Happy Hell-i-days!

Actually, I'm a fan of the winter solstice madness-- though the retail insanity and general materialistic mayhem breaks my heart.

But I want stuff, too. I'm a material girl. Mostly, my urges consist of food, and while everyone (or just about everyone) I know loves to overindulge at this time of year in preparation for some extreme New Year's Week penance (that they swear will last longer, but let's face it, it rarely does), I feel extra-guilty about it. Sure, I gain the weight, feel like shit (physically and emotionally) and generally suffer the way everyone else does. But I also torture myself with the thought that I might be shaving years off my life over the course of just a couple of weeks. I rub the numb edges of my two neuropathic toes against the carpet and remind myself how living is going to kill me.

People not in my position or any similar position love to judge folks like me-- you love food more than you love life? What about the people who love you? Well, did you know that no matter what I do, my golden years are likely to be showered in piss unless some major medical advances are forthcoming before permanent damage is done?

And did you also know that many of us, myself included, have mostly accepted and even embraced this? I'm not going to have children, so I won't be leaving any orphans. The only two real reasons I fear death: 1) That the people I leave behind will be sad to lose me and 2) That I won't achieve my goal of making it to every continent before I die. I hope I get to more of the world even than that, and as of now I'm only missing three continents. Death is not necessarily, well, death. It means my physical body and the personal shit of ego are gone, and with them all my aches, pains, and petty concerns. This beautiful season of slumber is about, in a sense, embracing death.

I got LASIK this month. I've been rejoicing over the idea that now the only things "wrong" with me now are that my knee is still fucked, my face is a little more vulnerable to corneal detachment and septum displacement, and of course, I'm still diabetic. I fret about and fetishize these things in my own weird, particular way, but one day, I'll be done with all of them. In the meantime, I can see and breathe clearly, I can still walk, and with injections, I can taste life.

She's Lost Control Again

Tonight I sat. Of course, I mean that I applied my ass to a surface and rested my weight upon it, but specifically, I mean that I meditated. With a group, this time. Many sanghas (Buddhist communities who sit together) include one-on-ones with your group leader about what's happening in your practice. My one-on-one tonight seemed like it was heading one way, and went in a completely different direction in the hours after the sit that I inevitably reflected upon it.

I wrote about two single-spaced pages on that for myself as soon as I got home, but of course the whole thing is still in the hopper. And a theme that recurs for me now is control.

Diabetics are obsessed with control. So are the people who provide us health care, live with us, and so even are those who have just met us and are talking about diabetes with us for the first time. I don't usually start these conversations in coffee shops or at cocktail parties (though sometimes one can't help it) but when I meet a new health care provider, s/he almost always asks, upon learning that I have diabetes, "Are you under control?" or "Is it under control?" Usually I get the latter, suggesting that diabetes, or at least MY diabetes, somehow has a life on its own. Not a life OF its own, as in running wild without my efforts having any influence on it, but as if it's a discrete entity whose existence can be without me. So in other words, it's separate from me, but I can allegedly control it. My diabetes is my wayward child, one who skipped her Ritalin and is now chewing on the furniture.

Meditation, contrary to popular belief, is not about emptying your mind or ignoring your body. Quite the opposite-- it's designed to have you be particularly aware of what is in your mind and body, and to understand that you often aren't aware of it despite believing that you are. You're in the past, in the future, inside a physical sensation you're experiencing at that moment, believing that the ideas that pass through your mind are real and true in an absolute sense, when they're actually synapses firing in a way programmed by your physical reality, your upbringing, your surroundings, your previous experiences, and countless other factors. Meditation isn't about controlling what happens, it's about knowing what happens, and noticing what happens.

Do you know why you lose your car keys? I do it often, despite attempts to be aware-- I throw them down on the first available surface or into a pocket as soon as I'm in the door, because I have to pee the cats are trying to escape I'm so hungry I need dinner now but I don't know what I want I need to empty the litter box and see if they have water and I have an hour before the next place I have to be and the neighbors are being loud. After that sentence, do you remember what I was talking about? I do because I'm making a point, but a reader (if I ever have any) might have to peruse the previous sentences to figure out what happened. After I've jammed my keys down in any old place because forty other things are happening in my head, I try to peruse my memory of what just happened, but to me what just happened are all those thoughts, not me placing the keys somewhere. And if you're about to tell me to have a place where the keys always go, I will tell you to shove it. I have a hook. I use it about 50% of the time. If I'm present and noticing, the keys go on the hook. It's not about the hook, it's about my head space when it's time to use the hook.

So, control. Control and diabetes. I get so pissed off when I'm asked if it's "under control"-- what does that mean to you? Does it mean the same thing as it does to me? It's stayed pretty steady for years now, and it's not bad, but I want to get tighter, maybe lose about 1% of the A1c where I hang out now. But when I try "control" I just fuck myself over, get angry at myself, at my providers, at the world, at the fate that gave me this shitty broken body -- which is actually a young, attractive, highly functional body from another perspective, but in the pity party that inevitably results from my struggle with control, I don't have that perspective, I have this image of a never-existing perfection up to which I do not stack. And not just because of diabetes-- let's not forget the bum knee, funky posture that resulted from the bum knee, shockingly bad eyesight, missing cup size or two from my bra, giant feet, repeatedly sprained ankle also connected to the knee trouble, extra two or three pants sizes I've gained in the last two years, and on and on. Maybe I should make a dart board with all my complaints as individual pie sections, and start nailing the shit out of that thing with darts. That might make me feel better, or I might get depressed at my shitty aim with darts.

So how's this for a resolution: stop trying to control ANYTHING. Just start observing everything. This will be added to my just-resolved first resolution, Stop apologizing for everything. I am not sorry, and I am not under control-- my own or anyone else's. I'm just here, and I do not apologize for that.

Long time, no blather

It's been nearly a year since my last post. I know that diabetes and everything else in life that pisses me off hasn't taken a break for a year, so I don't know why I have. One (sort of nice) reason is that I've discovered so many blogs by brilliant diabetics who are on the razor's edge of the sugar-free zeitgeist, but that's a cop-out. I've just been, if not lazy, prioritizing differently. I guess I'm kind of glad I didn't share with anyone that I was writing this, and I love my anonymity (a treasure in decreasing supply online) but that also meant no accountability. I got to not post, and everyone else got to not know. I can't promise I'm sharing this any time soon, though, so maybe it'll go on this way until... I don't know what.

What prompts me to be here now, other than following all the other blogs I do on this site, is that I just spilled my guts elsewhere in cyberspace in the hopes of making my life better, finding my goals and putting them into service. So I'm in the mood to confess.

What's new in my diabetes this year? It's fallen to shit due to stress in my life that I've let take over. I've now placed a moratorium on holding others' sweaty hands through all their bullshit, and put my own bullshit first, but what that's going to mean in practice is reduction, not abolition. Saying no as just that, "no" is so much harder for me than I would think or like. Not only that, it's so fucking hard for me NOT to open my fat mouth and offer to help. Goddess bless those of you who don't take me up on that shit. Also, I hate being in my early thirties and having every last motherfucker I know getting married this year. Buying presents, going to the damn things, it's unreal how much of my time is getting sucked into that vortex, though as of now, I'm still choosing it. This also means that my diet has gone to shit and my workouts have followed suit. Basically what I'm trying to say here is, I'm pathetic, I get it, and I know it's all me, so don't feel sorry for me, just see that I'm being honest.

There are about five million topics specifically salient to diabetes that I have in my head, but for now, I'm just going to leave it here. Depression plays a role, too, a big one, and I guess this is most of what this post is about. So for a few moments we've sidetracked into another of my chronic problems, and we'll return to our regularly scheduled programming, well, whenever the fuck I feel like it. Probably before next year, though.

Death, Already

I have some notes about what I’m going to talk about the next few times I post. Sex, death, society, doctors, a few other things. Death was actually low on the priority list, what with it being a downer, but it popped back up this week (and it’s been in my life a lot in the last six months), urging me to address it.

A woman I have known and been friends with since ninth grade died yesterday. M. was a passionate person, an artist, musician, writer and filmmaker. She had been working on a film of her most recent screenplay, as well as pursuing other endeavors. Then, on Sunday, she experienced an adverse reaction while taking cough syrup with prescribed Adderol. The cough syrup may or may not have been recreational, but the boyfriend who was with her apparently didn’t call paramedics in a timely manner, and by the time they got there, her pulse, brain activity and breathing had stopped. The paramedics managed to get her heart started again, though she needed a breathing tube and other life support measures to survive for the two days that she hung on. An experimental treatment didn’t work, and she died yesterday morning.

She was three months older than I, born in June to my October. We lost touch here and there, but I always knew what she was up to through other friends, even when I had run away from home and only spoke to a couple of people here on a regular basis. The miracle of Myspace and Facebook brought us back together on a direct basis, and a few years ago I visited her at the restaurant where she worked, rekindling our friendship. M. was a vivacious, unique personality who was well-known around our small city, and so the reach of her influence was wide. On Monday, it was Facebook that made it possible for me to find out what was happening to her.

Part of me always assumes it’ll be me before it’s any of the rest of my friends from our high school class. D. smokes, and has a bleeding disorder, and is having surgery next month, and that scares the shit out of me. T. has, through no fault of her own, come close to the ultimate disaster a couple of times, getting a very high degree of disaster out of it, but she lives a pretty clean and healthy life. A. is settled in with a husband and two kids, and is pretty insulated. B. is a physician herself now and that seems to insulate her, too, somehow. M. was never a heavy drug user; she was a vegetarian who didn’t drink, and whose open heart often resulted in less-than-stellar taste in men, including a randomly violent one, and the one who didn’t call 911 in time, presumably because he himself was high and/or feared getting into trouble.

But diabetes isn’t the only disaster out in the world; in fact, as tragedy goes, it tends to be a very slow burn. Overdose, suicide, accident, violence, and the like are so much splashier, and several terminal or potentially terminal diseases even yank the spotlight away from chronic diseases and their sufferers. I said last time that there are no diseases left for which there are romantic notions, but on second thought I think cancer may have some cachet with a certain type of drama queen (never the people who actually have cancer or those who love them most and see what they really go through, though). The four horsemen I listed first (suicide, violence, accident, overdose) all have that element, though. There’s a reason we call it staring at a car crash. All those times I ever have or ever will bitch about not being seen for who I am and the parts of me that my disease has formed, I’ll know somewhere in the back of my mind that what’s worse, at least for the survivors, is the death that comes so much faster, so much more suddenly, and draws such scrutiny from the vultures.

The Sweetest Bitch Ever: In which a cranky chick with diabetes sounds off.

I’ve had this blog kicking around in my head for a couple years now, and its subject has been kicking around in my head and in my body for 22 years. I’m 32 now, and I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of ten, on the day after April Fools’ Day, I guess because fate needed at least 24 extra hours to work up the craziest prank possible. My twenty-second anniversary was a few days ago. The anniversary never is romantic, and the connotations of the disease itself don’t have nearly the cachet that tuberculosis had about 250 years ago, but I guess in the age of science we’re past the romance of any disease, and we now just know our broken bodies for what they are, diabetic or not.

Juvenile diabetes sure does live up to its name—it just seems like something I ought to be able to get over with the appropriate maturity, but here I keep waking up every morning for 22 years now wondering what my blood sugar is. If you don’t have diabetes, I can tell you that you wake up at about eighty milligrams per deciliter. (Go look it up. That’s not what I’m here for.) If you do have diabetes, I don’t need to tell you that waking up often has nasty surprises in store for you, but it’s better than the alternative, which is also a small but distinct possibility.

For the first five years, I don’t think I really understood what the hell was going on. I was doing my own shots and glucose tests from the beginning, for which I am eternally grateful, but I didn’t know to be in denial, get angry, get scared, get offended by my doctors’ or the general public’s misconceptions about what I was actually going through, or anything else. So much has changed since then, and I know I’ll have plenty to talk about at least once a week here, trying to hit all the highlights and many of the lowlights.

And just so you know, I curse. A lot. You’re probably reading the longest streak of not-cursing I’ve been on in a while. OK, the title contains the word “bitch” and I dropped an H-E-double-hockey-sticks earlier, but believe me, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And my cursing condition is bound to flare up when I get started on the longest, most frustrating relationship I’ve had in my life—aside from my parents and my beloved younger brother, all of whom can give diabetes a bit of a run for its money on those fronts, but unlike diabetes, I wouldn’t give them up even if I could. They’re all likely to feature prominently in this blog, though. My grammar and spelling tend to be generally accurate, but if I get in a hurry or on a tear, I can’t make any promises on that front. I’ll also likely quote studies, research, other diabetes blogs, and the like to demonstrate what might be on my mind, and I’ll do my best to cite everything appropriately, but I’m not a real resource for real information about diabetes, just a ranting platform that I hope might help you out, but like most people, I mostly do what I do to help me out.

Oh, and there’s apparently another diabetic bitch on Blogspot with a similar URL. I’m more interested in the diabetes side of things, and she’s more interested in the bitch side, but she’s been inactive for three years now, yet continues to hog a shorter, more desirable URL. Oh fuckin’ well, I guess that’s what I get for not getting on this sooner.

Just know that everything you get here will be from the heart. Because my pancreas is unlikely to make any sudden moves.