Bitch & moan, ad nauseum
I am now officially sick of being diabetic (or have I already said that?). By the end of the first month it seemed like everything was going so great, and now it's like everything's falling apart again. I'm stressing out about it – a lot – which only makes the numbers go even higher.
It's so frustrating to try to sort out all the information that's available. There are so many different components to keep track of. There's diet, exercise, and all the various kinds of stress – physical, emotional, environmental, chemical, heat, cold, noise, traffic, clutter, interpersonal conflicts, barking dogs, scary nightmares, broken bike racks, the past, the present, the future, people getting trampled while waiting in line for an iPhone (as was just predicted on the 11 o'clock news) ....
Right now, for example, at this very moment, a noisy tractor is making its way up and down the rows of the vineyard across the road from my house, spraying whatever it is they spray in early summer – sulfur, probably, since it's that time of year and it's an organic vineyard. Sulfur is relatively safe and non-toxic, and they only apply it at night when the wind is low and the chemical is less likely to drift. So it's supposedly no big deal, or is it? For the last few mornings my fasting blood glucose has been way higher than usual – this morning it was 40 points higher than it has been in weeks! Is this related to the spraying? Or is it because of other stresses I'm dealing with right now? Is it just a weird fluke, a natural variation? Or is it a trend? Should I worry? Should I wait and see? Should I try to find out what they're spraying? Should I demand they stop? Should I go stay with friends for a few nights? Should I not be living in an agricultural area at all?
And in more general (or specific) terms, what should I be eating? Should I exercise more? Or less? Harder? Gentler? How long? What time? Should I eat before I run? After? How much? What food?
I feel like my eating, in particular, is totally screwed up right now. I'm eating very few carbs, probably less than 80 carbs a day on most days, and probably not enough calories either. But I'm too scared to eat anything, because whereas awhile ago it seemed like I could easily control my blood glucose by watching the carbs, now it seems to be creeping up again no matter what I eat. Last week I had one quarter of a small French roll, just as an experiment, and my glucose shot up from 104 to 202 in less than an hour. Today I had basically no carbs at all, and in two hours just sitting at my desk working it went from 118 to 182. My liver is totally freaking out.
Not to bore you with all the mind-numbing details. I guess I'm just feeling angry and frustrated, and also realizing (by reading, I'm still reading as much as I can) that all these health issues I'm starting to see now have roots that go much deeper than I ever used to think even just a month ago – which is scary, which stresses me out, which makes my glucose go even higher, and on and on.
For instance, I've been reading up on endocrine disorders and cross-referencing what I'm learning with some things I already know from my own record-keeping over the last 25 years, and have realized that if I'd been able to connect the dots a lot earlier, or ever had a relationship longer than about two or three years with any doctor who was paying attention, I might have been able to do something to protect my poor pancreas, or at least maybe postpone the inevitable, or make it less bad than it is.
Before I was even out of high school, I was plucking little beard hairs out of my chin in the bathroom mirror of the t-shirt shop where I worked after school. That was before I got fat – back when I weighed barely a hundred pounds. I was hairy enough that my electrologist sent me to have an ultrasound, to make sure I didn't have some kind of hair-causing tumor (I didn't). I've always had weird ovulation and heavy, irregular periods – my average cycle since my late teens has been between 35 and 40 days. In my early 20s I had cystic acne bad enough to merit a prescription for Acutane, which was another whole mess I don't even want to go into (but which did clear up my skin and save me from scars). Anxiety disorder, depression, insulin resistance, exhaustion, weight gain, polycystic ovary syndrome (maybe it's not such a surprise I never had kids) .... I'm still researching all the ways my constellation of symptoms might be related, but from everything I've found out so far it seems pretty clear that something's been going more and more wrong with me for a really long time.
And I guess it's good to know that, and to start figuring out what's going on so that I can know what to do to take care of myself better now. No point in obsessing about the past, right?
All the same, I just keep thinking about my poor pancreas, my dying pancreas, and it just makes me sad to know that it's been struggling all these years, and I never knew it, and never did anything to help.
And I'm afraid for my heart now, too, since my heart attack risk is now supposedly equal to a non-diabetic person who's already had one heart attack. Great!
Well, grr. I guess what it really comes down to is that all this new information is making me afraid that I'm going to die, and I just really hate to think about that, but how can I not think about it, when I'm seeing numbers on my glucometer that show my very own personal capillaries and internal organs are sustaining irreparable damage Right This Very Minute?
And how the hell am I ever going to handle the stress of going to grad school if I can't even handle the stress of asking the guy across the street what he's doing in the vineyard?
Another funny thing – despite growing evidence to the contrary, I always have and still do think of myself as a very healthy person. It's just that now, I'm a very healthy person who also happens to have all these syndromes and diseases and disorders. So maybe part of why I'm feeling anxious and depressed is because my identity as a gloriously healthy person is being challenged ... and my ego doesn't like that.
I don't want to start seeing myself as a hypochondriac, or a sickly person, or one of those people who only wants to talk about how crappy they feel all the time, or how worried they are about their health. Someone kick me if I start doing that, okay? Or is it already too late?
I really need to just calm down and stop whipping myself up into a frenzy over this. I just started a weekend retreat series with Pema Chödrön and this week she was talking about the five Skandhas, or aggregates that constitute individual experience (form, feeling, perception, concept, and consciousness), and the various ways we get hung up in our own lives by always insisting on attaching a storyline to everything that happens ... It reminded me of what I've recently realized about drama, and the habit I have of indulging in exclamation points when most of the time a simple period would do, and be more accurate.
Anyway. Just a few things I'm thinking about. Mr. A is away again this week, and will be for awhile, so I have more time to just sit and stew than I usually do. Not necessarily such a good thing, perhaps.
I'm sure I will figure this out and get my attitude back where I like it before too long. In the meantime, riding my bike an hour or more every day continues to be a major saving grace, not to mention a huge pleasure. It's a whole hour every day when I know for sure I'm going to feel good.
P.S. I just smelled something sweet and juicy and delicious, and now I see that that Tater has brought in the first fallen apple of the summer, and is lying on the couch next to me holding it between his front paws, gnawing on it and licking up the juice. It's so adorable to me that he loves apples so much. He's a sweet darling little 75-lb. apple himself, to me.
It's so frustrating to try to sort out all the information that's available. There are so many different components to keep track of. There's diet, exercise, and all the various kinds of stress – physical, emotional, environmental, chemical, heat, cold, noise, traffic, clutter, interpersonal conflicts, barking dogs, scary nightmares, broken bike racks, the past, the present, the future, people getting trampled while waiting in line for an iPhone (as was just predicted on the 11 o'clock news) ....
Right now, for example, at this very moment, a noisy tractor is making its way up and down the rows of the vineyard across the road from my house, spraying whatever it is they spray in early summer – sulfur, probably, since it's that time of year and it's an organic vineyard. Sulfur is relatively safe and non-toxic, and they only apply it at night when the wind is low and the chemical is less likely to drift. So it's supposedly no big deal, or is it? For the last few mornings my fasting blood glucose has been way higher than usual – this morning it was 40 points higher than it has been in weeks! Is this related to the spraying? Or is it because of other stresses I'm dealing with right now? Is it just a weird fluke, a natural variation? Or is it a trend? Should I worry? Should I wait and see? Should I try to find out what they're spraying? Should I demand they stop? Should I go stay with friends for a few nights? Should I not be living in an agricultural area at all?
And in more general (or specific) terms, what should I be eating? Should I exercise more? Or less? Harder? Gentler? How long? What time? Should I eat before I run? After? How much? What food?
I feel like my eating, in particular, is totally screwed up right now. I'm eating very few carbs, probably less than 80 carbs a day on most days, and probably not enough calories either. But I'm too scared to eat anything, because whereas awhile ago it seemed like I could easily control my blood glucose by watching the carbs, now it seems to be creeping up again no matter what I eat. Last week I had one quarter of a small French roll, just as an experiment, and my glucose shot up from 104 to 202 in less than an hour. Today I had basically no carbs at all, and in two hours just sitting at my desk working it went from 118 to 182. My liver is totally freaking out.
Not to bore you with all the mind-numbing details. I guess I'm just feeling angry and frustrated, and also realizing (by reading, I'm still reading as much as I can) that all these health issues I'm starting to see now have roots that go much deeper than I ever used to think even just a month ago – which is scary, which stresses me out, which makes my glucose go even higher, and on and on.
For instance, I've been reading up on endocrine disorders and cross-referencing what I'm learning with some things I already know from my own record-keeping over the last 25 years, and have realized that if I'd been able to connect the dots a lot earlier, or ever had a relationship longer than about two or three years with any doctor who was paying attention, I might have been able to do something to protect my poor pancreas, or at least maybe postpone the inevitable, or make it less bad than it is.
Before I was even out of high school, I was plucking little beard hairs out of my chin in the bathroom mirror of the t-shirt shop where I worked after school. That was before I got fat – back when I weighed barely a hundred pounds. I was hairy enough that my electrologist sent me to have an ultrasound, to make sure I didn't have some kind of hair-causing tumor (I didn't). I've always had weird ovulation and heavy, irregular periods – my average cycle since my late teens has been between 35 and 40 days. In my early 20s I had cystic acne bad enough to merit a prescription for Acutane, which was another whole mess I don't even want to go into (but which did clear up my skin and save me from scars). Anxiety disorder, depression, insulin resistance, exhaustion, weight gain, polycystic ovary syndrome (maybe it's not such a surprise I never had kids) .... I'm still researching all the ways my constellation of symptoms might be related, but from everything I've found out so far it seems pretty clear that something's been going more and more wrong with me for a really long time.
And I guess it's good to know that, and to start figuring out what's going on so that I can know what to do to take care of myself better now. No point in obsessing about the past, right?
All the same, I just keep thinking about my poor pancreas, my dying pancreas, and it just makes me sad to know that it's been struggling all these years, and I never knew it, and never did anything to help.
And I'm afraid for my heart now, too, since my heart attack risk is now supposedly equal to a non-diabetic person who's already had one heart attack. Great!
Well, grr. I guess what it really comes down to is that all this new information is making me afraid that I'm going to die, and I just really hate to think about that, but how can I not think about it, when I'm seeing numbers on my glucometer that show my very own personal capillaries and internal organs are sustaining irreparable damage Right This Very Minute?
And how the hell am I ever going to handle the stress of going to grad school if I can't even handle the stress of asking the guy across the street what he's doing in the vineyard?
Another funny thing – despite growing evidence to the contrary, I always have and still do think of myself as a very healthy person. It's just that now, I'm a very healthy person who also happens to have all these syndromes and diseases and disorders. So maybe part of why I'm feeling anxious and depressed is because my identity as a gloriously healthy person is being challenged ... and my ego doesn't like that.
I don't want to start seeing myself as a hypochondriac, or a sickly person, or one of those people who only wants to talk about how crappy they feel all the time, or how worried they are about their health. Someone kick me if I start doing that, okay? Or is it already too late?
I really need to just calm down and stop whipping myself up into a frenzy over this. I just started a weekend retreat series with Pema Chödrön and this week she was talking about the five Skandhas, or aggregates that constitute individual experience (form, feeling, perception, concept, and consciousness), and the various ways we get hung up in our own lives by always insisting on attaching a storyline to everything that happens ... It reminded me of what I've recently realized about drama, and the habit I have of indulging in exclamation points when most of the time a simple period would do, and be more accurate.
Anyway. Just a few things I'm thinking about. Mr. A is away again this week, and will be for awhile, so I have more time to just sit and stew than I usually do. Not necessarily such a good thing, perhaps.
I'm sure I will figure this out and get my attitude back where I like it before too long. In the meantime, riding my bike an hour or more every day continues to be a major saving grace, not to mention a huge pleasure. It's a whole hour every day when I know for sure I'm going to feel good.
P.S. I just smelled something sweet and juicy and delicious, and now I see that that Tater has brought in the first fallen apple of the summer, and is lying on the couch next to me holding it between his front paws, gnawing on it and licking up the juice. It's so adorable to me that he loves apples so much. He's a sweet darling little 75-lb. apple himself, to me.
Labels: diabetes
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