such a place existed for them. To store it along the frontage road clearly meant to me that such a place didn’t exist.

And now, six fashionably-attired cyclists on their $2000+ bikes had discovered the bag and were going through it like a discount bin at a road-side yard sale.

I had seen all I wanted to see. I don’t know, maybe there are salvage rules for this kind of thing like there are on the high seas. If there are, I’m not aware of them. All I know is it didn’t leave me with a good feeling. As I was leaving one of them called “It’s not yours, is it?”

I shook my head no. Then, as it popped into my head, I added “But I’m sure it’s somebody’s!”

The rest of way home, I thought about what is the right thing to do in that situation. Does anybody know? What would you have done?

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On September 8, an article appeared on the New England Journal of Medicine web site. It was an article about something I already knew: the use of a continuous glucose monitor improves blood glucose control for adults with type 1 diabetes.

The article is about a study funded by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). According to the JDRF, the study found that “people with type 1 diabetes who used continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices to help manage their disease experienced significant improvements in blood sugar control.”

Here’s a link to the article in the New England Journal of Medicine:

Continuous Glucose Monitoring and Intensive Treatment of Type 1 Diabetes

and here’s a link to a summary from the JDRF. I found it much easier to read:

JDRF-Funded Clinical Trial Demonstrates Continuous Glucose Monitoring Improves Blood Sugar Control

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I had coffee recently with a good friend that I hadn’t seen since just before my bicycle tour to Alaska. He wanted to know all about my tour. One of his questions caught me by surprise. He asked, though not in so many words, what it all meant and what I learned from it.

Except he didn’t care at all about the things I’ve learned and shared in previous “Alaska Tour Wrapup” articles. For example, important lessons about my insulin pump and making a smooth transitions back to work. Those easy and obvious things. Harder and more nebulous is what did I learn about myself? That’s what he really wanted to know.

It was an excellent question. I think I babbled something about how it was too early to tell which is an admittedly inadequate answer. A better non-answer would have been to say something about Alaska being the forty-ninth state I’ve bicycled in. Even better would have been to assert that I wanted to show that people with diabetes can do whatever they set their minds to doing. That’s an admirable mission, in my opinion, but it didn’t answer his question.

So, I’ve been thinking about his question quite a bit in the last couple of days. I came up with several things I learned about myself. First, I learned I dislike touring in traffic. When I recall the days when I toured through cities, I know they were definitely more stressful for me. One of the things I like about touring and bicycle riding in general is the meditative aspect. For many years, I’ve known that I do my best thinking and my mind seems clearest and calmest when I’m bicycle riding. When I’m touring on a busy street, instead of a clear and calm mind, I have to occupy my mind with negotiating traffic and making sure I don’t get myself run over.

With that in mind, you’d think the very best days on the tour would be the days when I was fortunate to ride along comfortably pedaling and meditating on a remote and little-used road. While those were very good days indeed, they weren’t what I consider the best days on the tour. When I think back to the very best days of the tour, I think about the day I spent with friends in Wilsonville, Oregon; the day I explored Guemes Island near Anacortes, Washington; the six days on the ferry to and from Juneau; the time I spent in Juneau and Sitka, Alaska. These were the high points of the tour. Interestingly, these were also the days when I did less bicycling. In fact, the best of the best days were those in which I did very little at all. They were the days when I was able to simply experience what the world had in store for me that day whether it was sipping coffee while sitting in the sun on the deck of the M/V Columbia, watching a long line of tourists disembark from a cruise ship moored in the Juneau harbor, listening to the enormous silence of the Mendenhall glacier or sitting in the grass of Schoolhouse Park on Guemes Island as dozens of starlings flitted endlessly in search of a meal.

I’ll have to remember these peaceful moments of inactivity next time I’m faced with throwing one more “personal project” onto an already long list of projects.

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