Day 5

No classes or practice sessions today so spent the morning at the apartment making creative use of tables and beds to replace usual yoga equipment. Spent a lot of time wrestling with antiquated twin tub washing machine trying to get a load of washing done without completely flooding the apartment. Lets just say the floor is very clean now.

Headed off to join Lynda for her 60th birthday celebration lunch at La Pizzeria – a rather nice italian restaurant with UK prices but good food. Salad that’s safe to eat and desserts such as melting chocolate bomb. We followed with afternoon tea and cake at the flat and then headed out to see if we could find our way up the hill that overlooks Pune.

We weren’t sure how to get there so we just ambled in the general direction and ended up walking through the slums and seeing a completely different side of Pune. Narrow streets and a higgledy piggedly mix of tin shacks, colourful houses, shops and stalls, people working, children and goats scrubbing around on wasteland – it almost had a festival atmosphere.

You might imagine it would feel unsafe but in fact the opposite was true – a friendly and relaxed vibe. I stopped to take a photo of some goats and the people nearby wanted their photo taken too and of course wanted to see their image on the camera amid much giggling and chattering. It was a shame I didn’t have a word of Hindi nor they of English.

We finally found our way up the hill and scrambled up some rocks to sit and enjoy the vista over Pune just before the sun went down. A good day 

I spent the evening catching up with the family on Skype and doing some Diabetes research online and was dismayed to find out that I had been incorrectly advised by the laboratory to fast before the c-peptide test. Basically if your blood sugar is already low why would your pancreas bother to produce insulin? (and therefore c-peptide). It would have been more useful to go and test when the sugars had been raised for a while. So I may go and re-test tomorrow. On the plus side my test result was 0.13 ng/ml which is very low (normal fasting range  0.78 – 1.89 ng/ml) but it’s not nothing – indicating perhaps that a few beta cells have survived despite having type 1 diabetes for 16 years.