I am not doing so hot in that area.  And I am beginning to get worried.

For a while, I have been getting various kiinds of phantom pain in my poor feet. The most common acute form is a feeling rather like being jabbed between the toes with a red hot needle.

It can happen at any time and has no obvious source. There is no external sign of anything wrong, like discoloration or swelling. And it disappears as fast as it comes on, fading away with a maddening but mercifully hot, itchy, kind of wet sensation.

But there have been lots of other weird sensations. Like my foot feeling cold and clammy like it’s in a wet sock in the winter when it is in a perfectly dry sock in the summer. Or a feeling like I have a big ol scratch down the sole of the foot when there is nothing there.

These are clear signs of neurological distress.

But it might also be a circulatory thing as well because I have noticed that my feet fall asleep SUPER easily lately. The slightest pinch or pressure and down they go, like I have narcolepsy of the feet. And that’s quite worrisome, with or without the other symptoms.

But wait, there’s more. I also get this feeling on my big toes like they are wrapped in very tight bandages. Almost like they have been shrink wrapped.

And overall, the whole area feels numb, including the back of my legs. Sometimes it feels a little like I am wearing tight pants from the knees down.

I am not.

That would be weird.

Oh, and for ages now,  my hands have gotten cold very, very easily.

Even in the middle of a super hot day.

This is bad. Very very bad. Clearly my diabetes is fucking things up somehow and my blood, like the rest of me, isn’t getting around too good any more.

So it’s to the doctor I go. This morning, I was freaked out about it enough that I thought about calling 911. Or getting Joe out of bed to get him to drive me to the hospital.

Meh. If it came to that, I would probably just take a cab.

But things are clearly going from bad to worse. I’ve got to get this shit checked out. I only hope that I have not permanently damaged my body via self-neglect.

I mean, sure I take my meds and avoid sugar, but I still eat too many carbs and I never ever test my blood and I don’t even take my insulin any more because I am afraid of setting off a blood sugar crash and ending up in a very bad place.

Pittsburgh! Ha ha ha. These are the jokes, folks. I don’t juggle.

For the most part, I have crawled out of the deep dark hole I feel into due to goddamned motherfucking Skyrim, but the insulin taking stayed gone.

Turns out it is really easy to NOT stab myself in the flab every night.

Let’s see. Oh, it only takes missing my diabetes meds one time for the hyper hunger to return. As patient readers know, that’s not just a serious case of the munchies.

It’s my cells crying out for nourishment because I don’t have enough insulin response going on and therefore not enough glucose is moving from my bloodstream to the cells to keep them going. So they hit that hunger button HARD.

And it can be very stressful and frustrating because the hunger is SO strong and eating barely puts a dent in it.

I suppose it could be worse. I could be the sort of fat dude that binges. That could easily lead to a very nasty cycle of trying to fill that hole in my gut with frantic eating and ending up making things a whole lot worse.

So I lucked out there. I haven’t done any binge eating since I was a growing teen. Blame and/pr credit my dislike of things without clearly defined limits as well as it offending my sense of order and control.

If anything, I go too far in the other direction and rarely ever eat between meals. Even if I get pretty hungry. That started as a response to extreme poverty but I am in no big hurry to change it, even though I have more $$$ now.

I hate to think of the possible effects of having a lot more money, though. Like, the kind of money where deciding, on impulse, to order some pizza or whatnot would not be madness.

I don’t worry about sweet temptations. I am pretty much over that. I hhave my sugar free treats and the nausea I feel when looking at sweet things has never been stronger.

But there’s all those other kinds of carbs.

Still, meanwhile, back at the point, I got serious health stuff to get looked after. And I will have to be on guard to make sure I don’t just let it dissolve back into the primordial starstuff of my mind like so many other things.

The real problem is that I have both diabetes and depression. It’s the depression that makes it so hard to look after myself properly. Any impulse I have to look after myself better gets blocked by that enormous sadness inside me and I have to turn away and say “No”.

The best I can do is build up new habits over the long term. I successfully got over my hygiene issues. I don’t get the urge to eat sugary foods any more.

But it’s going to take some time for me to recover enough of myself to make that big mound of sadness small enough to truly deal with.

Until then, all I can do is trudge forward like usual, and keep testing my boundaries in search of a weakness I can exploit.

It happens. And then I can break off another piece of this glacier and send it down south to melt.

I wish I could do a lot more than that, But I can’t/

Amd that’s okay. I guess.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.