Trakai Castle on an island near Vilnius, Lithuania

Click to watch or watch on YouTube
(the article below accompanies this video)

After a day of pretty bad blood sugars yesterday, I had better hopes for today in Vilnius, Lithuania. No matter how bad diabetes gets, you always have to get up, dust yourself off, and hope for better things tomorrow. As it turns out, I wasn’t perfect today but not as bad as yesterday – I’ll take any progress at all. And I was in a good enough mood to enjoy our trip out to Trakai Island Castle with our Lithuanian friend Neringa.

Upon waking at 8:30, I was 243. Bad start. Breakfast was again a small, manageable amount of chocolate cereal with milk, and a banana. Also, Masayo went out to get some coffee for us.

At noon, I checked and was 168. Great! Not great, but better. Anything under 200 seems like a miracle to me these days. We left the room to see some parts of Vilnius’ Old Town we hadn’t seen yesterday. The temperature was a little warmer, and I wore several shirt layers but not my down jacket.

We stopped by the STEBUKLA Miracle Tile again, because after seeing it last night I’d read on the internet that you were supposed to make a wish, stand on the tile, and turn around. So we did that, then walked up to the amazing St. Anne’s Church. I don’t know who St. Anne was or is but her church is very cool — made of red bricks, but with very ornate and winding construction, not blocky. We went around and inside, taking lots of photos. It was really nice.

Then we walked along the small and lovely Vilnia River to see the only still-standing section of the Vilnius town wall. Again, the view overlooking the city was nice. We could see over the rooftops to the Gediminas Tower that we climbed to yesterday; then, we were looking over here. Now we’re here, looking over there.

But we were getting hungry.

Back near the hotel in town we stopped by a bookstore/cafe and got granola yogurt, quiche, and a big cookie we split. (And I had carbonated water, mm-mmm!) I took my shot, hoping this was a relatively low-carb meal and my lower-than-200 BG would remain so.

Trakai Island Castle

After lunch, Masayo’s friend Neringa came to the hotel to pick us up in her car. We were going about 25 km outside of Vilnius to see Trakai Island Castle, a very famous sightseeing spot (and resort, in summer).

The drive was pleasant, into the setting sun, and the town at the castle was really quiet and pretty. We walked across a couple bridges to get to the castle. We couldn’t go inside much, because opening hours were over at 5 pm and it was 4:40. But we walked all around the outside of it. It was dusk, and a 3/4 moon was bright in the sky over the water. Ducks and swans scooted around the water. It was all quite a sight.

Afterwards, cold, we stopped at a restaurant for hot tea and kibinai, a local specialty of bread wrapped around something inside; I had chicken and mushrooms. It was excellent, and very warm.

We got back in the car, and in the totally dark back seat, not having checked my BG recently, I took a blind shot — three units of Humalog. All I could to was hope it would be enough but not too much. The same old story for a diabetic, multiple times daily!

Neringa drove us back to our hotel and we thanked her. She had made our trip to Vilnius very friendly and had shown us things we would not have seen otherwise.

My BG back in the room, unfortunately (and unaccountably) was 281. I was still a little hungry so we went back to the Rimi supermarket to get a few small things: a piece of pizza bread, and some La Vache Qui Rit cheese (I had survived on this stuff in Southeast Asia). I ate the rest of the Chiki Chips from last night too.

This seemed a simple meal, carb-wise, so I guessed and shot up the Humalog. No good: at midnight, I was 269. I don’t know why, so I don’t know how to fix it. I took a couple more units of Humalog and went to sleep.

Tomorrow we are leaving Vilnius. I’ll keep working on the stupid BG, which refuses to pay any attention to my Humalog.

When’s the last time you had blood sugar that would not go down?

Thanks for reading. Suggested:

• Share:
• Watch: Video on YouTube
• Read: Day 19: My first Lithuanian train ride to Šiauliai
• Join: Free email newsletter (info and early video access)
• Support: Patreon (much earlier video access and other perks)