Aaron: How much info is too much?

1 March 2010
2 Comments

Hi all!

New week, new month, new season!

Pardon my absence for the last  couple of weeks – I’ve been a bit crook and have been coming home from work completely knackered and quite incapable of doing much other than going straight to bed! Nic has been cranking out some awesome content though so I’m sure that you have hardly noticed

Having been sick, the last couple of weeks have been a struggle in terms of BGs and not just fatigue with, unsurprisingly, lots of fluctuations and heaps of hypos and highs as I’ve been trying to get the levels back under control. For a couple of weeks I thought I was just working too hard and not getting…

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By Aaron on 1 March 2010 at 6.57 pm
Posted in Complications, Hypos & Hypers, Medical Services, Slice of Life
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Are you TRYING to wind me up?!!

22 January 2010
23 Comments

Grrrr – and breathe.

I’ve just come back from a diabetes check up at my GP’s.

Aaaand breathe.

You see – when I took my son in for his six week vaccinations, they decided to corner me about not having seen the diabetes nurse at the clinic for over a year.

“Ahhhh”, I said. “That would be because I’ve been under the care of the diabetes department at National Women’s for the last 16 months”.

“Well”, they said. “We need you to come in and we’ll go through a checklist of all of your vital tests etc and check that your diabetes is under control”.

Me: “Oh, but you see I’ve been under the strictest care I’ve had in 15…

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By Nic on 22 January 2010 at 10.06 am
Posted in Medical Services, Pregnancy, Slice of Life
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The ‘new’ HbA1c.

15 January 2010
1 Comment

A comment on this post led me to have another look at the ‘new’ international standard which has come in to eventually replace the HbA1c results which our doctors benchmark our diabetes control on.

I say ‘new’, because the new ‘molar’ system has actually been available in our lab reports since August last year. Apparently our blood glucose control will be reported both as an HbA1c and in mmol/mol for two years, after which time we’ll switch to solely mmol/mol. The reason for this is to foster international measurement of blood glucose control, as instigated by the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry (IFCC).

To give you a better idea of how these numbers…

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By Nic on 15 January 2010 at 6.16 pm
Posted in Medical Services
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Guest Blog: The verdict on Labtests

24 September 2009
1 Comment

There has been a far bit of noise in the news recently about the apparently poor quality of the Labtest services that have replaced Medlab in Auckland – a lot of’ it coming from GPs critiquing the turn around time of results being delivered for their patients if the reports from the NZ Herald are anything to go by with titles like “Doctors lay into Labtests’ poor service”. There have been claims that up to 68% of people are calling the service ‘bad or very bad’ and there was an article on the NZ Herald site last week about a type II diabetic woman from Papakura being diagnosed with prostate issues -something she is quite unlikely to have…

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By Aaron on 24 September 2009 at 10.46 pm
Posted in Medical Services
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Guest Blog: GP vs. Endo

19 September 2009
3 Comments

When I had the idea of writing this post I told a workmate of mine what I planned on calling it and he pointed out to me that within certain circles (this person is a website programmer) one may take this title as a reference to two fighting computer game characters but we know better than this don’t we?

After reading the post Nic wrote on Dr Carol Atmore, listening to her talkat the DY conference in person and subsequently chatting with her after her talk, it stuck me that I don’t often hear people in the ‘diabetes community’ (for want of a better word) talking about their GPs be it positively or otherwise. Because our focus is…

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By Aaron on 19 September 2009 at 8.00 am
Posted in Medical Services
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