Zed and two noughts

No, not the Peter Greenaway film Zoo. Frank and I went to to Colchester Zoo this morning, and it's all about numbers. Last week Frank matter-of-factly informed me "I know all the numbers in the world". And numbers are something we're struggling with at the moment.

We're gathering lots of diabetes data under Frank's new testing and administering regime, and trying to make sense of it all. We're now weighing his food, calculating the carbohydrate content, and working out insulin doses. Plus we've got data from fingerprick blood testing to measure where his blood-sugar levels are at that instant. Calculating insulin doses based on what he's going to eat, and factoring in a bit more to correct for the (most likely) over-high blood sugar levels.

Meanwhile Frank's doing his own calculations. We're looking at the lions, and one has died since our last visit. "There used to be two, but now there's one", Frank tells me. In the next cage is a swarm of Persian mice. There's usually around a dozen in there, but today there's heaps all over the floor of the cage, on the rocks, and up at the high level platforms and ropes. A quick estimate and I'd clocked around two hundred meeces, suggesting they'd been busy amusing themselves over Christmas, or the snakes had lost their appetites. I asked Frank how many mice were in the cage, and he had a good look round, muttered a string of numbers under his breath, and pronounced after his deliberations "there are eight mice".

A quick scoot round the apes and tortoises, and it's back home for lunch, where we discover he has a high of 24 (when we should be between 4 and 8), so it's another big injection of insulin, to correct his high and to allow for his soon-to-be-eaten lunch, but he isn't that hungry which leaves him potentially overdosed on insulin. And sure enough, two hours later he crashes into a hypo episode at 2.8.

We know what to do, but it's back to Peter Greenaway films again, and this time it's Drowning by Numbers.