So far so good!
Best glucometer reading so far : 14.3! So I am getting there.
Why, that’s barely in the “call 911 you fool!” range.
But I am still having trouble getting myself to bleed. I am beginning to think that there must be something wrong with my technique. Like I am pressing the clicker to my finger too hard, or I am subconsciously twitching away from it, or something.
Luckily, I have been looking into Alternate Site Testing, which is using the clicker on parts other than the dense nerve clusters on your fingertips in order to get the blood to test, and so far the results are encouraging.
According to what I have gleaned from this website, it seems like the only reason they have been making us poor diabetics lance our fingertips for all these years is that there are a lot of blood vessels close to the surface there, and thus they are good spots for reliably drawing blood.
In other words, the important thing is to get the blood. Where it comes from on the body is not important. It’s not like blood from the fingertips is somehow special and the only possible source of accurate readings.
So fuck this fingertip bullshit. I am going to try the clicker on other parts of my body to see if I can get blood from some place way less sensitive.
Hell, I could pick at the sores on my legs to get the blood. In theory, at least.
Unfortunately, I’ve had to call a ceasefire in my war against my blood sugar because I seem to have misplaced my insulin injector pen.
Figures, dunnit? Two steps forward, one step sideways into a pothole that makes your twist your ankle before you fall down onto the street and get run over.
i can’t get my blood sugar down fast enough considering my symptoms. I get all these weird aches and pains all over my body, especially my legs and feet. Sometimes it feels like my muscles have turned to stone.
But of course, that’s impossible. I hope.
More likely, neuropathy is causing the nerves in the muscles to get stuck in the “on” position, meaning they tense up all the way and then stay that way,.
If so, that’s pretty damned bad. I hope it’s reversible, but it might not be. Nerve damage often isn’t. And so it might be that the best thing I can hope for is to keep things from getting even worse.
But there’s no sense in beating myself up for not taking this shit seriously earlier. Absolutely no good can come of it. I can’t change the past, only the future. And hating on myself for being too depressed to take care of myself properly is a sure fire way to ensure I stay that way.
Instead, I am going to concentrate on my goal of feeling better. That is something I can work towards as a simple, pleasant, hedonistic goal.
And I want it so bad I can taste it.
More after the break.
How to live
That’s what I am trying to figure out lately.
How to be me. How to go about this thing called life. It’s like I am trying on various sets of clothing to see what fits me best before going out into the world.
Only the clothes are more like….. attitudes towards life? Something like that. Ways to approach life. I really need to negotiate some kind of deal with life where I get more of what I want in return for things I either have in abundance or can live without.
I know that there has to be some sacrifice. In some way and on some level, I will have to leave the fetid embrace of my mucky little bolthole and go out into the big bad scary world in order to find a better life for myself.
After all, in order to be truly free, you have to give up a little part of yourself.
I also know that if I want to become more robust and durable and thus more able to take on that big bad world, I have to build slowly to keep from becoming overwhelmed by it all and end up running back to my hidey hole and burying myself deep again.
Between those two demands – sacrifice and sustainability – hangs the current tightrope. I am gingerly exploring the space around my tiny comfort zone, looking for a bridge to the next step short enough to be crossed in baby steps.
Okay, even for me, that was a clusterfuck of metaphors.
My point is that I am looking for a way forward that I can actually do. I am through with looking across the chasm at the things that “should” work and all the things I “could” do and feeling terrible because none of them are doable for me.
There is no more “should” or “could”. There is only that which works for me and that which does not, and the first qualification for whether something works for me or not is whether I feel like I can do it.
If it seems impossible to me, then the gap is too large and I need to try something else. It doesn’t matter whether “realistically” or “logically” there is “no reason” why I can’t do it, all that matters is whether it feels possible enough for me to at least try.
And if I try something and it doesn’t work out, no judgment. Again, nothing “should” work. Should doesn’t mean shit.
It works or it doesn’t. Do or do not. Above all, pragmatism.
Somewhere out there in the n-space of my possibilities lies a path I can take to get to where I want to go in life.
It might not look anything like other people’s paths. And it might not make a lick of sense to anyone, not even me.
It might, in fact, be utterly baffling to my usual logical mind.
But if it feels right, nothing else matters. I will follow that path no matter where it leads.
I have blind at heart for far too long.
Time to learn how to see.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.