THad my arranged phone conversation with a hospital nutritionist at RGH today and she firmly confirmed what I had started to suspect :

There IS such a thing as too few carbs in the diet!

She said I should be getting a minimum of 130…. somethings of carbs every day, minimum.

She didn’t specify and I didn’t ask. Grams, I am guessing?

She said there should be thirty in every meal, and here my dumb ass has been having the vast majority of my meals with none at all.

Shows the dangers of nutritional absolutism. Never thought I’d be one to fall for that.

She said that what happens when your body isn’t getting enough carbs is that it pulls the glucose it needs from your muscles, leaving them weak.

Um. That sounds familiar. Wouldn’t it be wild if I found out the real cause of my weak leg muscles was not the spinal fracture but carbohydrate deficiency?

In extreme cases, your body will even digest your own fat and tissues in order to get the glucose it so desperately needs. In order to keep the brain going.

Because brains run on glucose and that’s it.

Another thing that happens when you take the whole low carb thing too far is that your body signals the liver to release its stored up glucose into your bloodstream.

And you know what that leads to? High blood sugar!

So um… yeah. Kind of need to put some carbs back into my diet.

But in what form?

Not chocolate bars, presumably. Those are still bad, mmmkay? But my time in the hospital showed that having some of the no-no carbs like bread and rice and mashed potatoes with each meal is OK.

So I will be looking at things at that approximate level of carb complexity.

I will certainly be looking into the exciting new wave of healthy snacking options in the world. Like all the potato chip and tortilla chip clones made of something other than potato or corn.

And of course, I am always looking for no-sugar cookies, candy, and so on.

And speaking of tortilla chips, I might get some of those, along with some salsa. I am fairly certain that real plain tortilla chips (not that Doritos junk) is a fairly friendly sort of carb.

And of course, I have to always been careful to get low-effort foods these days.

Even with the walker there to lean on, I can only stay on my feet in the kitchen for a short time before my legs start to buckle under me.

Which suuuuucks. I hate having to hurry. I miss being able to spend however long I needed in there.

Beats having other people prepare my food, though. Not only would I hate to have to impose on Joe and Julian to that extent, I have have doing food my way for a very long time and the thought of either having to put up with it done “wrong” or teach others how to do it “right” appals me.

So I will continue doing food myself for as long as I am able.

I’m serious. Even if I was a billionaire, I would probably still make my own meals.

I’d just be doing it in a super modern kitchen filled with all the latest kitchen gadgets.

And maybe a sous-chef or two.

To be honest, that seems like way more fun that having to wait for my personal chef to make me a meal that he or she might very well get wrong,

More after the break.

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It’s getting dark

Well today’s been shitty.

First, my web host, Fatcow, seems to have disappeared into the seething void.

When you try to go to my blog, you get an Fatcow error page telling you about how they can’t find my blog and how if I am having a problem I should click the link to Fatcow’s primary hosting site.

Click that, and you get an internet error saying that they can’t get there from here.

Lovely. When it was just the Fatcow error, I assumed it was just one of those things where I didn’t update which credit card Fatcow had on file for me and so I missed a payment.

Annoying, but easily fixed with a few minutes’ work,

But now that it can’t find Fatcow itself, I have no idea WTF.

Then I developed this weird pain that extends from my bladder down to my right testicle then further down the inseam of the right leg.

It’s got me pretty worried. I’ve had urinary issues before, including ones that made me pee blood, and so any weirdness in that general area has me on high alert.

The pain gets worse when I move and the muscles around that area have to flex.

I sure hope I am not going to start peeing blood again.

Finally, I have been feeling overheated out of nowhere again, which suggests that I might have some kind of infection resulting in an inflammatory response.

I am going to take some Naproxen, aka Alleve, and see if it helps.

Oh, and my back pain is much worse today after a lovely period of it being fairly mild.

Not hard to guess why, seeing as I can feel a large bolus of semi-digested food just hanging there n my lower colon like a bowling ball in a hammock.

I paint pictures with words.

The bladder/ballsack pain might be related. Hard to tell.

I decided that what with my digestive system in a questionable state, I should not eat the curry I bought on Saturday night just yet.

It will have to wait for when I feel more settled.

Now is not the time to introduce even a mild curry to my system. That seems like i would be playing a very dangerous game – East Indian cuisine roulette.

“This might make things much worse…. or much better. Now EAT! Mao mao didi mao!”

Both are possible with me and spicy foods. Which is weird.

Then again, so am I.

Oh right, one last thing : my dizziness on rising is back, too.

Same to you, life. But double.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s trip to Wound Care and back was fucking miserable.

Partly my fault, because I overslept. As in, we were planning on leaving at 10:30 am for my 11 am appointment and I woke UP at 10:30 am.

Well, 10:28 am, technically. Whatever.

So then I had to get ready in a hurry, and doing things in a hurray is never good for me. It always stresses me out and puts me in a bad frame of mine where I feel impatient and angry and irritable.

Practically turns me in my ever-impatient late father.

Then I had to actually get to the car via my walker, and I am still on the fence on whether that thing helps more than it hurts.

I mean, I remember what it was like getting around without it and how my weak legs made walking incredibly painful and draining, and I don’t want to go back to that.

But having to constantly push against an excess of friction on the rear legs of the thing is very draining too, and makes me feel like I am suffering some kind of ironic punishment doled out by the Fates.

Makes me think it’s time for that trip to Regency Pharmacy at long last. Maybe they have a superior solution.

Which reminds me : my nurse at Wound Care said that my walker is mostly a home model and not meant for outdoor use.

That explains a lot. It’s OK for getting me to the kitchen and back, even if I have to do the lunge and follow a lot of the time, but kinda sucks outside the apartment.

Oh well. It’s all I have got right now. So I will use it when I go to Denny’s tonight despite its lack of rugged outdoor features.

Life is such a drag for me right now.

Not all the time. Just during the parts where I have to actually do things.

Complex, challenging, death-defying things like taking a leak, or getting food from the kitchen, or going to much needed medical appointments.

Making it from the car to the Community Care Clinic really sucked. I felt so beaten down and tired by the time I walkered my way into the building, up the elevator, and through the larger clinic to the CCC.

Was my first post-hospital Wound Care and hence the first one where one of the nurses had to change the dressing on my butt wound.

She told me said wound was quite red and that i really needed to stay off my butt if I wanted that wound to heal.

Which means I need to work harder to be able to blog from my tablet. Sure, it will suck to either use a virtual keyboard or speech to text in order to blog, but if I can find a way to blog lying down, this whole problem will go away,

I will be able to avoid the painful kind of sitting almost entirely. The kind that involves this stupid uncomfortable computer chair.

Oh, how I wish I had gone with my original plan of looking for one in the $200 to $300 range instead of going with a cheapo $70 model.

Oh well. Time to get off my fat ass and back into lounging with tablet mode.

More after the break.

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So much potential

Early on in life, I was told how much potential I had.

Not hard to see why. When a kid shows up to first grade already able to read and write and do simple math (everything up to but not including long division) and already talks like a tiny adult and in fact seems smarter than most grownups, it doesn’t take a Piaget to see that this kid has potential.

Many adults predicted that I would go far with a brain like mine.

None of them seemed eager to help me in that direction though. I honestly think they all thought I didn’t need them, I was amazing without them,

And I was. But I had no idea what to do with all that mental power. I could have really used the voice of a knowledgeable adult to point me in the right direction and give me some sort of sense of what was expected of me and what I could maybe do to turn my talents into a career.

But nope. I remained sans guidance of any sort. And so I continued to just kind of wander through life without a real focus or goal.

And that’s never gotten any better. I still have no idea what to do with all these brains and all this talent. I have all this potential stuff but no route to turn it into anything useful, both on a practical level and, more importantly, on the psychological level.

I am like a great heavy storm cloud with an enormous electrical potential but no route to ground, no ability to discharge.

All potential, no result.

And the sheer voltage I have accumulated creates its own issues. I cannot even conceive of a project or goal that could possibly absorb all the energy I have been mindlessly saving up for all these years.

Metaphorically speaking, it kind of seems like anything I try to plug into this overloaded power supply in my head is going to be blown to pieces by the intensity of the current.

What I could really use is a non-intellectual way to discharge some of that electricity so i can lower my electrical (and personal) to a safer and easier to handle level.

It has to be something that bypasses the intellect because then it can evade interference from my overweaning superego and its eager minion the ego.

Both of those forces are corrupt as hell in me and will sabotage any attempts I make ti break free of their enslavement and servitude, so they must be outfoxed.

Basically, my id needs to get all clever and sneaky, like a wily and experienced hunter, in order to fight the system.

Because hear me now : I am busting out of this goddamned prison by whatever means prove necessary, and that means any and all of the voices in my head need to be on short fucking notice that if they get in my way, I will kill them without hesitation.

So get right by me or get the fuck out of here.

I’m finally using my reptile brain and it says ID SMASH!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.