Living with Diabetes and Lapband

This morning, I was trying to unload my truck, get my dog, and keep from spilling my morning concoction of caffeine when a neighbor of the school decided his two large dogs needed to visit Dulce.

Please! I swear the guy and his dog were related to the guy who wrote Marley and me….

I kept telling him that she was working and that she didn't need to be bothered.

Fortunately we got into the building with everything intact and not spilled, even managed to help the juice guy with the door, but please, keep your dogs away from service dogs. We don't need the extra distractions.

It will be interesting to see my a1c, its scheduled for Wednesday along with a trip to my endo's, a week from Wednesday. I've travelled, and yesterday wasn't one of my better days. At the same time, I've lost a lot of weight.

Trying really hard to be a good diabetic. Dulce and I need to work on high alerts.

Celebrating a new decade, new low and finally hitting over 50 pounds of weight loss.

Ran into one of my former principals last week at #TCEA13. She works for a local university promoting their education program. She's been at our school promoting it too. She was quite surprised to see me, especially seeing me dressing my weight. It was an added boost to get compliments from her and helped the self esteem before I presented.

I am going to start out by saying if you are hypo and hyper glycemic unaware that having a dog that can hp y9ou with that is invaluable, and is great for your confidence and state of mind.

However, don't do it if you just want to keep your dog with you. There are some drawbacks. First, accidents. Dulce had a few on the trip. Thankfully, she's small, I feed her really good food, and I don't let her have too many treats when we are traveling.

Most of them were caused by logistics and once I realized what we needed to do to get where we were going, we were fine. No accidents in the hotel room. One was caused because I really just wanted to get her to the dog park. One was caused because we were both being a little bit stubborn. Still not sure what was up with that.

Austin was dog friendly. There was a dog park close to the hotel which we used the first two days – Wednesday and Thursday were just too busy. There was a regular city park across from the Hilton and they were VERY pet friendly. Probably worth it to stay there.

The Holiday Inn where we did stay at wasn't too bad. Just not as much grass.

The other thing is that your medical business is out there for everyone to see. Not as bad as say a wheel chair or a white cane, but it's out there. Since I'm a teacher AND it was a teacher conference I did a LOT of education. Hopefully people will learn not to ask questions.

We did have a lot of fun though.

Dulce is a totally different dog at a convention. Which is probably good, because I think I need a different dog and am a different person. She is out going, visits with people and just has a good time.

She still takes care of me, but didn't have to work real hard at it. I was careful to stay in range, maybe a tad high. We did a lot of walking.

Came home a bit heavier, but I think it's the constipation thing.

Anyway, first, the Lego people had gotten a badge printed for her. I wasn't sure she would wear it, but she did. Pinned it to her vest. Everyone thought it was WAY cool she had a badge. Will remember that for the first convention.

Second, she seemed to recognize that everyone was at a high stress level and missed their dogs. There were some people she wouldn't interact with, but there were a lot of people she would. She was super friendly to important people – the guy who picked up after her at the hotel – the bus drivers, and the door people at the Hilton – they had water and treats for her, she is no dummy.

There was a nice park outside the convention center. We used it a lot. There was also a dog park near the hotel. We didn't get to it on Wednesday or Thursday. We answered lots of questions and we did a lot of teaching about service dogs. I did explain that she seemed to realize that people needed her.

I'm healthier and have lost more weight in two years (psst. still a size 16, hope we can still be friends) than I have in my life, because I finally felt like I respected myself enough to be worth it.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

I've recently started losing weight again, and wondering if my new wardrobe has anything to do with it.