Feeling virtuous at the moment because not only did I finally get around to making an appointment for a pill refill with Doctor Chao and not only did I go to said appointment today, afterwards I walked the five blocks to my pharmacy, handed them my prescriptions, then went next door to get my lab work done.

Ta da! For a healthy person, that’s just an afternoon of errands.

For me, that is a triumph of self-care.

The walk was kind of rough, and that made me sad. It’s not that long a walk even by my usual fat dude standards, but between being overweight, old, and so sedentary that there are people in iron lungs who get more exercise, my body can’t cut it any more.

Especially my poor feet. They are always the first thing to go. I don’t think I had gone a full block before they were all swollen and sore and bitching up a storm.

If I could somehow bypass that problem, I would be a hell of a lot more likely to walk for exercise. But give that problem, well, you can see why I prefer lifting weights.

Not that I do that either. Because the gym in this building suuuuucks and because I am too in the grips of social anxiety to go use the few machines they have.

Plus I don’t have proper exercise clothing, but that never stopped me before. I’d work out in a tuxedo if the mood struck me.

Oh, and speaking of my being overweight, I am less so than before. Once more, when the doctor weighed me, it turned out I had lost weight.

The last time he weighed me, I weighed 314 pounds. That was last June.

Today, I weighed in at 299.5, meaning I lost 14.5 pounds over ten months.

That is a nice, healthy, steady rate of weight loss. I am still, of course,. far above my ideal weight, but it’s still very nice to know that my fatness is disappearing.

Imagine if I actually, like, did stuff about it.

That’s not fair, really. I do things about out : I take my meds and avoid sugary things. But I don’t actively pursue weight loss. I don’t actively pursue much, to be honest.

I just kind of drift along that long dark silent canal that is my life.

One bit of bad news today : I asked my pharmacist about the OneTouch Freestyle Libre, otherwise known as “the blood sugar monitoring system that doesn’t me to stab myself in the fingertips, which happen to have the densest nerve clusters on the human body”.

With the possible exception of the clitoris.

I told him I was thinking of buying myself one, and in response he showed me how much the little sensor discs that they require cost, and it was $120!

And they only last two weeks. So even if I sprung for the base unit, I sure as fuck couldn’t afford to spend $240/month on the little discs.

And the province doesn’t pay for them yet. Of course.

Clearly, the rat bastard sons of bitches in charge of the company are juicing people for as much as they can get from them and are definitely not eager to change their business model away from the highly lucrative “sell them the thing then sell them the thing needs” business model.

As far as I can tell, there is no reason for the discs to be disposable. Granted, they are supposed to sit on your skin for two weeks, beaming glucose readings to the base unit the whole time, but that just means they need to be rechargeable.

And cleanable, of course. Otherwise eww.

But no matter what is inside the things, there is no way that price is justified by anything other than sheer greed. I can only imagine the porcine capitalists behind the company jizzing and whizzing all over themselves with in an orgy of greed and avarice when they were presented with such a boner blasting opportunity to clip sick people for all they are worth and then some.

I don’t like people like that.

Presumably they are of the same ilk as the scumbags currently murdering Americans by vastly overcharging them for their insulin.

No wonder the kids today are embracing socialism.

Anyhow…. dragging myself back to the freaking point. I will not be spending my money on one of those systems any time soon.

And that means I will not be monitoring my glucose any time soon either. Which means my diabetes will not be treated in the most effective way we know of.

And so I will die inside some more.

So that was pretty frigging depressing.

I thought the discs were more like $50 each. I could manage $100/month for discs. It would be a struggle but I could do it.

But not $240/month. That is sheer madness.

Let’s see. The trip to the lab was routine and unventful. I gave them some of my pee and they took some of my blood.

Well life is all about the give and take.

Oh, that’s right : I have this nasty lump on my right arm and the doctor says it’s some kind of skin infection. I have another similar bump on the left side of my left leg, but that one is not nearly as infected, or as my doc adorably put it, it’s not as “angry”.

So now I am on antibiotics for a week. No big. Modern antibiotics are so much better than the old school ones I grew up with.

Most of the modern ones don’t even have significant side effects. I remember when antibiotics would wipe out all your energy like you had mono.

I always wondered if doctors secretly liked that because it made sure the patient would get the bed rest (or couch rest, or floor rest… ) they had ordered.

I’m looking at you, MEN.

I guess that’s it for my exciting journey into actually doing stuff.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.