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For the first time since I’ve been checking, my glucose is under 200!

What’s weird is that I only took it because I was feeling a little shaky – but now that I think about it, it feels more like Ritalin-on-empty-stomach more than blood-sugar-problems, which would be accurate – I took Ritalin on an empty stomach, then went to fix breakfast. And I can feel the Ritalin kicking in… So yeah… Oops.

OTOH, I probably wouldn’t have bothered checking my glucose, so it’s not all bad. heh.

OTOOH, this is “fasting” level since breakfast hasn’t kicked in – so we’ll have to check in a bit to see where it goes… but maybe this Metformin will start working. I hope so.

(For those that don’t know about glucose: Normal people range from 90-130. Controlled Diabetes is 140-150; anything over 200 requires help to control… so my goal is 140-150, but my FIRST goal is to drop below 200…)

Nobody comments on the blog – I dunno if anyone reads it… I’ve gotten discouraged multiple times and not bothered…

What’s happening at the moment, though, is that I’m getting a lot of comment spam, and I’m tired of it… I’ve set it to not even email me when there are comments to be moderated – and I’ll just let them die.

Sorry. Comments are dead.

The other day, after the last post below on this subject, I checked my blood sugar once an hour for about six hours… It didn’t seem to correspond nearly as much as I’d expected to the meals I ate… As high as ~300, and as low as 215.

Right now, at 266.

So far, this medication is doing very very little…

This sucks.

About an hour or so after a meal… I’m guessing upper 200s, just because I feel a bit tired…

Bah, not enough blood on the first one. Second one either. Look, this is NOT fun, dammit. FINALLY on the fourth lance.

Glucose: 280

And yeah, I feel better than I did a few minutes ago… so I was probably around 300…

Just got up, so this will be a ‘fasting’ test.

I’m definitely tolerating the lance more and more – this is not something I expected. Glad for it, though.

Glucose: 216

sigh

I’m going to go eat some breakfast and take it again in maybe an hour to see how high it leaps up.

Yee.

Hah.

(what sucks is that I’m tired, and I really don’t feel like preparing anything to eat… I’d rather go get fast food – much easier. But much unhealthy)

It’s 4:30am and I thought I’d give one final shot (hur hur)...

Had to lance twice – I think I’m beginning to get used to this. It’s not fun, but… it’s not that it hurts much less, but I’m better able to just DO it, and it seems like I can sort of block it out somehow. I hope this ability increases.

Glucose: 252

I hope this medicine kicks in, because so far it seems to be doing nothing at all.

This is about an hour after having two (small) bowls of cereal.

The previous was before the meal…

ARGH.

So.. here we go again. Haven’t tested in about 24 hours…

Hopefully we’re coming down… I need to get that job. Well, I’d like that job… there are others, but this one I want if I can.

Glucose: 301

ARGH! Wrong direction

I did eat five hours ago, but it wasn’t that bad.

I think I’m going to have to seriously look at the diet thing and go extremely strict – at least for a bit.

sigh

Well… at this point, looks like I won’t be able to go tomorrow morning to re-take the physical (and be approved to drive commercially)...

Result: 227

A little less pain on the lancing – I think I was pressing down on the finger a bit last time, whereas this time I just rested it on there… If it’s like that everytime, it might not be so bad… heh. (This morning… hurt a bit)

Second pill taken this morning…

I’m not ready to poke m’self, but I must. Bah.

A new day, a new finger.

I can see both sticks I made on the forearm, and two of the several on my finger (all yesterday). heh.

255? Dammit!

Well, it is post-meal.

I took the first pill a couple of hours ago…

It didn’t say to take with or without food, but some online research indicated I should take it with meals… SO… I had to go cook.

Made a quick mushroom/broccoli/shrimp stir-fry, although I didn’t have time for sauce, so just a bit of soy on top… Didn’t do any rice or carbs…

After dinner, lanced once on the finger and it didn’t take. ARGH! So I moved up from the lowest setting to the next-lowest setting and tried the other side of the finger. Worked!

Glucose: 223.

So I finally got my prescription filled for the diabetes medicine (1000mg Metformin). The pills I’m not afraid of – but I. Hate. Needles.

Someone gave my wife a meter for me, but I decided to get one for myself – partially because I could control the need guage that way… I found some 30 guage lancets at Walgreens, and you can be sure I snapped `em up.

After reading all the meter instructions and calibrating it, it was time.

I’d convinced myself I wasn’t going to panic, that I’d be ready for it… but I really wasn’t. I sat there for about five minutes, with nothing left to do before lancing, trying to convince myself to do it.

Now, I must interject that I have cats. Two cats with sharp claws. Two cats that I love so dearly that I ignore the pain when they pad their paws on my shoulder when I pick them up. As I write this, I can still feel a little bit of pain from petting my stupid cat before starting the testing process… but I’m afraid of the needles…

I’ve been tested now a few times, and it hurts, but not for long. I know it doesn’t hurt for long. And yet, faced with that damned lancet….

Well, I’d already figured out that I’d try my forearm first – that did help the mental battle a bit.

So finally, I get up the courage… And, of course, it doesn’t hurt very much at all. And I think, “See, ya wuss?” – but my bones say “Yeah, whatever. We don’t ****ing like needles.”

I got such a tiny droplet… I knew it wasn’t enough, but I wasted a strip to find that out, just because I didn’t want to lance myself again. Bah.

It wasn’t enough.

This time, it only took me about 30 seconds to lance myself.

But, dammit, still didn’t get enough blood.

Now, I really don’t want to lance my fingers, but it’s quickly getting to the point where I’m thinking once finger lance is better than 20 forearm lances…

Alright. Finger it is. SIGH.

That did hurt a bit worse, but I did manage to get enough blood. Barely enough. And now my finger hurts because of the squeezing, massaging, and general pleading for blood I gave it – “PLEASE don’t make me lance any more! Three was already three times too many!”

...but I got enough.

Result: 272

Ouch.

I don’t know whether or not to count that as fasting – it’s not 100% fasting, as I had [the equivalent of a] beefstick or so when I went to pick up the prescription… Either way, obviously it’s way too high.

Yesterday morning, I had a pre-employment physical. Fasting, it was 225. They can’t approve me unless I get down below 200; and they’d prefer to see 140-150.

BUT… this is all unmedicated. And frankly, I’ve not got the diet straight yet – I’m eating better overall, but I don’t have it all set yet…

As I’ve typed this, my finger is pretty much fine again, and my shoulder isn’t… but I’ll pick up the cats and pet them in a heartbeat, and I know I’ll freeze again next time I go to monitor. Wish I could fast-forward to a week or so when it won’t bother me. Dammit.

OTOH, hopefully this medication will help get things under control… I feel tired nearly all the time, and I suspect that’s tied to the high glucose levels… I’m mentally lucid, just physically tired…

I hate my local clinic….

So they send me off to make sure there’s not a clot in my leg—because obviously, that’s life-threatening if there is. That’s not the problem. I call in later to make a follow-up appointment and see what else I need to do to solve the constant pain in my ankle that’s been there for several days already… Nobody knows what’s going on with me. They have no clue. They do suggest making an appointment with the doctor for the following Wednesday, but that’s all they can do. That was Friday (for the original appointment and clot check elsewhere) and Saturday (calling them back).

Now, the visit on Friday was to see what to do about my left ankle, which had been hurting since Monday. They took a glucose reading, and it was very high, so they suspect (very strongly) diabetes. They were wanting to do some bloodwork to test for that and other loverly things; they talked about a “uniboot”; but first I had to be cleared from having a clot, and that ASAP, of course.

I love my local clinic…

So Monday, this morning, I get a call—“Have you gotten the uniboot?”—and my first instinct was to exclaim: “Someone who knows what’s going on! Please please don’t hang up I have questions”...

Come to find out the doctor was in today and saw my chart and inquired.

So all is well; I’m getting the uniboot device as soon as I post this, and Wednesday is fine for a followup – this is basically what they’d have done anyway…

But I spent Saturday and Sunday in pain and wondering what the hell to do next…

ADDENDUM: So as I’m about to post this, I get another call from the clinic. Thanks to beaurocracy… for some silly reason, they can’t act solely as a pharmacy and just give me the uniboot; but they can give it to me as a part of a office visit… so instead of $75, it’ll be that plus a $70 office visit… I don’t know how much these things cost, but my guess is much less than $75… but hey… my initial sentence of this post was just for effect so I could do the “I hate…” / “I love…”—in fact, this clinic is awesome. Well, except for this little bit.. and the call on Saturday—but this is Real Life™, where These Things Happen™. heh.

sigh

So every resource I’ve found so far online about ADHD falls within one (or more) of these categories:

– Lots of people saying “ZOMG I haev ADHD!” “OZMG, meee toooo! lollerz!”—I mean, community is nice, and really, I hope this helps them… but… it’s not for me. – Spam sites. Lots of them. – Medical and Pseudo-medical sites that give basics, like “ADHD is a disorder affecting the brain” or some stupid crap… Stuff I know pretty well by now.

Add to all of that that my Google automated search for “ADHD” has thus far turned up articles about how ADHD is overdiagnosed, medication has OZMG horrible side effects and we should warn everyone, with the occasional misuse or some idiot saying “everyone has ADHD” and crap like that….........

I’m beginning to wonder if there’s intelligent life out there…..

Travel Video Television News

Quote: As the 2007 Spring Break season quickly approaches, Panama City Beach is launching its “Celebrate Safely” Campaign. Now in its fifth year, the campaign features the slogan, “Not a break from common sense – Celebrate safely.” This message is prominently displayed in Panama City Beach on billboards, posters, fliers and in public service announcements to reach the 250,000 – 300,000 spring breakers Panama City Beach anticipates this season, beginning on March 3, 2007.

Ah, the joys of being a “local”.

Spring Break…

After three years of living here, it means:

– Heavy traffic on the beach for several months. (You learn NOT to drive down Front Beach Road after about noon) – The occasional story about some drunk moron(s) falling to their death off a hotel balcony

I suppose it also means quite a bit of dosh for the economy, but I don’t think I personally see very much of it at all.

Meh…

Boring article, but it was an excuse to post about spring break and get this blog moving again…

So I ran across the original sketch for the Firefox logo, and I decided I wanted to play with it. Firefox rocks, especially the logo…

Here’s the original image:

And here’s my colorized version:

I made gradients from the actual colors from the rendered logo. The gradient is working better on the fox than the world, because the fox sort of follows a gradient, whereas the world is patchy. So I should probably do something else, but for now, I’m happy as a first version.

So I found that someone quoted me via Technorati.com—which I didn’t know about before.

Cool!

And there was a link to find a value of your blog, which of course I was curious to know if mine was even worth two whole cents…

Here’s the result:

Er… What?

Hmm… One blog for sale!

So I got this going well, then got distracted by real-life events going on in my life…

Oops.

Okay, so lemme give it another shot…

To my already-loyal readers, I apologize for disappearing.

I made a mod to the way Press-It works—I want text I quote from the original to be so marked… So here’s the mod, made to wp-admin/bookmarlet.php:

Original:
$text = wp_specialchars(stripslashes(urldecode($text)));

Replaced:
$text_raw = wp_specialchars(stripslashes(urldecode($text)));
$text = "n".'<b>Quote</b>: <i>'.$text_raw.'</i>'."nn";

Hope that helps someone…