Right now, as I type, I have a knot in my stomach. It’s a familiar feeling, often accompanied by an inability to take deep breaths, that is my body’s way of telling me that I am very stressed out.

The reason, in this particular case, is that my husband and I have decided to move back to the east coast, and are going to be leaving our lovely Oakland home in a matter of weeks. Before we settle in, we’re going to be going on a big trip — stay tuned to the blog for details — that’s going to include some pretty diabetically unfriendly places. Like Latvia, for example. Or Russia.

I had my last appointment with my San Francisco endocrinologist this morning, and instead of discussing basal rates or boluses, we focused mostly on a checklist of prescriptions for me to take with me while abroad, just in case my supplies get lost or stolen or I find myself in a foreign country with a bottle of Humalog that’s expired. It was actually a pretty funny interaction — I’m quite worried that a Chinese-speaking pharmacist is not going to know what to make of Symlin to begin with, let alone if it’s written in my doctor’s handwriting. So as he kindly created a ridiculously long list of prescriptions for me, I kept gently prodding him to, you know, write a little clearer. (“Thank you so much!” I said, as he scrawled out a prescription for test strips. “Can you just write that a little more neatly?”)

He tried, and I now have a stack of prescriptions for any sort of diabetic calamity I might face. He also gave me some valuable travel tips, including the fact that apparently most insurance companies allow you to do a “vacation override” where you can get more than three months’ worth of prescriptions at a time (I’ll believe it when Blue Shield sen