Been doing some research into things relating to my diabetes.

It started with a worry about the lack of results I am getting from my insulin injections.

Now, I might be worried over nothing. It might just be that I have not found my dose yet. I started off at ten units and I am up to 26 now, but who knows what the right dose for me might be?

It is true that the higher the dose I need, the sicker I am, so part of me keeps hoping that the next dose increase will be the last one. I will have found the dose needed to get my blood sugar levels down to normal, and I can stop increasing the dose and just be healthy.

The sooner I find that level, the less sick I am. It makes sense, in a way. But right now, it is looking like I will practically be dumping the entire pen into me (60 units)each time before I see any definitive result.

And this worries me, and I have been wondering what other factors might be causing such high readings.

Some of my readings have been so high that I should feel way sicker than I do. And that made me wonder.

Then I remembered an incident many years ago, the last time I was testing regularly, when I tested my blood sugar and the result came back “Error, level too high to read”.

This freaked me out, even though I did not feel that sick. So I got Joe to drive me to the ER (that’s what it said to do in the manual for the tester) and went through that lovely process. Always fun sitting there waiting in a series of waiting rooms when you have no idea if you are, like, dying or something.

But eventually, I got a bed, and hooked up to fluids, and they determined that I had been dehydrated the whole time, and that caused the super high reading.

Fast forward back to today, and I have been wondering if that might be happening again. I have chronic mild dehydration, and that causes my blood sugar test readings to be artificially high.

So last night, I decided to look that up, and I came up with this.

Theory confirmed. Dehydration causes blood sugar levels to spike. It is not exactly a false reading, just a somewhat misleading one. Dehydration causes low blood volume, and so the percentage of glucose in my blood is higher relative to total volume.

The blood testing meter is doing its job just fine. The readings are accurate. But the problem is more than just a lack of insulin response in my cells.

But the thing is, I drink plenty of water. Too much, perhaps. Drinking a lot of water can flush out the salt in your blood, making you less able to retain water, making you lose fluid rapidly, making you… guess what… thirsty again.

Throw in the diuretic effect of caffeine, and you see why some people drink diet cola all day long, or drink so much damn coffee.

Anyhow, I drink plenty of fluids, and I add a little salt to my food here and there to make sure my sodium levels are sufficient, and so I can’t imagine I have the classic sort of dehydration.

But sodium is just one of the electrolytes. What about the rest?

So I checked out this page and it suggests, to me, that I likely have pretty rotten electrolyte levels.

Especially calcium. I don’t drink milk, nor do I eat a lot of cheese or other dairy products. The only source of calcium in my diet that I can think of offhand is the very tasty almonds we get from Costco, and those are only around some of the time.

So I probably have pretty awful calcium levels. I have no idea about the others like phosphorous and magnesium. I know I get some potassium by eating bananas fairly regularly.

Anyhow, so now I am officially worried about my electrolyte levels. So I Google up “diabetes electrolytes” and I end up at this place.

That confirms that diabetes and electrolyte issues are intimately linked. All this drinking and peeing uses up my electrolytes. And yet, how else do I keep from becoming dehydrated?

I am in a bit of a bind there.

So I figure the solution is to get some damned electrolytes into my diet, pronto.

Checking out this article about foods with electrolytes in them, I am noticing a distinct trend.

That is, of all the electrolytes listed, the one kind of food that seems to have them all is green, leafy vegetables. Hmm, interesting.

So this would suggest that I need to up the intake of green, leafy veggies in my diet. And seeing as I currently eat almost none (apart from the occasional small salad at Denny’s), increasing the amount should not be too difficult.

The bar is set pretty low.

And I am a pretty veggie positive fellow, and green leafy veggies are not too expensive, so in theory, it should not be too hard to get like, a salad a day into my diet.

That still does not provide a lot of calcium, though, unless I was to get into the really nasty green leafies like kale and chard, and I am so not going there.

So I think I will also look into some sort of electrolyte supplement, probably in pill form.

There are plenty of sugar free electrolyte drinks out there, but I do not have much money to spend and I figure a one a day pill would likely be a lot more cost effective than shelling out for drink mix.

I might be wrong, though. And a drink is certainly nicer than a pill.

Either way, I am looking to up my electrolytes as soon as possible.

This explains why I always feel better after eating a veggie-heavy meal, though.

I needs me them electrolytes!

Been having a weird time of it lately.

First off, last night : I did not get any decent sleep last night because for some reason, every 2 hours or so, I woke up with a super full bladder and had to get up to take a piss.

This was very very irritating. Dunno where my body was keeping all that extra fluid, or why it decided it had to shift its water ballast all at once, but that is, indeed, what happened.

And I am no “power sleeper” who goes directly into REM-rich sleep moments after my head hits the pillow. I am as cautious in sleep as I am in life, in a sense, and I don’t commit to the really good sleep until I have been asleep for a while and my brain is convinced that we’re in for the long haul.

So these brief sleeps were more maddening than soothing.

And all this, on my therapy morning. Normally, that is Thursday, but for holiday scheduling reasons, my doc had to put me on Wednesday instead this week, and I won’t be seeing him again until the 20th, in order words, 2 weeks from tomorrow.

So, yay on that, then.

So I had to get up at 7 am despite not having really had much sleep at all, and when I tried to take a nap this afternoon, I still ended up needing to get up to pee 2 hours later. So I am running a fairly significant sleep debt right now.

Nothing big happened in therapy, although I did get asked some questions that made me really think, and that is always productive in therapy, at least in my little world.

Like I have said many times before, the most important job of a therapist, to me, is to ask questions and make observations that force me to think about things different and look at things from a different point of view than my own.

Left to my own devices, I will run in the same circles over and over again, making progress only very slowly. The right questions at the right time can force my train of thought onto an entirely different track, and save me a hell of a lot of time.

And I am pushing forty, and so I may not have all that long left. Not a lot of people as fat and sick as me make it to 50.

And with the way I have been feeling lately, I wonder.

Maybe it is just plain emotional constipation. Too many feelings locked up inside me making me all seized up and jammed up and fucked up inside.

I just find it so hard to deal lately. The urge to just crawl into a deep dark hole and pull the whole in after me is strong in me right now. I feel hemmed in by fear and pain and loneliness and depression and all that other bad stuff.

I feel like I have been stuffed in a cage and forgotten in some deep dark hole down a public oubliette lately. The sunshine and happiness retreat further and further away while I watch helplessly, unable even to move or think, let alone pursue it.

Of course, the sunshine really has gone away. It’s winter, after all. It gets dark so early sometimes that, with my messed up sleep schedule, it is getting dark just as I am getting up.

That cannot possibly be healthy.

I just feel so burdened. With emotion, I suppose. Got to find a way to let it all out.

That is harder to do now that I have shut off the old “self-loathing” valve. (Well, not entirely. But compared to before, it is almost totally shut off. )

I am even getting pretty good at remembering that I am a cool, talented, intelligent, insightful fellow more often that not. I am learning to build a stable sense of self, and that makes a huuuuge difference when it comes to how vulnerable to the world you feel.

Without a stable sense of self, any input at all can cause your self-worth to fluctuate wildly and cause great internal chaos. The person then, not surprisingly, considers the world to be a cold and hostile place, because to them, it is.

But with a stable sense of self, your ego has shock absorbers and the road does not seem so rough.

And I am working on all that. So why do I feel so crappy?

Some of it has to be physical. Although with me, I can never tell. Are my physical symptoms caused by my emotional issues, or vice versa?

Who knows. And saying “It’s both, in a continuum” might be more accurate but it is sure as fuck not any more helpful, at least, not to me.

I just feel like a steaming sack of fetid shit lately, and I don’t know why. I feel craven and low and bored and frustrated and tied up and hemmed in and trapped.

I feel like climbing something tall and screaming “FUCK YOU!” into the night at the top of my lungs until I feel better, or pass out, or bust a lung, or whatever.

Finding a route for catharsis that does not involve taking it out on myself is proving a lot trickier than I thought it would be.

If this keeps up, I might have to find catharsis by actually doing things.

And that is just plain crazy talk. (Or, you know, sane talk, and since when have I listened to that? Sanity makes no sense to the insane. )

Oh, and to add to it all, the insulin is having no provable effect on my diabetes yet. I have not being writing my readings down like I am supposed to do, but my sense of it is that I am getting the same range of readings every day.

And I am up to 24 units of insulin… 26 tonight… and I sort of expected some sort of provable effect by now. That has me down, too.

All in all, pbbt.