Beware the Ides of everything

SO...yeah. I've not been happy the last couple weeks. My car having engine problems to the tune of $6700 dollars ended up in me getting a new car, our insurance changes are likely leading to more money out of my pocket (or a new Doctor, which would be a complete other thing I don't want to deal with since I just got used to the current one) and the diet we were trying ended up not doing what we were hoping for, though we are eating better and it is costing us less than our prior noshing habits. Okay, fine. Trials in life and all that. I get it. We dealt with it. We took life's lemons and sucked on them and now we're fine. It happens.

But the truck now having engine trouble that is likely either going to cost us $7K or force us to get another new or new-to-us vehicle is ridiculous.

I'm not seeing it.

 

To say that life is stressing me out right now would be an understatement, and that of course means I will be feeling the repercussions in my blood sugar. Everyone keeps telling me to "take care of myself" but honestly, if I could lessen my stress don't you all think I'd have done that by now? I don't exactly like staring at my budget spreadsheet on Sunday morning but sometimes you need to do that (unless you're rich and pay someone to do that. So much the better for you.)

 

So life may be "abounding" in comedy, but right now, with the exception of my husband making some particularly goofy jokes this afternoon, I'm not laughing.

 

Oh, I see. Thanks for clarifying, Mel.

 

Tragedy + Time = Comedy, apparently, and right now I feel like I'm in the middle of tragedy, so I can only assume in a couple months I'll look back on this and laugh. Money is one of those things that no one ever has enough of and I am no exception. Even if I had more I'd still want more on top of that. I want to pay off my debt (who wants to spend the rest of their life paying off cars and houses?), but I can't do that if I keep accumulating it.

 

I spend all this time planning things out- we'll eat this food, I'll lose this weight, we'll pay this off, I'll read this book, whatever- and life never goes according to my plans. I know I'm not bad at making plans. I do it for work and often that comes out okay. I've planned trips, I've planned afternoon excursions, I've even planned massively big events that have gone off splendidly. But I try to plan my financial future or health...um, healthful...health...plans? Anyway, I try to plan either of those two things, and I get a giant cosmic "Oh no you di'in't!" from the Universe.

 

Sure, now he tells me.

 

And to say that I'm okay with this would be a bold faced lie.  If I had all the money in the world, if I had all the time and energy and every resource at my disposal, I still would not be able to control and plan for some things, and frankly, I take issue with that. This is why I like to write. I control everything when I write. A character stubs his toe? All me. A character wins the lottery, buys an island in the Caribbean and spends weeks at a time there with her friends celebrating boy band music? Totally doable. Wings bust out of my back and I can fly from here to NYC to see a Broadway show and still be home in time to catch the morning news? Hell yes. And if a character in a story I am writing comes up with a great way of paying off her house, her car, her credit card and her student loan it's gonna freakin' happen for her.

 

Actually, now that I think about it.... if I had all the time and energy and every resource at my disposal...I'd be a Time Lord. And I'd be okay with that.

 



 

 

Oh, fine. If you don't get it watch this, and if you do you likely are still chuckling over the Whovian reference at the beginning of this rant. Sing along!:

 

 

And as an aside...happy diabetes anniversary to me.



Goddamnitsomuch

With less than a month of lead time, we were notified our insurance is changing, effective September 1st. My endocrinologist is NOT COVERED. I bet NONE of my doctors are, and right now I'm too disheartened to even look. Likely, I will have to go through getting all of my pump and CGM supplies recertified, a process I JUST FINISHED DOING with the other insurance. I'll either have to find a new endocrinologist and start all over, or pay the $100 office visits myself. And if I decide to suck it up and pay for the office visits, none of the tests he runs will be covered so I will have to pay for all of those out of pocket, too.

"91.7% of providers in the Multiplan PPO network are also in the Aetna PPO network, so very few of you will have to change providers in order to receive services from an in-network provider." You know what that is? Bullshit. I don't usually mind being the exception to the rule, but in this case I MIND VERY MUCH.

Add this to the stress of my car dying this month, causing a financial setback I wasn't prepared for, and I'm pretty much at the end of the rope folks.

<insert snarky comment I'm too upset to come up with right now here>

I'm so stressed out and depressed about this that I'm crying. Not even music is making me feel better. What the hell sort of day is it when listening to New Kids on the Block doesn't make me feel better? A hell of a day, I guess. I just hope the rest of the week doesn't suck this much...

Lloyd Bridges was hilarious

I'm sure I'll just go in to work (late, because I'm not even dressed yet) and call the new insurance on my lunch break and keep my cool and figure this out like a responsible, mature adult. Or I'll ignore it, have a hissy all day, and blow my diet by drinking the six beers in the fridge as soon as I get home. Right now I am undecided.

One year later...

I've been writing this blog for a year. That's incredible. It certainly doesn't feel like a year.

A long, long time ago I started working on my "autobiography," which was an idea steeped in vanity because, let's face it, I haven't done much of anything with my life and I certainly hadn't done anything with my life when I started writing it. The idea was to call it the True Confessions of a Middle Aged 20-something- reflections on a life with diabetes, and maybe get it published so that kids who were diagnosed with diabetes, or maybe their parents, could see that living with this disease is do-able. Not necessarily always easy, never fun, but do-able. (And yes, in my mid twenties I felt middle aged...now I'm middle aged and I feel like I'm sixteen half the time. Woot.)

I think the blog is working better, obviously. For one thing, publishing a book is a pain in the ass. It costs money if you do it on your own (money that most people who self-publish fail to recoup, in my experience) and getting someone else to do it takes more time than I have. Secondly, my life is a work in progress. When I started the book version of this *NSync was still recording new music and the Twin Towers were still standing in New York City. My husband and I only had one dog. I wasn't using an insulin pump and CGM wasn't even something I'd heard of. Since that time New Kids on the Block has reunited and Seal Team 6 took care of the evil minded nutcase that brought the towers down. We now have three dogs, I've been on the pump for almost ten years, and CGM is something I don't think I could live without. A lot has happened during this time. And a lot continues to happen...

 

The Phantom Tollbooth- read it, see it. Yes, in that order.

Even with the passage of time, the book that almost was sits in the back of my memory. There was some good material there. I started with picking my mom's brain, going through old year books, trying to remember the things that happened when I was a kid. What school was like, how it felt to be the "diabetes girl," how things weren't that different in the grand scheme of things. I only stopped working on it because I had hit a wall- i.e., I'd hit present day and there wasn't much else to say except, "Yeah, and I'm still here, so...that's good." It was kind of done, and yet it felt like it wasn't finished because I wasn't finished.

Since I started that book my perception has changed on a lot of things. When I was a kid the thought of using a pump- sticking  needle in my stomach- was horrifying. I fought my doctor on that subject for years and years. Truthfully, I swore  there was no way I was ever going to do it. Well, look at me now. Perception is a fact of life. How you look at things is as important as what you're looking at. Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. That's as true now as it was when it was spoken a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away by a very wise dead guy.

 

That's right; it was this guy in a movie studio back in 1983.

I think this blog is fluid where a book would be static. And static isn't a bad thing- do you want to go back to your beat up copy of Pride and Prejudice someday and find Lizzie has run off with Bingley? Of course you don't. But since how I've been looking at my life with diabetes has changed so much over the years, I'm glad there isn't a book that details in black and white everything I was thinking when I was twenty two. I was naïve back then, and not nearly as sardonic or witty. And, if I may allow myself a little toot-you-own-horn moment, not nearly as talented at writing as I am now. At least now I think I've found my voice.

But the biggest reason I think the blog is more of a success is that I know I'm reaching more people with it than I would if I were to just write a book and try to publish it. It's out there...tagged with search terms and stored on Google's blogosphere, waiting to be discovered by someone who might need to hear what I'm saying. And that in and of itself I count as a win to me. Am I really reaching lot of people? No. I can see my stats and each post usually gets about 20 hits, more or less. But the potential is there. And seeing as how a book would have to come to an end at some point much sooner that I plan to come to an end myself, this works even better for me...because now I can finish it when it needs to be finished...

Pegged

A perfectionist is someone who spends his life feeling bad because he can't live up to standards no one else lives up to either. -- Chris Crutcher

This may be one of the truest things I've ever heard/ read. For those of you who don't know who Chris Crutcher is, he's an author of young adult books that are often banned for being too real to life for some parents to feel comfortable letting other people's kids read them. He's also a really nice guy with years of experience counseling troubled teens, and this quote is from a graduation keynote speech he gave this year. And boy is he right on the money with this. In fact, he has me pegged pretty well. I spend my life feeling bad.

I want to be perfect. I want to have no debt, always have a showroom clean house, never make a mistake at work, and always have my blood sugar be between 80 and 120. And none of those damn things ever happens.

I have debt- we all do, and the sooner I accept that I'm always going to owe someone money the less stressed out I'm gonna be. My house was showroom clean once...then I moved into it and brought all my stuff with me. I'm a packrat, and I can't seem to ever throw anything away, and my house doesn't grow in proportion to how much stuff I have. As for work, sometimes just going is a mistake. Don't get me wrong, I like my job, but today is one of those days where every little thing is making me angry and frustrated, and when you work with kids and you have no patience, it's better to stay home and watch cartoons.

Currently I'm trying to get through Saiyuki, which is awesome.

 

As for the diabetes... well, you all know how well that goes. Lately it seems like the harder I try the worse it gets. And the fact that I've come to appreciate a beer after work to help me relax doesn't help, because alcohol does weird things to blood sugars, even if you're not getting drunk. I have started on the exercise bike again, so that's a good thing, at least. A half an hour on that thing with Saiyuki on the TV goes by pretty quick. It also helps with the depression, which has been getting to me of late.

 

Usually writing takes care of that for me. I get depressed, I get on the computer, open Word, and two or three scenes in a story later I'm feeling better. I created something. I focused my energies in a positive direction. I did not sit there and watch "Oklahoma" for the one thousandth time while eating another Twinkie.

 

 

I actually prefer these.

 

 

Lately though, writing isn't coming as easy as it used to. And it's not helping me even when it does. Of course, neither does drinking a seasonal Sam Addams and eating greasy little snack cakes. The bike does help, so who knows...maybe I'll get in shape after all.

 

I am not perfect. I am as flawed as they come, yet I still keep trying to reach that pinnacle of excellence known as perfection, which Chris Crutcher is so right to have pointed out is not gonna happen. Hell, even Jesus had a bad day at the temple, right?  So why am I stressing myself out over this? Why can't I look at a model in a magazine and see her for the Photoshopped mythical creature she actually is? Why can't I just be happy being the best I can be? Why do I set goals for myself that cannot be achieved?

 

Damned if I know. Hand me a Sam Addams and a Twinkie. It's time for cartoons.

 

 







Deep thoughts by the meme generator

I've been flippant a lot in this blog, and likely will be again soon (maybe even this paragraph) but the fact is sometimes I think very deeply about what it means to live with something debilitating every day of my life.

It sucks out loud.

Really, it does. My pump, which is clearly the best thing to happen to controlling my diabetes since I took over the reins from my mother, keeps me awake all. Night. Long. It beeps messages incessantly. "You're going high." "You are high." "You're going high really fast." "Check your blood sugar in an hour." "Check your blood sugar NOW." "Did you forget to give insulin?" "You're starting to go low." "You are low." "You're sill low, haven't you gotten some juice yet moron?" And while part of me is glad that I get all of these alerts part of me is all "OMG STFU." (Translation for those not up on Internet shorthand: Oh, for Pete's sake, stop beeping at me. Please and stuff.)

You know what else sucks? Low blood sugars, which I admit I haven't had many of lately, probably because I haven't been eating right or exercising. But when I do have them they are scary, and I always feel like I'm not in control of the situation. Then there's my behavior when I'm going low- it's not always very nice. This is also true of when my blood sugar is high, but I am usually aware enough to know I'm acting like a jerk because I feel like utter crap when I'm high. Lows are a different story. Lows can have me yelling at firemen who are standing around in my bedroom at 4 am trying to make sure I don't die. That's just not very nice.

Could be one or the other. Hell, it could be both.

You know what else sucks? People who like to tell you how to live your life with diabetes when they don't even understand what it is. It's one thing to say, "Hey I read an article about diabetes that said ___. Let me see if I can email you the link." I'm okay with that, because at least you're not acting like you know better than I do. It's another thing entirely to say, "Oh, all you need to do is not eat carbs and it will go away." Or, "You know, eating cinnamon will cure you." Or, my personal favorite, "You shouldn't have eaten so much sugar as a kid. Then you wouldn't be diabetic."

Really, I'd love to hear it. Regale me.

Also on the list of things that suck about living with an illness that never goes away and can make living in the real world with regular people hard...all that stuff. I am going to the endocrinologist four times a year. I have a podiatrist, I make sure I always visit the dentist and I pay extra money at the eye doctor so I can have my retinas scanned every time I go. I meet my insurance deductible within the first couple months of the year. I take longer to get better when I'm sick. If my insertion site for my pump is off, I feel like crap until I can do it again because I'm not getting the insulin I need. Today it took me three jabby needles to get my new CGM sensor in because I kept hitting tissue that was so tough the needles only went in half-way. I have no fingerprints on some fingers because I've been jamming needles into them for over thirty years. I go to bed every night hoping my blood sugar doesn't crash so much that I don't wake up the next morning.

My husband has migraines, and some days his pain is worse than others. And it breaks my heart, because while I am not in pain every day like he is, I understand how easy it is to feel hopeless about dealing with something  like this. Your body, your temple, your home, is against you. Think about that. The things you want to do you can't because you're fighting your own body. How can you live with daily headaches that make even the simplest things ten times harder than they should be? How can you live with having to balance everything you eat with self administering hormones and keeping track of how much you exercise so you don't go into a coma all day, every day, for as long as you live? How can you beat the crap the world throws at you when your health bar isn't at 100% when the game starts?

Where's Frodo when you need him?

 

I don't mean to sound like I'm on the pity train again, because I'm not. I know there are people out there who have it worse than me. There are days, though, that I wonder why do I even bother trying with this? I could eat the same thing at the same time every day, give the same amount of insulin for it, do the same amount of exercise in conjunction, and one day I'll be fine, the next I'll be low, and the third I'll be high. There's no rhyme or reason to this, and there's no pattern to figure out. There's no vacation from it, either. And there are days when all I want to do is cry and scream in frustration, but instead I get up and go to work and smile and try not to show it because I really don't want my life to be about living with diabetes- I just want to live my life.

 

It has nothing at all to do with living with diabetes, but it has everything to do with being who you are and knowing that you're special exactly the way you are even though it's not always easy, and sometimes that message helps just as much to get through the day. It's been covered by so many people (amazing people like Julie Andrews, Lena Horne and Ray Charles) but my favorite has always been the original....so take it away, Kermit.

 



Hoarders

I mentioned in my last post that I have a rather impressive blood testing kit collection. It doesn't really do much...just sits there taking up space in the bathroom linen closet because really, where else would you keep medical supplies?

Well, obviously insulin goes in the egg tray. Everyone knows that!

 

I don't know what possesses me to keep those old things, really. It's certainly not as if I'm ever going to use them again. Like I said before, you can't even get test strips for most of them. And as far as I know there isn't a trade in program for them, either. In fact, at least two of the ones I have were sent to me free by Medtronic to use with my pump with the understanding that I don't actually have to use them, and one or two of them I got from my insurance company with the understanding that this was what they would cover so don't use anything else. So they're a little like Kindles- given away in a effort to make you spend money on the accompanying stuff.

 

The real reason I don't know why I keep those damn things is I really don't have the space for them. Let's go over what's in the linen closet. 1) Glucose testing strips, 2) Pump supplies, 3) Sensors for the CGM, 4) Linens. Obviously there's not really room for 5) Old glucometers I will never use again.

 

 

Exhibit A

 

If you look carefully at the bottom right hand of that picture you'll see in the back I also have two pumps that I no longer use sitting there "just in case" along with the museum grade glucometers.

 

 

Or I could just take a better picture.

 

Honestly, that's a lot of stuff there just to keep me alive. I'd show you the rest of the linen closet, but all the linens are crammed in there real good because there's not a whole lot of room for them, given that my diabetes supplies take up this much space. Usually I also have boxes and boxes of supplies that I haven't even unpacked stacked in there taking up three times the space, too. I don't go through all of this in a month, you know. Given the track record with my insurance company sucking as much as it does I tend to keep months of supplies on hand just in case they decide to stop paying for them in an effort to lessen their costs. The only thing I don't have that much back-up of is the insulin, which only costs $70 a bottle and is much cheaper than the pump supplies. Still, I have a three month supply of that on hand at any given time. I'm not sure how much I've got in the linen closet, though. Several months worth, at least.

 

Not usually, anyway.

 

So all of this begs the question...why am I holding in to things I don't need, that I know I won't ever use again, and that I don't really have the room for again?

 

Beats the hell outta me. Maybe I'm just a hoarder.

 







It's been a long...long...time...

I may or may not have gotten a Bing Crosby song stuck in my head with that title. :)

So, it has been a long time since I've blogged, and that is because I have been busy as HELL. The month of June, while usually busy at work because of school being out and the kids all hanging at the library, has literally been C-R-A-Z-Y for lots of other reasons. The husband and I spent a week in Oregon with his family on the beach, and then we got home and I had two days before I left for a conference in Chicago. During this time I've been getting used to....my new pump! Yay!

I started off the first couple days using both the good old Dex meter and my new multifunctional pump in tandem, just to see how far off the mark the pump was since my doc wasn't too thrilled with the idea of me using it. While it isn't quite as accurate, it's better than nothing and not nearly as bad as I was led to believe.

Plus, it's smaller (new sensor on the left, old Dex on the right)!

 



 

After a couple days I figured I was comfortable enough with the new set up that I could retire the old one, and I packed it up and stored it away. I really like only having one device to hang on my belt on tuck in my pocket, and while it beeps at me almost incessantly, I'm pretty comfortable with my settings. It tells me when I miss a bolus, it tells me when I'm going high or low, and it tells me if I'm still high or low, which my Dex meter didn't do. (Dex also didn't remind me to bolus, which is something I need pretty badly.) It may not be as good as the Dex over all, but I think it certainly has benefits that I need.

 

Which leaves me with a several thousand dollar device that is just sitting around. I'm sure that many of you have piles of old cell phones and electronics just sitting in drawers and boxes around your house. I know we do! But in addition to old mp3 players and phones and cameras, I also have a pretty impressive glucometer collection just taking up space in my linen/ diabetes supply closet.

 

Museum quality.

 

 

Most of these are completely unusable because they don't even make blood glucose testing strips for them anymore. Some of them I got for free and have never even used- the Contour Next Link ones I've never even taken out of the boxes they came in. And the one in the bottom left hand corner was like the old Kodak Disc Cameras...ten strips in a disk that spun around, and I never could remember how many were left in the disk. (That one is also a Dex.) And this doesn't include the multitudes of glucometers I've had in the past that I haven't kept.

 

I've been sitting here for an hour trying to come up with an ending for this blog...and my husband suggested I end it the way "This Is the End" ended...but that would be a big spoiler and not everyone has seen it, so I went with something else....that might become a running thing, because I had fun on YouTube tonight. :)

 

 

R.I.P. Robert Culp and Steven J. Cannell