Q: When is a weekend away truly a Getaway?
A: When your diabetes cooperates.

Relaxation is good for me. I know that now because I’ve tested it empirically. Whenever I’m on vacation, especially if it’s someplace hot where I can wear scant clothing and swim in a sparkling pool, my blood sugar evens out to a point where I often wonder if something’s not amiss.  Is this meter is working right? I’m really at 101 post-breakfast — again?!

However, I wasn’t too sure about this last weekend “with the gals” (my girlfriends, not the children) in Sedona, AZ. I’d just returned home from my trip to New Orleans for the ADA Conference a few days ago, where I barely slept because my hotel room was positively choked with cigarette smoke {insert gagging sounds}.  Then I barely had time to write a post or two and swap my pumps out for my flip-flops before I was heading to the airport again — feeling extremely guilty about being a Mother-Who-Travels.

So it didn’t start out so relaxing. And to make matters worse, during my first glucose check on the plane, the lady sitting next to me leaned in close and whispered conspiratorially: Is it good? O. M. G. You are NOT getting involved in my glucose management, are you?! That last part was in my head. Aloud I said: Oh, I stopped making judgments like that YEARS AGO.

She turned out to be pretty nice after all.

Anyway, we had a two-hour car ride from the airport to our resort, which was gorgeous (both the ride and the property)…

And next thing you know, I was in scant clothing sitting beside a sparkling pool. Aaahhh. BG check: 89, despite all those raisins for breakfast, and despite sitting still for all those hours.

The next few days were a mix of sunny hikes through tree-lined Red Rock, shopping and poking about a tiny southwestern town obsessed with all things “New Age,” and cocktails by the pool (I mostly stuck to wine). My blood sugar never topped 130, even after we closed down the only local bar on Saturday night. I never do that. I never stay up till 2am and then get up at 7:30 to go hiking over boulders that require continual “Jolly Green Giant” steps. And yet I did. And I felt relaxed. And my blood sugar control was perfectly lovely.

Nothing went wrong. My pod didn’t rip off during swimming. My PDM battery didn’t die at some inopportune moment.  There were no occlusion errors or unexplained lows or even unwanted alarms just when the fun’s escalating (although the music may have drowned them out).

I ate unusual foods and exercised at unusual times, and yet my D-control didn’t cave in on me. Thank you, Diabetes, for relaxing with me just this once, so that it was more than travel, but an actual bonafide break from the daily grind.

I guess that’s why they call it “getting away from it all.”  Highly recommended.  Talk to your doctor about whether vacation may be right for you

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (7)