Alright, time to get into it.
What, exactly, are my odds of psychological recovery? Will I ever get better?
Well to start off, depression has no cure. So that’s not going to happen. It can go into remission and you can be symptom free for a long time, but it will always be there.
But that’s not what I am getting at. What I really want to know is if I will ever escape this tiny prison of emotional isolation that I have been in since I was raped when I was 4,.
And that’s a very tricky question, not the least because the brain I am using to try to figure it out is compromised by the very mental illness I am trying to escape.
So in order to get any kind of decent, workable answer, I have to fight the voice inside me that wants to declare myself incurable so it can revel in my despair.
No, that makes it sound too demonic. The truth is that I would be the one reveling my my own despair.
Because the sick truth is that there is a great release of tension when you give up all hope. It provides a strong hit of that sweet relief that is the reward for failure.
And it’s addiction to that reward that makes someone a loser.
Back to the thorny question of prognosis. Despair addiction aside, it’s a very tricky question because there are a lot of complicated and difficult factors involved.
For example, my physical health. It’s bad. Very bad. And that has a very strong effect on my mood. I tend to think of the two sides of my health as being separate and distinct but that is garbage thinking.
If I want to feel better, it would be helpful if I didn’t have blood sugar so high my blood tastes good on waffles and I didn’t smother in my sleep over and over.
Radical idea, I know.
In fact, I think that will be my rallying cry going into the future : FEEL BETTER. I want to feel better. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired all the goddamned time.
Forget all the high level enlightened self interest things that should motivate me to do what it takes to, ya know, not die. They clearly do not work. They are not enough.
I just want to stop being in pain. I want to be able to relax in my own skin. I want to feel good for a change.
I want to stop feeling so god damned toxic.
That seems fairly doable to me. It is a direct and immediate goal that I can picture in my mind and work towards.
Just imagine how good it will feel to finally feel healthy again. How glorious it will be to finally lay my wounded burden down and walk strong and tall and free.
That’s the kind of relief that I should be looking for, not the loser relief of giving up.
Hmmm. Well, I didn’t reach a prognosis, but I think I did myself good anyhow.
Maybe I will try again later.
More after the break.
My diabetic dilemmas
Or should that be dilemmae?
I swear, I had it going on I tackled my high blood sugar systemically this afternoon. Test, still too high, take 60 units of insulin, try again an hour later.
Even got some exercise in too. And while there is definitely a limit to how many pushouts I can do, I ended up doing twice as many “crosses” (aka crossing the room once) with my pacing as I had planned to do.
So bravo to me there.
Even better, towards the end I was really feeling the tension leaving my muscles as I gave them something to do. I had a wonderful sensation of the pain draining away from me as the exercise depleted the excess energy in my bloodstream.
Which was kind of the idea.
So I was going great guns there. But every time I testing my blood sugar, it seemed to get harder to get a decent reading.
For one thing, I kept having to dial the tissue depth up on my little clicker (the thing that does the poking with the lancet) in order to get any blood to come out.
And that makes no sense. It’s like my blood vessels were getting further away from the surface in reaction to the poking.
Either that, or I am like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable and this is how I find out I have superpowers. In which case I am totally going the Spider-Man route and making a bundle as a showman with my gifts.
But don’t worry – I don’t even have an Uncle Ben,
More seriously (boo!), it might be that I am flinching at the last second. At least, I hope that it’s something like that, because I have the tissue depth dialed up to the max now and I am barely getting a tiny bead of blood.
I think I might be developing an immunity. To lancets.
And the worst time was the last time because I couldn’t get a reading at all. I went through the whole palaver over and over again : insert the lancet in the click, twist off the cap, get a test strip out of the film canister they come in (not easy because they are tiny and light and I have nerve damage in my fingers from my – you guessed it – diabetes) and insert it in the reader, prick my finger (do I not bleed?) and bring test strip and blood together so the magic can happen.
But instead of a reading, I just got “Er4” over and over. Time to look at the manual. Oh, how helpful, apparently that can mean like five different things, all of which boil down to “something went wrong with the test strip, I guess?”.
So for now, I have given up. I took another 60 units of insulin on spec and I will try to get a reading later to see where I am.
The last reading I took was 17.1, which is terrible, but (sigh) also a big improvement.
I am determined to beat this goddamned thing. Now it’s personal. The more it defies me, the more determined I am to make it do what it is supposed to do.
No, YOU have some serious fucking issues.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.