Last night my husband and I were out to dinner when he said “Let’s play a game. It will test our Beatles knowledge. We need to come up with a Beatles song for every letter of the alphabet.”

Really, he’s just a show-off smarty-pants and knew that there was no way that I could out-play him when it comes to the Beatles – Blue Jay Way? Really? Who even knows that’s a Beatles song?

So today, I thought I’d play a diabetes alphabet game. We had our end of year team lunch, so I had a group of incredibly bright women to help out. The way it worked was I said the letter and whoever came up with the first thing beginning with that letter won (with a few edits from me). Here we go:

A – ‘All the time’!

B – BGLs (close second to ‘Bugger’ with thanks to Kim)

C – Complications (and constant.)

D – Diabetes

E – Eyesight

F – Fuck! (Snap! Kim and I said it at exactly the same time!)

G – Glucose

H – Hypo / High (it was a tie. Special mention to Jane’s ‘HI’ from friendly meters when we’re reeeeaaaallllly high)

I – Insulin

J – Jelly beans

K – Ketones

L – Lucozade (Kim again!)

M – Mellitus (followed by a discussion on how it’s pronounced. Is it Mel-it-us or Mel-eye-tus??)

N – Normal (given that at the time of doing this there were more pancreatically-challenged people involved, we decided that our ‘normal’ is those with type 1 diabetes!)

O – Ophthalmologist

P – Pee stick (with pump as the runner-up)

Q – Quick-acting

R – Retinopathy

S – Slow-acting

T – Tablets

U – Undiagnosed

V – Veins

W – Wonderful people (with a shout out to the DOC)

X – X-tra sexy (with a shout out to the DOC)

Y – You’re in control!

Z – Zzzzzzzz (‘cause it’s boring. And I really want a good night’s sleep uninterrupted by either high or low sugars as has been the case every night this week.)

I suspect that everytime the game is played, the words would change. (Case in point: how was C not cupcakes? I’m shattered!) But it was a fun way to spend 15 minutes. I wonder if our ‘diabetes state of mind’ could be analysed by the words we come up when playing this game. I know that on those days where diabetes is misbehaving, most words would be negative. But when diabetes (very) occasionally plays nice, perhaps cupcakes would be the first thing we think of when the letter C is called.  

And hey – next time Aaron suggests we play the Beatles alphabet game, I’ve got A sorted. I’m calling Ain’t She Sweet.

Okay – it’s over to you now. What words would you come up with?