High blood sugars in Budapest, Hungary

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A big day of nothing in Budapest for Masayo and I today – we’ve been going at a quick pace for several days and were looking forward to doing very little. Fortunately, we have a nice big room at Elvis Guesthouse in a cute and personable part of Budapest. Unfortunately, this was a terrible day for diabetes. After my first 400+ blood sugar in months (or years?) last night it was hard to get it down today. I would eventually, and then some, but still ended the day with some rough T1D times.

We’ve scheduled a few days in Budapest so although we just arrived late last night and have seen nothing yet, it didn’t matter today. My blood sugar hadn’t come down all that much from outer space since last night; I was 320 before breakfast. Any day you wake up and have been over 300 all night is destined to be a foggy, blurry, sleepy, grumpy day. I hoped Budapest could help take the edge off of it.

Masayo made breakfast for us in our room’s private kitchen, including eggs, bacon, cinnamon cereal, and coffee. I took a large Humalog shot for the cereal and milk, and to try to pull that awful 320 down.

By a large window, on a sort of day bed/couch thing, I sat with my MacBook on my lap and watched a game on NFL Game Pass. The game was kind of a metaphor for my blood sugar and the day off today: it was aggravating and bad (the Falcons lost to the Packers) but it was at least nice to be able to sit and watch it and just wait for better times in the future. While I enjoyed the game (in a humorless kind of way) Masayo did some of her laundry with the Scrubba bag.

Just like that, a few hours gone.

By noon I found that my BG had come down a little more, but was still bad: 257. For the first time ever we went outside to see Budapest in the daylight, and to hunt for some nearby lunch. We ended up at a Chinese restaurant called Csang Úr. Usually when my BG is high my appetite gets reduced but that didn’t happen today – I was hungry and ordered a big beef and rice place. In light of my already-high BG I took a big shot of Humalog, at the table in the restaurant through my Bluff Works pants, and ate nearly the entire meal.

Strolling through our neighborhood afterwards in the cold Hungarian December sunshine, we went down some steps into a little basement junk shop. It was called Csak Egyet Charity Shop. Within ten seconds (literally) the personable and chatty elderly owner had approached us and was giving us a religious lecture, inspired when Masayo said she was from Japan and he remembered a story about a priest who lived in Kobe. Or something – his English was pretty adept but a bit too choppy for me to catch his entire meaning.

I got the impression that religion was a subject he found himself talking about quite regularly.

As for the shop, it was exactly like your average thrift store in America – musty and vaguely disordered, with clothes on racks, plastic bins full of assorted items, and a shelf for books and records that nobody will ever buy. They did, to my delight, have a few small used backpacks. The strap on my fake Vietnamese North Face day pack broke a few days ago and I’ve been carrying it around in my hand ever since.

I picked one of them out, a grey one that seemed to be in reasonable shape and was a good size. It even had a strap at the top, which my current one doesn’t have and whose absence has often annoyed me. I smiled patiently, trying to find an opportunity to break the man’s friendly wall of religion talk to inquire about buying the backpack, whose price wasn’t marked.

Eventually I jumped in as soon as I saw the chance and asked him what the price was. He ventured a price in Hungarian forints equal to about $2. He said, leadingly, that he thought that was fair. It seemed like he was trying to open the door to some wily haggling but I wasn’t interested – $2 was certainly fine with me.

I paid and Masayo and I thanked him for his super generous hospitality and his enthusiastic, well-meaning sermonizing. And I walked out of this obscure Budapest basement junk shop with a fine-looking grey day pack with an Adidas logo sewn onto it.

After another few hours hanging around the room at Elvis Guesthouse we left again about 5:00 pm. Masayo had found some yarn shops online in the area that she wanted to visit so I tagged along. It was already dark and Budapest was all dressed up for Christmas. Strings of white lights were strung up on delicate, light-colored trees along the sides of the roads, and glowing snowflake-shaped lights were suspended over the traffic below.

Even my diabetes got into the spirit – after the Chinese meal and the afternoon hanging around the room working on photos for t1dwanderer.com I was now 162. Back down below 200, I’ll take it! (Too bad it was destined to get much worse later on.)

The yarn stores weren’t where we expected, or had moved, or something. So we never found them but had a nice walk around this part of Budapest anyway.

Dinner consisted of one of my favorite meals, back in the room: cinnamon cereal and a banana. When you’re in the mood for this type of food, nothing can beat it. I had two large bowls, but despite my lifelong love of cereal I still don’t dose Humalog very well for it. I tried, but by 11:00 pm had destroyed my BG once again: 313, right about where the day started.

Sigh. I took three units of corrective Humalog, plus my daily Lantus, and went to sleep. Nice day of rest, mostly, plus I got to replace my broken bag and my shredded belt. I had a few good hours of diabetes but otherwise was still either paying the price for the 402 last night, or dealing badly with cereal.

My day wasn’t over yet, unfortunately: at 3:00 am I woke up low. So obviously low that I didn’t even bother to check; I just went down the steep stairs from the bedroom loft to the kitchen and had a Twix bar and some water. I figured that should take care of this bad end to a bad day of blood glucose readings.

Tomorrow we want to go out and see Budapest a little more properly. I can only guess what my blood sugar might be in the morning – after the roller coaster of today it could be anything. Hopefully it will behave enough for me to get the most out of our tour of Budapest.

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