Totally off topic, but amusing -

Have a look at (and vote for) Olivia Collins’s book review video, Your Chickens: A Kids Guide to Raising and Showing at StoryTubes – it really is the best one up there, and if she wins, South Portland gets $1000 for books!

I had it coming.

I went for about a week without missing my targets at ALL. I was steadily between 80 mg/dl and 140 mg/dl and was starting to get the feeling that I had this whole thing down pat – I would be able to do this diabetes management stuff as second nature, and life would pretty much go back to normal.

Uh-huh.

Well the first blow was Sunday night. Frankie was jonesing for some wings. Nice spicy wings. So we tried to go to Bingas Wingas – closed. Norm’s East End – closed. At this point it was time to get some food in the Ursl, so we headed home, and decided to have some Spicy Thai Wings from Thai Taste instead, after our traditional Sunday night popcorn. And so we did, even though during my second plate, I said out loud, “I can’t believe I’m eating this giant pile of wings!” Sure enough, by the time Frankie was getting out the ice cream, I was over 200 mg/dl and feeling like an idiot. Of course there was sugar in the sauce. I didn’t compensate for it. I felt like a loser. Took a compensation dose, but still just felt angry about the whole thing.

The next day was up and down – too high in the morning, still to high after breakfast, took a correction, went for a walk and then got a little hypo, ate some lunch after which I was up over 10 again, got it down by dinner time, and then after dinner was down around 47 – way too low, and had to stay up late to correct it. A complete disaster.

So today, I’m fine in the morning, fine around lunch – and then I had a burrito. Dosed myself accordingly, and still my BS jumps up over 260. Took a correction, it’s still going up. Took another 2 units, and now I figure I’m headed for a major crash, because I overreacted. I’m on a roller-coaster and I feel like I’ve got no control of this thing at all. So much for my confidence.

This newfound weakness has been showing up in my dreams, of course. Sunday night I dreamed that I was showering at a gym somewhere, and had a crash. I had to yell for someone to help me and finally a couple of people came and got my supplies, and just stood around while I tried to work my meter and open my glucose tabs in a hypoglycemic daze. I was scared and ashamed.

Last night I dreamed that I was at some sort of college event and I had lost my meter. Someone gave me another brand, but it was very slow… I had run out of insulin and was testing my levels over and over but they went up to 1440 mg/dl, and I was afraid I was going to go into shock and die at any second. I didn’t know whether I could trust the readings but they were very scary, and no one seemed to understand what I was talking about, why I was terrified.

So it was a real fun Memorial Day Weekend, diabetes-wise.

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That was a strange one – I woke up last night from a dream where Frankie, Urs and I and my parents were sitting around in our living room – but we were ready to go, the kitty was full and the boat was put together and we were talking logistics. Everything was going smoothly, and we were discussing something completely unrelated, when my dad cried, “Don’t do something stupid!”.

He was on the brink of tears.

I asked what he meant, and he said, “You have a good job. You have insurance. You’re going to give that all up, and when you get back here, you won’t have anything, you won’t be able to take care of yourself, and you’re going to get sick. And you have a family – a wife and a daughter and you shouldn’t DO SOMETHING STUPID.”

And I woke up.

Wow. I mean I often dream about things that are related to my life, but it’s rarely so completely direct! And what made it stranger is that my parents are visiting us right now – so now I keep worrying in the back of my head that we are actually going to have that conversation.

And I don’t know what I’m going to say. It is stupid, no doubt, to think about leaving the life we have. We have a cute little house, right up from the beach, I have an easy job at a nice company that pays the bills, Ursula is happy and healthy and cute as a bug, we have good friends and good food and I have a great team of doctors helping me cope with this illness – to put that at risk seems absolutely ludicrous.

But…

This diabetes thing has been a reminder that we pledged not to wait to do anything in life. Frankie and I are doing this because it’s a dream we both had, and after that bright September morning in 2001 when I was walking away from the World Trade Center wondering if things were going to start blowing up all around me – you can’t wait. You never know. That morning, I randomly got off the subway downtown instead of uptown to work out at the Wall Street branch of my gym – just for a change of pace. The second plane hit as I got out of the subway. You never know. Someone might just chuck a rock at your head, and that’s it – no more dreams, no more plans, no more nothing.

So I got diabetes. What the hell? Didn’t see that one coming. But there’s no way to see everything coming, and life would be pretty damned boring if you could. This is all such a cliche, but there’s a difference in the pit of your stomach between thinking that every moment exists just once, and you should seize the day, and really feeling the transitory nature of everything – that you are always in flux, and eventually this gathering of stuff that you think of as you will be moldering in the ground. This moment is the only moment that exists, and you always have to choose what to do.

So we prepare – we don’t want to be stupid, of course, but if this diabetes is what keeps us from living our dream, well that would be a shame. And it’d be our fault, for lacking the courage to realize that we can’t control live – we can prepare, and meet challenges with the tools we have – but we can’t live trying to keep everything safe and easy, because you never know. You never know.

Last night Ursula had a hard time going to sleep.

Frankie had gotten up at around midnight to “dream feed” her, and afterwards, all she was very fussy. She wanted to feed more, but wouldn’t calm down, and finally Frankie asked me if I could take over and try to put her to sleep.

So I did – holding her, rocking her gently, singing “Stay Awake” just above a whisper…

And I almost passed out.

Now I don’t know if it was just exhaustion or what, but I have the feeling that my blood sugar levels were crashing. I haven’t brought myself to testing in the middle of the night yet – I’m testing 6-8 times a day already, and sticking the needle in my finger at 2AM just doesn’t seem like a lot of fun.

What worries me about this is passagemaking – and anchor watches, for that matter. Am I going to be able to function after just 3-4 hours of sleep? Will I have to test every time I get up and eat a few raisins or something – and what will that do to my overall glucose levels?

I’m curious if anyone else out there is in the sort of situation where they have to deal with sudden, middle-of-the-night “action stations” situations – and how they manage the wooziness…