There’s a lot, including my trip to see Doctor Caswell yesterday, today’s Wound Care, and of course, the lowdown on Therapy Thursday.
Let’s go logically… chronologically.
Yesterday I went to see Doctor Caswell, my diabetes and sleep apnea doctor, to go over the results of the labwork she had ordered a few weeks back.
Labwork I actually got done promptly for a change. Yay me!
And the results are actually pretty damned good! My hemoglobin A1C, which measures blood sugar over time, was 7.6, and 7 is normal, so we are almost there!
I was pickled tink at that. Usually that test only gives me bad news. Like how I managed to beat my previous high score. 🙁
But nope. This time it was good news all the way. Means that the Jardiance and the Ozempic she put me on are really doing the job.
Kidney function was a little off, not much. Same with liver function. And creatinine, whatever the heck that is.
According to the Wikipedia article, it is a measurement of kidney function.
Cool. That’s all I needed to know.
All these almost right results make me wonder : is this what it’s like to be a C student?
I told her about the return of my dizziness upon rising (BTW : my dizziness on rising is back) and she did the test where she took my blood pressure when I was sitting down and again when I was standing.
And sure enough, just like last time I had this problem, my blood pressure plummeted thirty points when I stood up.
Yup. That tracks.
So she is going to hook me up with one of those 24 hour blood pressure monitors and based on the results from that, she may take me off one of my blood pressure meds.
And that makes sense because there is a direct relationship between blood SUGAR and blood PRESSURE. The higher the blood sugar, the more viscous you blood is, and the harder your body has to work to pump it around, resulting in high blood pressure.
Ergo, it makes sense that if my blood sugar is down, my blood pressure had gotten a lot lower too, and the meds are now making it too low.
Whatever. I am just sick of getting dizzy every time I stand up. Hopefully this all will lead to a solution to that issue.
Wound Care this morning was uneventful. The nurse was very nice. I liked her.
She knows my name now, so I must learn and/or remember hers.
Jennifer, maybe? Doesn’t really jibe with her sunny South American appearance and accent and demeanor. but who am I to judge?
The main foreign sources of nurses for this area seem to be, in no particular order, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, India, and for some reason Russia.
The trip TO Wound Care was eventful as fuck, though.
First, I completely spaced on having Wound Care today, forcing poor Julian to have to knock on my door to remind me, which I am sure he finds difficult.
There was no way we were going to make it on time, so I called the Community Care Clinic to tell them I would be late.
:Made me feel almost like a grownup.
Megan. to my surprise, told me that my appointment was at noon, not 11:45 AM like I had thought it was.
I think she just moved it to give me more time.
On the way down to the car, the elevator took forever to arrive, forcing me to stand there waiting for way way too long.
As you know, standing is much harder on my handicapped legs than walking. I think it’s because when you walk, the muscle groups holding you up constantly change, whereas when you stand they don’t.
As a result, my legs were very unhappy when the elevator finally showed up.
More after the break.
My angry feminism
My formative years – ages 0 to 7 – took place in the Seventies and I feel like I absorbed a lot of that wave of feminism on a cellular level.
A big part of that was the message that women can do anything men do and that women did not need a man for anything.
Remember, this was an era where people debated whether women should be allowed to work outside the home. Where a woman needed her husband’s permission if she wanted to open a bank account or apply for a credit card. Where domestic violence never happened or if it did happen it was rare and if it wasn’t rare she must have done SOMETHING to deserve it.
And remember, these were the daughters of the robot housewives of the 50’s abd 60’s. They saw how dehumanized their mothers were by domestic servitude and serial pregnancy and they were damned sure that was not going to happen to them.
So hell yeah the feminism of the era was angry. It had to be. Women were fighting for equality on a fundamental and very intimate level. This was ideological trench warfare and so it can be forgiven for going over the top sometimes,.
And I feel like I inherited that warlike feminism. I am ready to defend women anytime, anywhere, and against any one. There is no negotiation and I don’t care if anyone’s feelings get hurt. I will defend equality on all levels to my dying breath.
And as usual for me, that means I am often angrier about an issue than the women are. Women who are too young to remember Seventies feminism and the necessary militancy of the era so they don’t understand my rage.
I won’t put up with injustice in any form and yes, that has made me seem like a psycho from time to time.
But my beliefs run to the very core of my being, and I must act accordingly. It doesn’t feel like I am making a choice, any more than I choose whether to pull my hand away from an open flame when I feel the heat.
It is who and what I am. And if that makes me a fanatic, so be it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.