Access Diabetic Supply cold call - and I do mean COLD

I got a call this morning from some gal that barely spoke English saying that she was from Access Diabetic supplies and wanted to talk to my dad. Her English was bad enough that I barely caught 'Access' and since I was expecting a call today from a place about getting my dad a powered wheelchair I assumed it was them calling me back so I told her I was his caregiver, could I help her?

She began telling me about how Medicare recipients can get their diabetes supplies for free so I stopped her (not an easy task) and asked how she got my information. She said that they are authorized to call people that have, in the past, filled out a card saying they wanted information on diabetes products and services. That made me think for a moment, and I do recall filling out a general information card like that at one time at my dad's doctor's office, but I did NOT put down any phone number. They had to have looked that up.

As I said, I could barely understand her English and as she launched back into her spiel I had to talk over her (several times "Ma'am... Ma'am... Miss... Ma'am... wait wait wait wait...") to get her to stop talking long enough for me to inform her that the request had to have been from six months to a year ago, and that my mother, the diabetic, has passed away.

Now, for any normal person this would have resulted in a "Oh, I'm sorry." :::shakes head::: This gal - She paused for just a fraction of a second and then, with no tone change from her spiel, said "What about *****?" (my dad's name). It is putting it mildly to say that I was dumbfounded for a moment, then I recovered from the "WTF?!?!!?" shock of her coldness and said "Can I please speak to your manager?" She promptly hung up on me. I think she realized that she had screwed up when she did not even offer up a "Oh, I'm sorry" and just pushed right on ahead asking about the next possible target to her cold call.

This kind of customer contacting is not merely unwelcome, but exceptionally uncalled for in the level of uncaring that the caller has for the persons on the receiving end of the call.

McDonald's gambling on diabetic getting sugar in their coffee

I went down to Wal Mart with my mom yesterday, and as I was leaving I stopped to get us each a cup of coffee at the McDonalds in there. They had to make a fresh pot, so I asked if I should take the stuff I had bought out to the car and come back. Yes, so I did. When I got back they were having some trouble with the creamer dispenser so I told them I would grab a few things I had forgot from inside the store and be back after the coffee in a few minutes.

I got back to get the coffee and there is a kit that seemed to be very new to the concept of fast food at the counter in place of the person I had initially had serving me. He found the coffee's all ready prepared on the back counter by the coffee maker and slapped two lids on them and sat them on the counter. I turned the things around and could not find any marks for what was in which cup, so I asked him which one was the one with sugar in it. By this time the other gal had come back. The kid stared for a moment and said "I dunno... the one on the left?" His companion seemed almost as unimpressed with that response as I was, however, I can hardly let her off the hook since she is the one that prepared them and sat them out unmarked.

After a bit of debate and suggestions that it was the one on the left (big help there), I informed them that it was important I know because the person the coffee was for was a diabetic. So, the gal decided that they could just dump one out and make it extra cream only. I stopped that right quick with a reminder that they needed a new cup, since there would still be sugar in the one they were dumping if it was indeed the one with the sugar in it. By this time we had the manager's attention as well, and there was also a poor store employee trying to get something for having during his break. Poor Wal Mart employee spent half his break trying to get one of them to hand him an ice cream.

They finally settled on giving me two new coffees and still were not certain which one had the cream in it and which the extra sugar. URRGH!!!! Then I had to remind them I had ordered a soda and needed to have it and the receipt - which the kid had just crumpled.

Dang place scares me. They should take any order for an item without sugar or salt *VERY* seriously, because there are a lot of diabetics out there that it really does matter and you can not just guess "The one on the left?" What really got me though? I had not even got a sincere sounding "Sorry for the mix up, Ma'am," out of any of them - not even the manager.

In my opinion, in-store McDonald's are not the place to train new employees. They should be made up of workers that have been trained at other McDonald's restaurants and transfered into the in-store branches - possibly with a small increase in pay for the trouble of being shuffled. The kid-in-training was very obviously over his head and I'm not sure the other employee was all that coordinated given how much fluttering she did between helping me and helping the other man that was there on break and talking to the trainee and manager and just standing looking off into the nothingness of who knows where.

Diabetes symptoms

Since my mother has diabetes, and I am often concerned by the possibility that I too might develop it, I decided to go looking for what the symptoms are. I found it to be a little less than informative when the American Diabetes Association listed the following symptoms for diabetes:

* Frequent urination
* Excessive thirst
* Extreme hunger
* Unusual weight loss
* Increased fatigue
* Irritability
* Blurry vision

Mmmm.... Okay... how does one exactly determine if they are urinating more frequent than they should be, or more thirsty than they should be? And if they are thirsty, then frequent urination is a side effect of that. Anyone that has ever tried that 8 glasses of water a day trick can tell you that. Or just try drinking tea on a regular basis.

Extreme hunger and weight loss don't generally go together however. I don't think any of those symptoms pertain to me, though, so I'm hopefully still in the clear as far as diabetes risk goes.

Type 2 diabetes causes 50% faster muscle loss in legs of elderly

Do you, or your care recipient have type two diabetes?

If so then you might be interested in knowing that it is not just you (or them) that is having trouble with things like walking for very long or getting up even short flights of stairs.

A study on seniors with (type 1 and 2) diabetes, and those without it, was conducted and the results of the study printed in Diabetes Care. The study determine that older adults with type 2 diabetes have an accelerated loss of leg muscles strength and quality as compared to those without diabetes. They detected no difference between those with and without diabetes in the strength and quality of muscles in the arms.

What this means is that if you, or your care recipient, has no trouble with getting up to go do something but then finds that they have to sit down and just have no more strength, or while shopping are constantly looking for a bench to sit on, then it might be because of type two diabetes effecting the muscles in your (or their) legs.

The study was conducted on 1,840 older adults aged 70–79 years. The leg and arm muscle mass and strength was examined at baseline and then again three years later.

Dr. Seok Won Park, the lead investigator on the study, told Reuters Health:

elderly adults with diabetes lose leg muscle strength about 50 percent faster than their peers without diabetes.

I will be keeping an eye on this subject, since my mom has type two diabetes and has problems with reduced strength in her leg muscles. Keep an eye out here for additional information on this as I locate it. (I'll file it all under 'Diabetes'.)

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Sources:
Reuters Health

Seok Won Park, Bret H. Goodpaster, Elsa S. Strotmeyer, Lewis H. Kuller, Robert Broudeau, Candace Kammerer, Nathalie de Rekeneire, Tamara B. Harris, Ann V. Schwartz, Frances A. Tylavsky, Yong-wook Cho, Anne B. Newman, and for the Health, Aging, and Body Composition Study
Accelerated Loss of Skeletal Muscle Strength in Older Adults With Type 2 Diabetes: The Health, Aging, and Body Composition Study
Diabetes Care 30: 1507-1512; published online before print as 10.2337/dc06-2537