UTI?Water Infection question

[Sparkle]

Hi, I have a supra pubic catheter which makes me prone to at least a couple of water infections a year. I was diagnosed with type two about 4 months ago. This year I have had 7 infections already, a few which made me really unwell. My diabetic nurse says my numbers are so erratic because of the infections and meds and my Urologist says the infections are because of the diabetes. I am doing absolutely everything both of them advised but nothing seems to help. Does anyone else have this problem? I am so fed up.

 

[Ralph-YK]

I was diagnosed cause of repeated infections in my legs (celuitis). As I recall, infections does affect your levels.
Do you self test? Have you kept a food diary, along with a record of your levels?

 

[rebrascora]

Hi and welcome

The urologist is correct that high Blood Glucose (BG) levels are making you vulnerable to infections and getting them under control is the key to stopping the cycle because, yes, the infections and antibiotics will also be impacting your BG levels

What advice/medication (if any) have they given you to control your diabetes and do you know your HbA1c which is the blood test result which is used to diagnose you.... usually a number of 48 or above but can be well into 3 figures if things are really bad.

Are you aware that diabetes is not just about sugar in your diet but all carbohydrates, as the digestive system breaks down bread and pasta and potatoes and rice and breakfast cereals into glucose just the same as cakes and biscuits and sweets and sugar and honey and fruit in all it's forms (dried, fresh and juiced) .... so all of these things need to be rationed, not just cutting out the sweet stuff.

It may sound like there is not much left to eat once you cut down on these things but a low carb diet can be very enjoyable once you get your head around it.

The best recommendation I can give you is to get yourself a Blood Glucose meter and start testing your blood yourself before each meal and 2 hours after and keep an honest food diary along with your readings, so that you can start to see which foods cause your body a problem and figure out if you need to avoid those foods altogether or what size of a portion of them your body can tolerate without spiking your blood glucose levels too high.

 

[Sparkle]

Thank you for taking the trouble to give such detailed replies. I feel bad now that I did not give more detail, sorry! I have a meter, I keep a food diary, I have a two weekly telephone appointment with diabetes nurse. She is happy with what I am eating, it just doesn't corrolate with my numbers! I was started on Metformin, then it was reduced after two weeks because my numbers went too low. Two weeks later it was stopped altogether because I was still getting some low numbers. Currently they range from 3 to 11.5. As I said earlier, they don't corrolate with what I am eating. One night I had a stomach upset and couldn't face eating, yet the next day. I scored 5.4 in the morning and 9.5 in the evening.

 

[rebrascora]

Can we ask what you are actually eating? Say an average breakfast, lunch, and dinner meal for you?

Unfortunately NHS dietary and testing advice is a bit behind the curve for diabetes and they generally recommend wholemeal/ wholegrain carbs and fruit when many Type 2 diabetics can not manage many of these foods without causing their BG levels to spike. This is why testing before eating and 2 hours afterwards is advocated my members here because that shows you what that meal did to your BG levels and enables you to figure out which foods your body can tolerate and which need to be avoided and this can be an extremely individual response which is why general dietary advice doesn't always work.
As regards not eating all day because you were unwell and your BG rising to 9.5 that is because when the body or mind is stressed, the liver releases glucose into the blood stream to help the body cope. It also often does it first thing on a morning as a prehistoric response to the dawn (known as Dawn Phenomenon) to give us the energy to go out and hunt or forage for food.... These liver responses are not all that helpful when you are diabetic and we have to learn to manage them as well as we can. It is also important to note that the liver trickles out glucose to keep our vital organs going when there is no food releasing glucose into our blood stream like during the night whilst we sleep or at times of fasting/starvation, so it is not just food which raises our BG levels.

 

[Sparkle]

Crikey, I find it hard to get my head round all this! Diabetic nurse told me to test before I get out of bed and to eat a rich tea biscuit if it is below 4. Then to test before I eat my evening meal and to eat a snack like a piece of cheese with a cracker or a rich tea biscuit about 9pm. Some examples - I usually have wholegrain sugar free cereal, or porridge, or yogurt and red melon at breakfast. Lunch scrambled egg, omlette, soup, egg and soldiers, cheese on wholemeal toast with grilled tomatoes. Evening meal stir fry, baked fish with new potato and green veg, snacks (I've been told to have 3 a day) a small piece of cheese on a wholewheat cracker, melon, raspberries or yogurt, a rich tea biscuit or two squares of plain chocolate, like Bournville, the small squares size. I've had chocolate twice in one week. I've lost two stone in about 4 months but I need to lose weight so that's not doing me any harm. I'm actually a bit scared to eat. It was my birthday recently and a cake was made for me but I didn't even taste it. I had half a homemade scotch egg and potato salad for lunch and the other half with tomato and cucumber for tea with some pears in juice afterwards.

 

[Madeline]

Sounds very similar to the diet I was told to go on, which sent me sky high - the highest I saw was over 18!

I’d try carb counting for a couple of weeks, and keeping total carbs under 100, and see how you go with that. One of my children has lupus, which affects her kidneys, she takes a cranberry tablet supplement daily and makes sure she drinks a good 2l of water to help.

 

[rebrascora]

The sudden weight loss might be quite relevant to your diagnosis. Were you surprised at the rate and ease of loss?
The reason I ask is that weight loss is one of the main differences between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Type 1 usually involves rapid or unexplained weight loss whilst Type 2s usually have to work hard for slow weight loss.

Some Type 2 diabetics here on the forum cannot get away with porridge or wholegrain cereal for breakfast or wholemeal bread or potatoes although new potatoes are the best (lower carb option) if you are going to have potatoes, it doesn't sound like you are eating excessive amounts of carbs and I do wonder if your erratic readings and weight loss might indicate a pancreas which is slowly spluttering to a halt (Type 1 or LADA... Latent Autoimmine Diabetes in Adults) rather than some one who is suffering from insulin resistance which is generally a Type 2 diabetic.

 

[Sparkle]

Sounds very similar to the diet I was told to go on, which sent me sky high - the highest I saw was over 18!

I’d try carb counting for a couple of weeks, and keeping total carbs under 100, and see how you go with that. One of my children has lupus, which affects her kidneys, she takes a cranberry tablet supplement daily and makes sure she drinks a good 2l of water to help.

Really?! Crikey. This is rather confusing. Sorry to sound ignorant but how do you carb count? I take a cranberry tablet every day too and drink loads of water. I also have actimel (0% sugar) and an acidophilus tablet on the advice of my Urologist

 

[Sparkle]

The sudden weight loss might be quite relevant to your diagnosis. Were you surprised at the rate and ease of loss?
The reason I ask is that weight loss is one of the main differences between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Type 1 usually involves rapid or unexplained weight loss whilst Type 2s usually have to work hard for slow weight loss.

Some Type 2 diabetics here on the forum cannot get away with porridge or wholegrain cereal for breakfast or wholemeal bread or potatoes although new potatoes are the best (lower carb option) if you are going to have potatoes, it doesn't sound like you are eating excessive amounts of carbs and I do wonder if your erratic readings and weight loss might indicate a pancreas which is slowly spluttering to a halt (Type 1 or LADA... Latent Autoimmine Diabetes in Adults) rather than some one who is suffering from insulin resistance which is generally a Type 2 diabetic.

Thank you for your reply. I suppose I was actually pleased about the weight loss, (maybe a vanity thing) as I didn't know how much I'd lost until I went to Papworth last week where they can weigh me in my wheelchair. I just knew my clothes were too big. Thinking about it now, I suppose it is quite a lot in a short time considering I do absolutely no exercise, barely move in fact. Perhaps I should mention what you say about LADA to my diabetic nurse at my next appointment.

 

[Madeline]

Ok so I use the My Fitness Pal app and log everything I eat (and relevant drinks). It’s very helpful and shows how many grams of fat, protein, and carbs you’re eating, as well as calories. I started doing it when I was first diagnosed, and it’s just become a habit - it’s also very helpful to be able to compare what I’ve eaten with what my readings are.

 

[Sparkle]

I haven't got anything like that, I made a table in word on my pc and type what I eat and what my numbers are every day but that's all I've done.

 

[rebrascora]

You can also just carb count by reading the nutritional info on the back of packets.... the stuff in tiny print not the traffic light info on the front of packaging...You are looking for the "total carbohydrates" and it will be expressed as a number of grams per 100grams (ie a percentage) so with the likes of porridge oats they are about 63g/100g carbohydrate, so if you weight your portion before you make porridge with it and it is say 50g, then there are 30g of carbs in your bowl of porridge. Any fruit with it will also have a carbohydrate content. Rasps are about 5g/100g and blueberries are double at 10g/100g... Obviously you need to know the weight of your portion to calculate how many carbs in what you put in your bowl. After a while you get quite good at looking at foods and just knowing roughly how many carbs are on the plate, but all seems very complicated at first. Milk also contains carbs in the form of lactose so that may add another few grams of carbs, depending upon how much you have on your porridge and in your coffee/tea. A slice of wholemeal bread is about 15g carbs. A medium egg sized potato is about 10g carbs

As regards your diagnosis, there is a way to tell if you are Type 1 or Type 2 and it is via a couple of blood tests... C-peptide and GAD antibody tests. The C-peptide is a measure of the amount of insulin your pancreas is producing... Type 2 diabetics usually produce normal amounts of insulin but it is not effective because they are resistant to it whereas Type 1 will not be producing enough. The antibody test is to see if the diabetes is an autoimmune response where the body's immune system has attacked the Beta cells in the pancreas which produce insulin. Sometimes the 2 results are not conclusive in their own right, particularly if it is a slow onset Type 1 where the pancreas is still managing to produce almost enough insulin to get by but a good diabetes specialist should be able to spot a slow onset type 1 in most cases from the 2 tests.

 

[Docb]

@Sparkle, can I take you back to the beginning? Am I right in thinking that you are getting readings in the threes but are not on insulin or taking insulin stimulating medication? If so, then there is something there which needs thinking about by the professionals because it's my understanding that diabetes as such, will not cause your blood glucose levels to go that low. In simple terms, diabetes is diagnosed because your blood glucose levels are too high. If that is right then there must be something else going on that needs explaining.

 

[Kaylz]

I agree with @Docb diabetes alone does not cause levels to fall below 4, have you asked about reactive hypoglycemia? xx

 

[Sparkle]

@Sparkle, can I take you back to the beginning? Am I right in thinking that you are getting readings in the threes but are not on insulin or taking insulin stimulating medication? If so, then there is something there which needs thinking about by the professionals because it's my understanding that diabetes as such, will not cause your blood glucose levels to go that low. In simple terms, diabetes is diagnosed because your blood glucose levels are too high. If that is right then there must be something else going on that needs explaining.

Thank you. I take two readings a day. I am not on any medication. I was put on it originally because my readings were too high then taken off it when they went too low.

 

[Sparkle]

I agree with @Docb diabetes alone does not cause levels to fall below 4, have you asked about reactive hypoglycemia? xx

Thank you, I have not asked about anything but I will at my next appointment.

 

[mikeydt1]

as a SPC user i was told by a urologist to take Vitamin C well worth considering. also a nurse told me that cranberry serves very little benefit.

 

[Sparkle]

as a SPC user i was told by a urologist to take Vitamin C well worth considering. also a nurse told me that cranberry serves very little benefit.

Thank you, I already take vitamin C and a cranberry tablet, recommended by my Urologist. She said a cranberry tablet is equivalent to 8 glasses of cranberry juice.

 

[Madeline]

That’s what Small’s said too, and no sugar lol.