DAFNE/BERTIE

On Friday I attended my first week of BERTIE (my diabetes team’s version of DAFNE) for T1 diabetes.

DAFNE is Dose Adjustment for Normal Eating – also known as carb counting!

BERTIE is Broomfield’s Education Resources for Training in Insulin and Eating – also known as carb counting!

I’d been excited about this for weeks – the thought of learning so many new things that were going to help me control my diabetes better. As I walked to my diabetes centre, I started to feel really nervous – what if no-one likes me, what if they’re all better diabetics than me, what if they think I shouldn’t be there….the list was endless. Thankfully as soon as we were all together, you couldn’t shut us up!! It was like a big relief for everyone there to finally have people to talk to who would understand and know what they’re going through. There’s 8 of us in my group, which includes a wide range of people – different ages, different attitudes, different sizes, different experiences, different views on diabetes…BUT we are all there to learn the same thing, and that was what I needed to remember.  My group are all lovely people and we all immediately bonded. I really hope they will all get out of it what I have already from that one afternoon.

There were several things I learnt quickly – 1. I knew more than I thought I did - result, and 2. that unfortunately, the things I did know were all only things that I’d learnt from joining www.diabetessupport.co.uk earlier this year. Had I not have joined that forum, I would never have known most of the answers. And I’d been living with diabetes for nearly 20 years, without that knowledge. Shocked and embarrassed were not the words. Still, I didn’t dwell…the point was that now I did know. It goes to show how great the forum is and how rubbish my own care was!

In this session we went over the fundamentals – what is diabetes and what is happening in your body. We looked at the various different types of diabetes. We looked at ratios and calculating carbs. And left with homework!

Here’s some of the things I learnt that day that I didn’t know, or had heard, but only through 3^rd parties:

-       I’m supposed to change my needle before every injection (I’d never been told that!)

-       To inject 2 units before every injection into the air

-       Driving regulations – supposed to be over 5.5mmols before driving, if not, you could be banned FOREVER if you cause an accident.

For homework ready for next Friday, we were given individual carb to insulin ratios and insulin to correction ratio. Idea being to see how we get on this week and then try to 'fine-tune' next week. This homework will probably warrant another blog post!

So here’s to carb counting!