I’ve known that I had type 2 diabetes for 2.5 years now. I’ve gone from taking 2 medications (Metformin and an ACE inhibitor) to taking 6 different medications  for sugar control, insulin resistance, cholesterol, and blood pressure. Every time the doctor wants to add a new medication to the mix, it’s always the latest and greatest patented brand name-only drug that isn’t covered by my prescription plan. Odd coincidence, huh?

The doctors will send you to the Diabetes education class where you receive very generic and watered down  information. I think I knew more about the causes and treatment of Erectile Dysfunction from watching commercials on TV than I did about Diabetes when I finished the class. The class I went to at the hospital was sponsored by manufacturers of diabetic food products. Guess what their advice was? Yeah, eat expensive special foods for diabetics.

In 2007, I started with a fasting blood sugar of over 330mg/dl when diagnosed then experienced a brief drop to 169mg/dl (7.5% A1c) for a short period. However, for the past year I’ve been extremely frustrated with daily fasting readingss of 220-230mg/dl and my A1c shot back up to 8.8% for my last test in December. All of this despite my efforts to follow a “diabetic diet” and exercise. It’s hard to stay motivated when all of your efforts show absolutely no results!

I came across this website, bloodsugar101.com, a few weeks ago via the discussion forums at Sugarstats (the tool I use to track my blood sugar, doctor visits, etc). As I was reading the site, it was like I was learning about my disease for the first time. Why wasn’t it explained this way in the diabetes education class? Why have I spent the last 2 years feeling like I did this to myself, despite knowing there’s a family history (obesity is a symptom, not a cause)?

I’m happy to report that after following some of the advice on the site and making just a few minor tweaks to my diet, exercise, and medication regimen that  my fasting blood sugar has dropped over 50 mg/dl in just a few weeks. I have not finished absorbing all of the information available on the site or implementing all of the suggestionss, but for the first time in a long while I’m optimistic that I can get control instead of being controlled by it. Yes, I’m motivated again!

I know I have a long way to go. I have get my blood sugar down further and keep it from from spiking over 140 mg/dl at any time in order to avoid doing more damage. I have to break the insulin resistance cycle that is causing my beta cells to work so hard. In other words, I’m shooting for the 5% club.

If you know anyone that is concerned about their blood sugar then tell them about this. If they are diabetic, pre-diabetic, or just have a family history, tell them to read bloodsugar101.com or buy the book.

The past few weeks while I’ve had quite a bit of vacation time, I’ve worked on putting some of our family’s genealogical information online. I installed PHPGedview and ask my mom, who is the keeper of the official genealogy for the family, to provide me with a GEDCOM file to try it out with.

It took quite a bit of effort to get the initial file imported. I think it’s because of the size of the file and the limitations of the shared server I’m hosting it on. It kept running out of memory, but once I figured out how to increase the limit,  it seemed to go okay. After some initial testing, we opened the site up to the rest of the family to review their records and make corrections. It was all going okay.

Once people started making changes, the question came up of how do we take changes people have made and get it back into my mom’s official record in Family Tree Maker. I decided to let her approve all changes and use the change report to select just those records that had changed, create a new GEDCOM file which could be re-imported. The only problem was that the change report seemed to be broken in the version I was using.

I decided to upgrade to the lastest version, but it has a bug in it which doesn’t allow you login with Internet Explorer. I filed a bug report, but so far nothing. Meanwhile, things kept trucking along.

The major problem came in when one of our relatives sent an entirely new GEDCOM that contained all of the information for that branch of the family. My dad imported the file into Family Tree Maker and tried to do an entirely new export of the entire database to overwrite the information in PHPGedview so that it would include the new data. That’s where things went wrong. I’m not able to import the new file and I’m no longer able to import the original file that worked before.

I have no idea how to proceed at this point. No matter which file I try to import or how I do it (fiddling with the memory limits), the import fails with a 500 server error. I even tried creating a virtual machine with VirtualBox and a LAMP appliance to do the import and so far it’s not worked either. It’s weird that it gets to 16% or so and then the progress meter goes back to 2% and starts counting up again.

Maybe I should give up on PHPGedview and try something else.