This is my life now, apparently.

I got a new sensor. Thank you, Julian. He was nice enough to go fetch it from Doctor Caswell’s office for me after I called up and asked nicely for it.

Now I just have to work up the nerve to try applying it, hopefully this time without breaking it, and then hopefully get the fucking thing up and running so I can finally play with my new toy.

Um, I mean monitor my blood glucose like a good diabetic.

With my new toy.

It’s even my favorite kind of toy : the kind that makes SCIENCE!

Like I have said before, some people dream of living in a mansion, driving fancy sports cars, and going everywhere in limo.

Me, I dream of owning my very own Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (GCMS).

It can identify the exact elemental composition of any substance you feed it! And it does it with LASERS! ^[1]. How cool is that?

The answer is “very”. Very very cool./

Oh, and Joe has supplied with me with batteries for that blood pressure monitor I bought like a month ago then promptly forgot about due to lack of batteries.

Now I will finally get to try the damned thing.

Assuming I can find it. It kind of got sucked into the chaos nexus that is my desk.

One of these days I will learn to throw stuff out.

Oh, and I had a nice conversation with the diabetes nurse from Richmond Hospital. She was late, grrr – the appointment was for 1 pm and I didn’t hear from her until 1:20 pm.

But whatever, she seems quite nice. Another nice older lady. I could get used to this. I want all my medical professionals to be sweet little old ladies now.

It would reduce my anxiety considerably, because sweet little old ladies with kind voices and a gently attentive manner are people I trust implicitly by default.

Because they sound like they truly care. Ergo I trust them to look after me. Male doctors never give me that feeling, although Doctor Chao is pretty nice.

But he does not give me the feeling he cares because he rarely seems to remember much about me.

Well I only see him every three months except for when I have problems. But still.

I need both the compassion and the competence before I will trust someone with something as important as my health.

I need to be seen as a person. An individual. Someone with a personality and feelings and who is, despite prodigious intellectual abilities. quite fragile and delicate in many ways, and who needs quite a bit of gentleness and understanding in order to feel safe enough to really relax.

I am a strange blend of confident and delicate. Opinionated and vulnerable. Powerful and helpless. Magnificent, and pathetic.

I sometimes wish I was a more well rounded person instead of this cluster of extremes.

Then again, if I was more well rounded, I wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

I think I prefer being a freak.

More after the break.

---

Progress at last

Well I finally got the ferschlugginer thing to work.

Just got my first home blood glucose reading in a decade. 19.7 mm/L. That is pretty damned bad. Normal is 7 mm/L.

But that is hardly a surprise. I knew my diabetes was out of control. That’s why I wanted this glucometer so bad, so I could get some hard data and react accordingly.

Right now, my plan is to wait until an hour after I finish my supper, take a reading, and act accordingly. Presumably, the reading will still be super high, in which case I will give myself a stiff shot of insulin and check again in an hour.

I’m going to get that damn thing under control no matter what it takes.

Supper tonight is chili and cheese toast, and normally I would not bother mentioning that, but I would like to share the results of a little experiment of mine.

See, I had this little container of 7-11 nacho cheese sauce left over from the last time I ordered a cheddar smokie from there, and I thought I would just mix that in with the chili before heating it up.

Nacho cheese and chili seemed like a smart combo to me. Basically a chili cheese dog without the bun.

So I made my little concoction, heated it up in the nuker, took a bite, and unsurprisingly it tasted like…. mustard, kinda?

Wait, I was wrong, that is SUPER surprising!

Tastes enough like mustard that I had to stop and wonder if that’s what was actually in the container. But if so, it was a much duller yellow and much more viscous a mustard than I have ever seen.

Not even Dijon is that thick.

So it probably actually WAS nacho cheese that went in. In which case, there is a very good chance that this stuff wouldn’t taste like mustard to anyone else ever.

My taste buds, like me, are a tad eccentric and sometimes lock on to one obscure note in a flavour and then that’s all I can taste.

I still bear the scars of Bullseye BBQ Sauce tasting like a dirty ashtray to me.

Still, I should not be so quick to self-persecute. Maybe it really WAS mustard. Next time I am in the kitchen, I will sniff the container before throwing it out.

If it IS mustard, that will still be a mystery, albeit a lesser one. Because why the fuck would some DoorDasher give me a container of mustard when I definitely did not order it? I rarely have mustard on my hot dogs. I find the stuff obnoxious.

Which is why when I DO have it, it’s in a miniscule amount.

Oh well, it’s just one of my life’s many tiny weird experiences.

My reality has always been a little wobbly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.