Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Diabetes and Handyman work, do they get along together?

 On the web there are articles about how diabetics feel alone in certain situations.  May it be talking about their disease with others, or testing in public.  Personally I usually only feel like I am the only one when it comes to how bad I eat at times and also doing work around the house.  Lets leave the eating aside and look at my latest work.
 I have blogged before about how I could not find any information on how to clean my hands after doing car work with diabetes.  The grease and grime in my fingers when testing seems like it would alter my numbers.  Then building "Pete's" chicken coupe I tore up my fingers up pretty good.  Two weeks later and now they are starting to heal.  There is no information I can find about precautions or what others have done while doing home or auto maintenance in these situations.  Now I am going to make the most un-true statement ever and I know it is wrong:  I am the only diabetic that works on their own car and does home repairs.  This statement I know is 100% false but back to feeling alone, this is when I feel like I am the only one like this.
 Yesterday was my wife's birthday (Happy Birthday Brenda!) and she has been wanting a new dishwasher since the second day we moved into our house.  We bought our house new but our family is hard on appliances and well a bit lazy as well.  That whole rinsing and washing your dishes before you put them into the dishwasher just does not work for me. 
 What luck we had once she ordered her new dishwasher it was delivered about a week later on her birthday.  I took the day off to spend with her and to install the dishwasher.  As our house falls apart (almost ten years old) the more and more work on fixing items,  I am learning and doing the repairs on my own.  Have you ever thought about growing up as a child you should have paid more attention to your parents when they were fixing things?  I think that is one reason I make my son do alot of these repairs with me.  He needs to learn.
 So here we are (son, dog, and me) getting ready to put the new dish washer in the wall.  Looking at both washers sitting side by side you are thinking they look the same.  Well folks let me tell you our old washer seemed to make the dishes dirtier than when they were put in.
As a diabetic and a klutz put them together with home repairs and my hands are always destroyed and it seems like weeks of healing once I have completed these projects.  This time I tried to put a screw driver through my pointer finger and only took off an inch of skin. 
I know there are millions of diabetics out there that do this sort of stuff every day.  The only thing is I can't seem to find them on this inter web.  Just like how I never found any camping, outdoor, or guy stuff related to diabetes and I started blogging.  I know there has to be someone or somewhere out there that can help me get grease off of my hands or how to keep me from destroying my fingers and hands.

1 comment:

  1. Try nitrile-covered gloves - the kind with a fabric back and rubbery palms/fingers. Usually about fifteen bucks in gardening/hardware stores. They are thin enough you can feel and grip things like small screw heads, etc, yet thick enough to not let too much poke through - unless you really try.

    I used them for my uber-ambitious camping/outdoor/"guy stuff" project - my husband and I built a house from a kit to be used as our seasonal camp. I think my most recent (relative term there) D-blog post has a link. Next spring we worry about the inside, shell is weather tight for the winter at least.

    You would think D would behave better with all the exercise I was doing, but it pretty much
    the same - a few more lows and one spectacular day of mis-measuring every other board - but mostly same high and low ranges as every other day...

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