The low down on the down low

It's getting really hard to turn on the news or log on to Facebook these days. It seems everything posted or linked or talked about is __ number of ______ people killed in ________ because of _____. I know I shouldn't hide from it, because I want to be informed on what's happening in our society and in our world, but if I have to actively seek out good news, or scientific discoveries, or anything positive while I weed through article after article about racism or animal cruelty, hate fueled rants against people running for President, and stories about rapists, murderers, and child molesters... eventually I just sit in a corner and I cry.

Beats me, Theoden. You ever find out let me know.

Yeah, life sucks for a lot of people right now, and I'm not usually political, but it's getting me down. Real down. Low down. It really seems like the media (in all of its forms) has honed in on the fact that people will read good news, but they will share and rant and talk about bad news until the next bad thing comes along, thereby making the media oodles of money.

Sadly, my blood sugars sure haven't been low down. When I get depressed, I eat. When I eat because I'm depressed, I usually forget to give insulin. Not even "enough" insulin. Just "at all" insulin. And last night my stupid pump setting was off (probably because I was tossing and turning all night) and I woke up with a blood sugar of 440 and eff it all. I felt awful. I was sure I was going to start throwing up and the sludge running through my veins was going to never go away. 

If you've never had a high blood sugar, imagine the most hung over you have ever been in your life. Nausea. Head aches. Light sensitive. And an overall feeling of I will never forgive myself for drinking as much as I did last night and I swear to God I will never do it again...only you didn't drink and you probably just goofed and no matter what promises you make you will goof again.

Since my last blog I have forgotten to put my insulin pump back on after showering and have made it all the way to work (which is a 30 minute drive in no traffic) before realizing it. TWICE. Who the hell walks out the door without their pancreas? 

Seriously. 

I've also rescheduled my next endocrinologist appointment twice now because I haven't had the time (read: motivation) to go and get my blood work done. My birthday was a couple weeks ago, and there was a lot of cake. A lot. Of. Cake. Also, I am not playing Pokemon Go so I am still walking as much as I ever have, which is to say about 7000 steps a day, which is enough to keep me from gaining a lot of weight but not enough to work off the multiple calorie overages I tend to make in a single day.

To say that taking care of myself has taken a back seat to pretty much everything else in my life would be a fairly accurate statement.

But...life goes on. And everyday is a new one to remember to log my calories into MyFitnessPal and make sure I get up and start walking when my VivoFit3 tells me to. And there's little else I can do about the rest other than be the best person I can be, teach the Toddler to be the best person he can be, stand up for what I feel is right when given an opportunity to do so...and post a lot more videos that are funny, because Rob Paulsen is right, and laughter is the best medicine. You can't OD and the refills are free.

So here are some videos that make me smile. I hope they make you smile, too. And tomorrow, I'll be sure to get in some more steps and not forget my pump. Baby steps.

Yakko's World from Animaniacs (c) Warner Bros.

The McCarthys (c) CBS, not they they care since they didn't renew the show :(

I can't even with how hysterical this is.

Rocksugar + Christmas = Perfection.

Seeing the Unseen

Sounds like a paranormal TV show on one of those cable channels that you can never remember the name of, huh? Seeing the Unseen. I'm not talking about ghosts, though what I am talking about is definitely scarier than things that go bump in the night.

I'm talking about not seeing how sick, tired, in pain, or ill some people are because the thing that makes them sick, tired, in pain and ill isn't obvious. Right now you'd never be able to tell I'm a diabetic because I've got my pump tucked away someplace you'd never see it, even if you were looking for it. I've got no physical deformity that identifies me as someone with whom you must be Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant.  In fact, many people are generally surprised to learn that I am a diabetic, as if there should have been some kind of obvious, clear-as-day sign that I'm not normal. But man do I feel like crap today.

Wait, doesn't mal mean bad, or something?

My husband suffers from frequent migraines, but he tries very hard to hide his pain from everyone. I work with someone who has fibromyalgia, and to just look at her gives you no indication of how much she often hurts. A very good friend of mine has Lupus, but on her good days you'd never know she is as ill as she is because you just can't see it. There is a long list of  chronic diseases that hide in plain sight, and hide in plain sight so well that many people over look how serious they are.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I want to be clear that I'm not comparing diabetes, something which I think is fairly livable, to any of these other conditions based on "how much one suffers" with whatever they have.  But the two major similarities between them and other diseases like them are that 1) You can't tell we've got it just by looking at us and 2) Trying to appear normal is exhausting, because believe it or not pretending to be okay can take a lot out of a person.

Creative Commons / Flickr: qjakeTired usually isn't this cute

When I was a kid everyone knew I had diabetes. It was one of the first things everyone in class learned. "Carla has diabetes. If she falls asleep on her desk let the teacher know." I sometimes used it to get attention, and never more than in third grade when my mom got the whole school involved in the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (now Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) annual walk-a-thon. I milked that for weeks. But I was keenly aware even as a child that diabetes made me different. I was the only kindergartner with an alarm clock in class that went off when it was time to eat a snack. I was the only one in my class- the only one in my entire grade- that left class a little early to go check her blood sugar and give herself a shot before lunch. And I was the only one who woke up in the nurse's office at some point during the first couple weeks of school because my blood sugar crashed and I passed out in class.

So eventually I stopped drawing attention to it, because once I hit junior high all I wanted was to be like everyone else. I wanted to eat pizza and drink Coke- not diet Coke. I wanted to eat cookies and not miss the last five minutes of whatever class I had right before lunch. I wanted to ride the bus to school and be allowed to sleep over at my friends' houses without my little sister tagging along "just in case." And I sure as hell didn't want to be a human pin cushion anymore. I didn't care for being called Diabetes Girl, either.

I spent years having to tell people about my diabetes right after telling them my name, and like I've said before it defined who I was when I was a kid. In spite of disliking the moniker, I was Diabetes Girl. My Sophomore year of high school the debate team signed up to help out at the JDF Walk-a-thon, and I'd kept my familiarity with the whole shebang under wraps. At some point however, one of my team mates found out, and I can still hear him in my head, talking to his mom who was one of the people coordinating the event: "Carla's one of the people we're helping!"

Well, really.

I won't get into my cynical rant on how little I feel people are helped by things like the JDF or JDRF when drug companies are making bank on us sickies and probably suppressing all research that would enable me to lead an Islets of Langerhans filled life without needles. (Besides, I've probably done it before.) The reason that this moment has stuck out in my memory is that it was just a nasty reminder that I was different in a situation where I wanted to be the same, and now people who had looked at me like I was normal now looked at me like I was someone who needed "helped."

But that was all in the past right?

Even if you take people knowing/not knowing I have diabetes out of the equation, there are just days I feel like crap and don't want to let on. I mean, I'll complain sometimes, but there are many days I just plaster a smile on my face and try to ignore the fact that my blood sugar won't go above 65 or below 325 or whatever. And there are days I'll pretend that I don't want to cry every time I give insulin because my setting went in wrong that morning and it hurts like someone stabbed me in the side. And I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've come in to work when I should have stayed home because the pump beeped all night long and I've gotten little to no sleep. What would be the point?

I guess the point is that even now I want to appear normal. And if I'm bone tired at the end of some days, then those who have it worse than me, and have a harder time appearing "normal" every day, have got to be even more bone tired. And that can be frustrating for their families, who actually get to see the pain and fatigue that is carefully shielded from the rest of the world. I had a conversation with my mom recently wherein she was surprised that my husband had been fighting a major migraine for a few days because he'd been over at my parents' house the night before and had seemed fine. He hides his pain from people well, and sometimes I wonder if people think I'm lying when I tell them how much he always hurts. They probably think he's exaggerating when he tells people how tired I am, too, because I spent most of my energy trying to appear healthy when I feel anything but.

I had to scan through a year and a half of Facebook posts to find this, and while diabetes isn't listed, that "etc" covers a lot of ground:

And....I Forget

I had a great idea for a blog post ten minutes ago in the bedroom...and now it's gone. Oh, well. I'll try a little free-flow writing and see if my brain can end up there again.

I made myself a promise that I would try to be more positive and let go of my hate this year. I would say anger, because that's more what I need to let go of since I don't really hate, but anger can be a good emotion and frankly, mine isn't going anywhere. I'd also say resolution instead of promise, but I stopped making those years ago. Resolutions most people don't keep, and while a lot of them don't keep promises, either, I'm much more likely to keep a promise.

Of course, Google Blogger isn't letting me load pictures and I just cast my laptop aside with an "I hate you," so clearly this is going to be a challenge for me.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I made a promise to be more positive, but you can't just flip a switch and go from being the person who professed extreme dislike for Barbara Streisand because of so many legitimate reasons to being a person who can sit and listen to her music...especially when the reasons to dislike still seem so legit. But honestly, is Babs feeling the sting of my ire? Hell no. The woman doesn't even know I exist and she wouldn't give a tuppence if she did. The only person I'm hurting is myself carrying around all that negativity. So I need to stop that.

I need to laugh more. I need to listen to happier music. I need to rant less and let go of my negativity because I'm too stressed.

 

Well, that's happy music and makes me laugh. Check and Check!

                         
I know I've touched on this before, but I'm a bit of a negative person. I see the best in people, usually, until I get to know them and they start to annoy me (lol), but I almost always see the worst in situations. I immediately think, "This can't be done because of X,Y, and Z" instead of  thinking, "This could totally be possible if A, B and C!" I try to think the latter, and if I'm consciously thinking about it I do, but...Geez is this hard. Changing the way you think isn't easy. The fact that I am actively trying to change should say a lot about me, at least. I see something about myself I don't like, and I am trying to improve myself.

Which miraculously made my brain remember what I was going to write about in the first place. Woohoo!

My diabetes (no, I didn't forget that this is a blog about living with diabetes. I'm not that old!) has of late been kind of borderline. I'm not doing bad, but I'm not doing good. What is that? Fair? I'm doing fair with it. And fair is frankly not good enough for me. I'm also over weight and I need to lose somewhere between 20 and 30 pounds before I won't actively fantasize about destroying my bathroom scale with a baseball bat a la Office Space.

A great way to get rid of stress!

Now before you all jump into the comments and tell me I look fine or great or I'm beautiful and shouldn't buy into skinny jeans, do me a favor and shut up. I appreciate that I probably don't look as bad as I think I do, but telling me so is doing a whole lot of nothing for me. I need to lose weight. I need to be in better shape. My health is affected by the extra weight I carry around. So telling me I'm not fat isn't helping me because frankly if I start to believe it I won't do anything about the weight I have gained.  Eating less, eating right and exercising 3-5 times a week- these are my goals, and I am not doing it because I want to fit into smaller jeans (that's a lie), I'm doing it because I want to be healthy (which is true). So, strangely, in this case, I think being negative is going to produce a positive.

And now we've come full circle, and I seriously didn't even plan that. Bam!

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

I've been a little depressed lately, I will admit. A look at my last few blog posts is evidence enough of that. And when I get depressed I tend to focus on the negative more than usual (which is saying something). But for once I have good news...and some embarrassing news.

First, the good. We got an email at work yesterday that said my endocrinologist was going to be covered as an in-network doctor even though Aetna itself isn't covering him (yet). Yay!

Happy Dance!

 

This is such a relief to me that I can't adequately put it into words....well, maybe one.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. (Which, I am pleased to see, my spellcheck tells me I spelled correctly on the first try.)
 

And now the embarrassing thing. I've been complaining about how miserable it is to put the new CGM sensor in for weeks. It often doesn't go all the way in and I have to stick myself more than once, twice, three times...My last blog post, I think, really went off on the device. I have since inserted two sensors without any problems whatsoever. Why? Because I realized I was doing it wrong. If you put the sensor into the inserter correctly it works really well. At some point I got cocky and forgot to be careful with what I was doing.

 

When the fail is so strong, one Facepalm is not enough indeed.

 

Which just goes to prove that even after having diabetes for decades I can still learn a thing or two about taking care of it. Namely, don't cut corners you idiot.

 

I'm still not out of the depression woods yet, but I've been feeling a lot more up than down the past week or so, and I'm not really sure why that is but I'm not about to over-analyze it. There are still big things that will set me off and make me cry, but I'm better able to handle the little things. I think it's because I vented and a lot of people reached out to me, which made me feel less lonely than I have been. Also, I've been trying to laugh more. 

 

"Laughter is the best medicine; you can't OD and the refills are free." So says Rob Paulsen, who has been entertaining you and your kids for quite a few years with his voice (seriously, his IMDb page is a mile long. He's Yakko on Animaniacs, Pinky on Pinky and the Brain, Carl on Jimmy Neutron, has been two Ninja Turtles...the man's incredible). "Everything you can imagine is real." That one's attributed to Pablo Picasso. "You cannot reason with the heart; it thumps about things which the intellect scorns." Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I've actually been researching "motivation" for a presentation I'm giving on Saturday (no, I didn't pick the topic), and I've been relying heavily on quotes to fill time. Twain didn't make it in because I can't figure out how to relate it to motivation, but Pablo and Rob did, among others.

 

I actually have a list of quotes by my desk, along with various other things that make me smile- pictures of my family, lots of Obi-Wan Kenobis, a giant map of Disneyland and a less giant map of Boston I picked up on my lone visit there. Honestly, I should never be depressed in my office. It's way too cool in there.

 

 

Don't you wish your office was cool like me?



I think the only thing that isn't obvious about me just from looking at my office is that I'm a diabetic, which is fine with me, since no one wants to be defined by their disability. I'd much rather be defined by the fact that I have a life-sized, working Muppet taking dictation for me or a blaster wielding space pirate guarding my filing cabinet. Or the fact that I still have a lot to learn when it comes to taking care of my diabetes. :)

I guess my lesson for the last couple months is that you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both...and then you have George Clooney before ER made him ridiculously famous.

Incidentally, Mindy Cohn is also an amazing voice actor these days. :)

 

Getting Well Soon is Hard to Do

What the hell IS "well" anyway?

I think "well" is pulling on two pairs of sneakers (not a sneaker and a boot) and being able to go take my dogs for a walk, or getting on the stationary bike we bought and doing thirty minutes of aerobic cycling while I watch last Friday's episode of Blue Bloods. "Well" is having full use of my arms again and being able to make myself a cup of caffeine free coffee in a regular old coffee cup.  "Well" is not keeping my foot up on a trash can while I'm at work so my foot isn't swollen at the end of the day. "Well" is not having to choreograph getting in and out of the car, going to the bathroom, or pretty much everything requiring movement. I'm looking forward to being "well."

Right now I'm  just making it a day at a time and knowing that each day brings me that much closer to being healthy again...or as healthy as I can be. It's all relative.

"...from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint- it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey...stuff." --Not Albert Einstein, and it kind of got away from him anyway.

 



Fact of the matter is, though, that even once my foot is healed I'm not really "well" because I still have to choreograph food, and make sure that I have candy in my desk at work, and still have to count carbs and watch what I eat and keep changing insertion sets.  You know that moment when your brain suddenly pulls free of the fog of everyday blah and has this bright moment of clarity that suddenly gives you a new lease on life? It's like that, only in reverse. And once I made this realization I got a little pissed off because I've had it in my head that "well" is what I need to be striving for and like Sisyphus I'm never going to freaking get there.

 

So I'm not going to be "well" any time soon. What does that leave me? Better. I can work toward being better. So I'll do that, I guess.

 

 

So what the hell is "better?"

Well, "better" is no longer wanting to scream when I turn the wheel of my car because my arms hurt so much that I think I might need morphine. "Better" is being able to walk on my injured foot without crutches (but totally not doing that because I'm afraid I'll over do it and screw up the healing process.) "Better" is admitting that I HATE CRUTCHES and NEVER EVER WANT TO BE ON THEM AGAIN and being okay with that. So it looks like I am better.

On a lighter note, my husband stumbled across a Pintrest page that had me literally laughing so hard I almost needed to change my pants because it is ALL about Type 1 diabetes. I then got lost on that blasted site looking for all pictures related to Type 1 and found so many that I needed to make an album of my own: https://pinterest.com/bookdivalv/type-1-aint-type-2/. 

 

If you've never been on Pintrest before I warn you to set aside an hour or two because once you start over there you will be stuck for hours...I started this blog at 9 am and have been on Pintrest pretty much since then laughing my butt off... And you know what? Rob Paulsen is right-

                         "Laughter is the best medicine...you can't O.D. and the refills are free."