Andy Stuckey on social media
This week in diabetes, I say good-bye to my Diabetes Self-Management blog. I’ve been writing weekly now for about a year, and for those who read regularly and commented, thanks. I hope you learned and laughed a little at some of my insights—or lack thereof. It certainly is an ongoing process.
Since I was away last week, I have a double entry for you here. Enjoy.
Last week I was in Nicaragua with my wife, visiting some friends who had moved there after Hurricane Katrina. They lived in New Orleans for a while after Katrina, but then decided to pack up and drive to Nicaragua, a place they had visited a fair number of times but never actually resided.
I have a little confession to make this week. Yesterday evening, Murray and I were out shooting a fake commercial that we will use as part of one of our shows soon. (The phony product is an adult beverage.) Anyway, we were getting some “beauty shots”—it’s an industry term—in the Brooklyn Bridge Park at sunset yesterday and were in a bit of a hurry. The sun was setting fast and we were losing light. We set up the fake bottle and a pint glass on the rocks looking out over the city. I was filming the whole thing and as we finished our last slow-mo shot, I felt my blood glucose sinking.
When I feel like my blood glucose is a little low and then check it and it is, let’s say, 82 mg/dl like it was the other morning, all of a sudden the shakiness and low-blood-glucose feeling that wasn’t so dramatic to begin with immediately heightens. It’s as if a trigger has been pulled telling my body that, yes, the levels are off. What started off as a routine check all of sudden becomes a scrambling panic to raise my blood glucose level.
This week was a big one for Stuckey and Murray. We secured a flat for the month of August for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and we are performing with our employer Heavy.com at the Montreal Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in the middle of July. Montreal will hopefully be good preparation for our trip to Scotland, assuming I’m not too distracted in Canada. I hope I meet another person with diabetes on Lantus (insulin glargine) while in Canada so we can compare insulin prices.
Yesterday, I went on an audition for a Trident commercial, and the whole gist of the audition was improvising on the topic of gum. The script I received had a few paragraphs of ideas, but you were told you could take it in any direction you wanted. However, as I scanned the page, one of the ideas caught my eye. The premise was a standup comic talking about gum in a classic, brick-wall comedy club. The script talked about how normal it was to ask for a piece of gum and contained the line, “It’s rare you hear someone say ‘can I have some insulin?'”
I’m way over in Type 1 land contemplating whether or not to lower my daily dose of Lantus (insulin glargine)…
Yesterday was a great day of circumstance in my little world of diabetes. I started the morning off rehearsing a brand new dirty song that Murray and I wrote and that will be performed at our next show. I’m curious to see how audiences react. I left our rehearsal at 1 PM and headed up to the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center for the second time in a month. This time, I was going to visit the ophthalmologist.
I made it back from the tour with my Lantus (insulin glargine) bottle in check and I didn’t run out of FlexPen needles before I made it home to Brooklyn to refill my prescription. My pharmacist, meanwhile, has been having quite a battle finding NovoPen Junior cartridges. I’ve received two phone calls in a matter of hours from the pharmacist with questions and one phone call from my endocrinologist asking if there was a problem with the pharmacy. Good to know that they are looking out for me.
So this week I’ve been a traveling diabetic. Our tour started Monday night in Auburn, Alabama, and from there we went to Nashville and last night played in Birmingham. We have a long drive today to Savannah and we plan to do what we always do on long road trips: Anytime we stop for gas, we check and see if the gas station sells compact discs, and if they do, we purchase the worst-looking one.
This past week I made the trek up to 168th street to the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center for my first doctor’s visit in a long time. I’ve written about this in the past and now it’s time for the payoff. My HbA1c cruised in at 5.5%, up a little from my previous 4.9%, but I think I was still in the “honeymoon phase” during my first visit to the center.
So I checked my mail yesterday and received a package from one of my friends who left New York a while back for a job in Texas. He sent me a few samples of an injection therapy device known as the I-Port. While it sounds like something Apple could have designed, I promise you that it requires no software or technical knowledge to understand.
This week has been quite a change from life in Brooklyn, New York. I’m currently in Seagrove Beach, Florida, with my wife Katherine, Murray, and a few other friends filming our last two videos for Heavy.com.
Another week has gone by, and for you regular readers who were left hanging at the end of last week’s blog entry, we ended up using a combination of powdered sugar and Sweet’N Low for fake cocaine in our video shoot. You’ll have to watch the video when Heavy.com releases it to see where it comes into play. Let’s just say it’s the worst- and best-case scenario for an 80’s hair band.
This week, I’ve been thinking about why it took me so long to go back and see the doctor. I realized after scheduling my appointment that it has been almost two years. I feel like I’ve been taking good care of myself for the last two years—I just haven’t gone to the doctor to get proof.
This week is the most important week of the year. Why is that, you ask? Well, it’s my wife’s birthday this Sunday. Not good enough? How about that it’s my niece Sara Reeves’s birthday on Monday. Still not good enough? It’s my brother Reeves’s birthday on Wednesday. I’ve already given them their gifts, except for my little brother. I’ll be sure to take him an extra NovoLog FlexPen the next time I travel to Alabama (he also has diabetes).
This week has been another busy one and will continue to be busy into the weekend. Jon Murray and I plan to shoot our second music video for www.heavy.com this Saturday. We’ve hired a group of professional dancers and some old friends from our sketch comedy group to help us out. I also scheduled an appointment with my endocrinologist and realized that I haven’t seen her in over a year.
I spent the last week in Crested Butte, Colorado, for what has now become an annual family ski trip. The place we were staying was at an elevation of 7,000-something feet. Of course, my mom told us to drink plenty of water and take saltwater nose drops to flush the system out. All of this is fine and dandy, but I wondered what, if any, effect does altitude have on diabetes?
Yesterday was my first video shoot for my new job. Murray and I are making five music videos for the Web site www.heavy.com, and yesterday we shot the first part of what will be a video for our song “Garden State of Love.”
Last weekend was a long one, and I spent it in the Berkshire mountains with 15 or so good friends. For the last five years, we have gone to my friend Doug’s home in Mill River, Massachusetts, to have Burns Night.
So yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and my wife and I did what all newlyweds do: She went to her photo etching class and then met me at the Upright Cititzens Brigade Theater for The Rejection Show and Mortified’s Valentines Day Extravaganza.
How about that title? That’s my Fox News question mark headline of the month. Moving on.
Like a lot of people, I watched the Super Bowl last weekend and had very little connection to either of the teams. I was pulling for the Colts, but my attitude for the upcoming work week did not depend upon a victory. I couldn’t care less. I watch the game for the event of it. The food, the friends, and of course, the ads.
This past weekend, I took a trip to Atlanta to attend a surprise party for a soon-to-be family member, Heather. She is my brother’s fiancé and turned 30 last weekend. Only, there was a catch.
Thanks for all of the comments on my post about the diabetes/Jack Bauer man-purse. My man-purse was a gift from a TV show that I worked on and I’m not sure who the maker of the bag is. I think that the company was called Corporate Specialties. I also know that Timbuk2 makes a couple of good, well, let’s go ahead and abbreviate: DJBMPs.
Yesterday, I went to the pharmacy to get some new test strips. I have come to embrace the fact that, even though you can see the 100 strips behind the counter and have no idea what harm they could possibly cause anyone, you are still told that it will take 30 minutes to get them. Thirty minutes for the pharmacist to walk three yards and print out a label.
Now, as you can tell by my photo, I am indeed a man. What kind of man you’ll never know until we meet and spend a little time together, but a man nonetheless. If we ever do meet, there is about a 99% chance that I will have a few things with me. One of these things I mentioned in last week’s blog entry, and I’d like to elaborate a little further on it. It’s my diabetes/Jack Bauer man-purse.
Yesterday, I went to the New York State DMV on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to get my driver’s license renewed. My license expired two weeks ago on my birthday, and ever since then I’d been dreading this day. I tried to keep my hopes up that the turnaround would be quick, checked my blood glucose (82), ate a granola bar, and shuffled out the door with my mp3 player clipped to my belt loop.
I was in a cab at 5:15 AM this morning, heading to LaGuardia Airport to catch a plane back to my old Alabama home for Christmas. I grew up in a small town in the southeastern corner of Alabama, where peanuts are not only monuments around town but also a reason to celebrate. I encourage all of you to experience the National Peanut Festival towards the end of October at some point in your life.
One of my first family Christmas responsibilities is to make my family’s world-famous cheese cookies.
This week in diabetes all was going well until we decided to do a “family project.” Now, like any good husband, I’m all about a family project. In my family growing up, a family project was always entertaining, partly due to a combination of my sarcastic nature and the idea of everyone trying to work together. It usually ended in my mom questioning what my dad was doing and my dad finishing the job alone after questioning her question as only a father can. My dad is a fairly handy guy, but apparently that gene skipped me.
So I haven’t had a day off in the last week and a half, splitting my time between making videos for a Web site and being a camera guy for a TV show. It’s good to have a lot of work leading up to the holiday season, but a day off every now and then does wonders. I will also be celebrating a birthday in nine days.
In my free time, which I haven’t had much of lately, I like to catch up on what I’ve missed on television through the wonders of YouTube.com. If you’re not a fan of YouTube or have never visited the site but are looking for a reason to go, well, here’s one, especially if you have diabetes. This video has been out for quite some time now and is worth a screening for all of you who are Wilford Brimley fans, like myself.
I’m a little late with this post, and you’ll have to forgive me as I’ve been recovering from what I’ll now refer to as a “six-unit Thanksgiving.” I overate this Thanksgiving but took six units of insulin as an estimate for my gluttony and pretty much hit the nail on the head with a blood glucose level of 130 an hour after eating loads of cornbread, turnips, potatoes, turkey, ham, and just a few bites of banana pudding.
Another week has flown by, and my friend Murray and I have been busy trying to write, record, and mix a new song for www.dotcomedy.com. We finished late last night after a bunch of revisions from the network and we will spend all of today and tomorrow getting props, permits, organizing crew, figuring out the schedule, and hopefully purchasing mariachi suits. All of the hard work will be worth it if Murray and I own mariachi suits at the end of the day.
It’s been a pretty busy week with work, and a pretty normal week with diabetes. This just in: My 14-day blood glucose average is a stellar 110, and I just got some new insulin syringes that have the easy, snap-off needles. My little brother Reeves, who also has diabetes, gave me a box of his when I was at home last week. It is pretty crazy how many diabetes supplies two people with diabetes can go through in a week. I imagine that, this Christmas at the Stuckey house, the stocking stuffers will be test strips, FlexPens, and maybe a few bottles of Lantus (insulin glargine) in a cooler under the tree.
This past weekend, I drove from New York City all the way to Alabama with my wife, stopping along the way in West Virginia and staying the weekend in Sewanee, Tennessee, for her 10-year college reunion. It was a gorgeous autumn drive and, after a fun weekend spent meeting my wife’s old friends, I drove down to my hometown in southeast Alabama to begin work on a movie we hope to shoot in the spring of 2007.
Yesterday, I had my first video shoot for what could become my full-time job. My friend Jon Murray and I are in the process of making a video for a Web site called www.dotcomedy.com. They have asked us to write, record, and make a video about something topical each week.
I’ve recently been intrigued with all of the new gadgets and advancements available for treating diabetes, but there seems to be a little something that’s been left out. Now we’ve got needles, pumps, pills, prickers, inhalers, and the like, but is there anything we’re missing? Why, yes, I think so. Last week, I went to the pharmacist to renew my prescription of insulin glargine (brand name Lantus) and this time, instead of stating the norm, I decided to spice it up and requested my insulin in “rock” form.
Diabetes has been in my life indirectly since I was 10. (My little brother was diagnosed when he was 4 and I was 10.) Around the age of 16, I went to Shands Hospital in Gainesville, Florida, to see my brother at a diabetes camp, and some researchers there wanted to do blood work on siblings of people with diabetes. My older brother checked out fine, but they found something in my blood and response to glucose that, at the time, they called “markers.”
Did you know that if you “google” the word diabetes, the sponsored link that pops up at the top of the search page is the phrase “Diabetes and Pain”?
So I’ve been doing some work for a TV show lately and last week went on a very interesting shoot. I was one of three cameras filming one of the show’s hosts as she learned to drive a stock car at the Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania. It was a gorgeous day and I gained a new respect for race car drivers.
I’ve only had diabetes for three years, but I’ve been around it all my life. My little brother Reeves was diagnosed when he was four. We discovered his diabetes after he went missing one day.
To stick or not to stick, that is the question. However, it’s not really a question when you’re a diabetic—sorry, person with diabetes (a.k.a. “The Brimley”).
After reading Joe Nelson’s August 17 blog entry, I thought I would also comment on “diabetes in the bedroom.” I just got back from my honeymoon, and it’s safe to say I’m no longer a virgin and my wife has not contracted diabetes from our interactions. Score one for “the Brimley.” (In case you don’t know, “the Brimley” is the new nickname for diabetes since the term diabetic is obsolete. If folks ask why you have to take shots or wear a pump on your stomach, tell them you’ve got “the Brimley.”)
I had dinner last night with Jon, a friend of mine who is also a musician and also has Type 1 diabetes. At some point in our career, we plan to team up with a few other diabetic musicians and form the band “The Diabeatles.” (If you know any diabetic drummers or bassists, let me know.)
Here’s a little something on the perks of diabetes. “The perks of diabetes,” you ask? Yes, the perks of diabetes. I call it “playing the D card.”
Well, where do I begin? I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes on Christmas Day in 2003, at the age of 28. A little strange to be hit with Type 1 at that age, but what can you do? Just when I thought I’d won the genetic lottery, Santa Claus gave me diabetes. (Santa Claus is your mom and dad.) To deal with the diagnosis, I wrote a song called "Santa Claus Gave Me Diabetes."
