Tuesday, July 21, 2009

All By Myself

It’s official: I’m in a commuter marriage.

The husband got a great job with great benefits, great career experience, great company, great people. One small glitch: it’s one hundred and twenty miles south of where our house is.

The daily commute would be about 2-1/2 hours each way and virtually impossible to do. So we packed him up a week and a half ago and moved him to a small studio apartment near his new job. He drives home on Friday night, we spend the weekend together, and he drives back Sunday night or Monday morning and spends the week in his apartment. And I spend the week in our house. Alone.

While I do have two dogs for company and security (they like to bark), I realized this is the first time since my diabetes dx that I’ve lived alone. I’m not obsessively worried about it, but I do find myself taking a different set of precautions than I normally would.

My general rule of thumb is not to go to bed unless I’m over a 100. I’ve bumped that number up to 110, and I pay more attention to what I’ve eaten, how long ago, how my sugars might be affected. The other night I ate Chinese food and miscalculated how much insulin I’d need to cover it. I tested right before bed and I was high. Normally, I would have given myself a correction of a couple units, but I paused, thought twice and didn’t. What if I dive-bombed in the middle of the night? My dogs are good company, but they’re not very adept at getting the straw into a juice box.

I don’t have a history of waking up low in the middle of the night—it’s only happened a couple times in my six-year diabetes history. But there’s always a chance it will happen, and I’m going to do my damnedest to make sure it’s a fluke, and not some stupid, “Oh, I’ll be okay,” lapse-of-judgment moment on my part.

I know I’m not the only one who spends time alone with diabetes, so if anyone out there has any good advice, tips, tricks, suggestions that I might not have thought of, please let me know.

As always, more to come…

7 comments:

Crystal said...

No tips. You are doing All the right things.

Glad he has a good job. Sorry you are alone tho. :(

Araby62 (a.k.a. Kathy) said...

Hi Lora,

I lived alone for 6 years and, although it sounds silly for a grownup, you might want to consider having your husband (or someone else if he can't) check in with you every morning. My mom expected a call by 9AM or she worried I'd gone low in my sleep and didn't wake up. Also, can't say enough about having plenty of test strips and fast-acting glucose around. There's no one to go get it if you can't!

meanderings said...

That is hard, living apart, been there-done that and it wasn't easy. And I didn't have diabetes then.
I like Kathy's suggestion of having a call - or at least - you could call/text your husband each morning at a defined time.

This Ro(a)mantic Life said...

When my husband first got diagnosed with reactive hypoglycemia (not the same, but managing a crash requires similar treatment), we kept emergency sweets in the nightstand -- a fruit cup (doesn't need refrigeration), hard candy, etc. He never had to use anything from the stash during the most recent two-year commuter stint we just completed, but it was there.

Hope the adjustment to commuter marriage has as few challenges as possible!

jimpurdy1943@yahoo.com said...

Lows at night can be very scary, but it sounds like you're coping very well. I do like the idea of having someone call each morning. Or maybe even setting an alarm to wake you up at, say, 3 a.m., if you could go back to sleep easily. Best wishes.

Lora said...

Thanks for the advice! We do have a check-in system in place. He gets to work earlier than I do, so I e-mail him from home to let him know I'm okay, then he e-mails me back at work and I answer him from there so he knows I made it into the office. I have a small stash by the bed but I'm not good at keeping it stocked. I'm going to make sure it's fully loaded tonight. I also moved my land line phone (yes, some people still have those!) right on to the bedstand within arms reach so I can call someone quickly, hopefully, if need be.

karend1 said...

I live in a suburb of Chicago and for 5 months my husband commuted to California only home every other weekend, I hated every moment of it, not for fears of low, just was use to him being around for 27 years. He came home the end of April and they did not save his job in Chicago. :(, so now my anxiety and fears are different and worse cause he has not job. I think I could handle same state 2 hours and home every weekend, cause if I have lows during the night I wake up and handle on my own anyway for some reason