Okay, so I went in to my labs followup today and it’s about how I expected: I’m officially diabetic now.
I don’t remember the exact hemoglobin A1C number but I think it was 7.2. It was definitely over 7. I think it is supposed to be less than 5. Given that I was pulling fasting glucose of more than 150 mg/dl, typically 160 mg/dl on my better days, this was absolutely no surprise.
The clinic is prescribing metformin for me. Picked that up today too and took my first dose with supper. It could be placebo effect, but I took it between 3pm and 4pm and within a couple hours I felt a little better already. (I have not felt good once since coming back here. I have felt bad and I have felt less bad and I have felt kind of meh. I think I’m a notch above meh now. Hey, that’s progress.) The other option was one of those weekly-injection metabolic drugs everyone’s so excited about right now. All I can say is I’m old enough to remember fen/phen, and anyone who takes five seconds to google knows how that turned out. We’re not doing Mounjaro or any of that nonsense until I see a LOT more data on what those drugs do to people. Metformin has a long history as a relatively trustworthy medication as far as diabetes meds go. Even Dr. Atkins used to recommend it, and he didn’t like diabetes drugs. I will need to take supplemental B12, but that’s not difficult or expensive and as an Old Fart In Training, I probably should be on it anyway. And for the record, I already knew metformin depleted at least one B vitamin, and I’m not happy that medical providers still aren’t telling us about that. Everyone reading this please do me a favor and start advocating for your own health, and not just by reading fucking mommy blogs, either. If you run across a claim about something, google it and look at the mainstream medical sites and study abstracts on the subject. See where people agree and where they disagree. If you don’t know what a drug is, look it up. If you don’t know where a body part is, look it up. If you don’t know what a disease is, look it up. It pisses me right off knowing how often doctors and other providers (mine’s a nurse practitioner) leave patients in the dark. It may not even always be on purpose. The blind leading the blind.
My cholesterol isn’t great either but I was pleased to note the only number they seemed to care about was my LDL, which is currently in the 170s (mg/dl). They didn’t try to put me on a statin today but I am supposed to go back in a month and they might try then. Nope. Either I am getting my LDL down before then or I am telling them no, I’ll try niacin and maybe garlic but I am not doing statins. If they really stress out about that I will suggest a calcium score, which is a better indicator of cardiac risk anyway, but I’m betting Medicaid doesn’t cover it, even though it’s cheap as far as tests go. But we’re just going to have to clash on that one. I’m too weak already and statins cause muscle damage. They also fuck up the brain, and I don’t need my brain fucked up. It’s the only one I’ve got. No prosthetics possible.
I really want to see my full labs but I still have to figure out my patient sign-in because I don’t think they have sent that to me. Providers think, “oh, I will tell her the total cholesterol” or “oh, she just wants to know LDL” and I’m here like “what is my particle size?” I’m such a dork. But this is stuff that is quite useful to know. Even if it’s not in the labs they did, there may be other numbers that point to it. We’ll see.
I really need to get back to animal fats too, and I really should consider going gluten-free again. Sounds like a non sequitur, but my numbers are better eating that way. Dad swears by soybean oil. It’s horrific. Also, I don’t know if I can manage keto with Dad being the way he is, but I’m willing to try if I can get on a good multimineral. The idea of winding up in a major electrolyte imbalance does not sit well with me. I don’t need keto flu and I don’t need muscle cramps. I’m good. Honest. But in the meantime I can still do lowER carb, and maybe make it so that most of the carb I do get comes from veggies. I used to do pretty well with things like carrots and beets. We’ll see. I’m thinking I may have a lot of sheet-pan meals in my future. Dad’s willing to buy the meat and we have a chest freezer now. And he ought to get a kick out of it if I’m eating more veggies. He nags me about that sometimes. The hypocrite.
Oh! Forgot to mention. My blood pressure is not brilliant, but it’s like on the high end of normal. 128/88, I think? Something like that. I was very surprised. As with my blood sugar level, I can tell when my BP’s elevated and it is not a good feeling. (A different not-good feeling than having high glucose is, though.) At this point it seems to go into the stratosphere when I am in a lot of pain or when I am under a lot of stress that I can’t possibly resolve. But I don’t seem to have white coat syndrome. That’s fine. My pulse rate wasn’t that brilliant either. I need to start exercising. That would be half the battle for both these issues. Will I? Probably not. I have never been my own best friend.
Weirdly, they didn’t prescribe me a glucose meter or strips. Hi, it’s not enough to tell me to eat differently and then put me on a drug. I need a strip prescription! I don’t think I can even get OTC meter strips with the Walmart gift cards I got from Humana, because it is a prescription item. I can’t bring in even $200 a month right now without a lot of luck. Strips are beyond me.
If anyone wants to know why we do not have diabetes under control in this country, ask me. That’ll be three hours of your life you’ll never get back.
I wonder if Amazon has a store-brand meter and strips that are cheaper than Walmart’s. No meter brand that I’m aware of is as accurate as we need it to be anyway. As long as I can ballpark, I guess.
OH. Also forgot. The dietary advice was interesting. It was suggested I cut way back on carbs and emphasize protein in my diet. Well gee whiz. The times they are a-changin’. So I guess we have that going for us, then.
Another interesting thing: I got onto the MyChart at the hospital in Jennings (American Legion) and my ER visit from December ’21 is still there. I can’t figure out how they got to “fibroids” when part of the ultrasound results says they couldn’t really see distinct tumors. They saw some on my cervix but apparently of a different kind. I also forgot to ask about that today, AGAIN. I’ll double-check but probably I can go to a specialist without a referral. Let me get through this nonsense about the colonoscopy next week and then we’ll see, one way or another.
Oh, and I really should add Dad’s medical appointments to my Google calendar. I have Carrie’s unavailable weekdays there, at least over the next month, and now I need that one more thing. I do add my appointments to Dad’s paper calendar on the fridge and he has already expressed appreciation for that. We’ll see how it actually works out.
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Oh, Christ. The Republicans are yelling at Biden in his State of the Union speech. He’s giving back as good as he’s getting, but it’s all ridiculous. Even the people up there who are more like the adult in the room still don’t know what the fuck is going on and just want to suck up to campaign donors and the idiots who don’t know what the fuck is going on but still want to fucking vote. “Let’s save the environment by making electric car charging stations!” CARS ARE ANTI-ECOLOGICAL. ALL CARS ARE. EVERY ONE.
And he still doesn’t fucking know what a woman is.
And he’s still acting like that Hamas attack in October was somehow worse than what Israel has been doing for more than seventy years, including their current assault on Gaza.
Also, fuck the middle class. The middle class is the reason the poor never get a fair shot, BIDEN.
“First senator to be kissed by the president” WHY THE FUCK IS HE DOING THAT AND WHY DO YOU FIND IT NORMAL
I’m pretty much at the point of never wanting to vote again. None of these fuckers represent me anyway. It’s fucking useless.
(I don’t hate people with speech impediments or anything, but I feel like being well-spoken and CLEARLY spoken ought to be a requirement for elected office. Fucking mushmouth. Don’t come at me about Trump. He’s fucking worse. I still don’t know what covfefe is.)
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We are two days away from the day my ex-mother-in-law walked out of my former stepmother’s house with my son in tow; I would not see him again until the following year, and saw him only once more after that, the month his sister was born. This will be the 25th anniversary of my losing him. Literally half my life ago.
(It’s also his father’s birthday. I’m sure that was complete coincidence.)
March used to upset me much more than it does now. This stuff really does scab over. At some point I suppose it will do that for my experience with Thea, too. I used to have this vague notion that getting over these things would somehow diminish my humanity. I think now it’s more a feature than a bug.
I don’t know that I will ever stop being angry, though, at all the people who think women who can have babies are just dumb animals to harvest of our offspring. It would be bad enough if only men felt that way. Too many women are betrayers in the name of propping up their own egos. This has to stop.
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I found out recently that my Minecraft game got updated and now I can’t play it offline. I had that ability not even a month ago and now… poof. This overall trend is really pissing me off. If it’s not turning a solid install into a subscription service, it’s removing offline capability. This may come as a surprise to all the privileged shitheads out there, but not everyone can get online at home 24/7. Also, if I’ve fucking paid for fucking software, IT’S MINE. If you do something to make it not mine without refunding me and I didn’t violate terms of service, that’s fucking stealing. A child could understand this.
I wasn’t playing Minecraft all that often and so I’m not as pissed off about this specific incident as I could be, but I’m not thrilled either, and I’m wondering what techbros will fuck up next. They don’t give two shits what the end user wants. They’re just sitting around wanking and typing random keys. I shouldn’t be surprised Matt gave me so much grief. Birds of a fucking feather.
I suppose at some point this is probably going to turn me into a developer if that starts to be the only way I can have my own fucking software. That was why I learned HTML and CSS in the first place: the available website development applications didn’t cut it for me. But if I did learn this stuff it likely wouldn’t be for pay; they want to replace real, normal, sane employees with troons and AI anyway. Still, it’s a good set of skills to have. I would be useful to the feminist movement, probably. More of us need to become tech-literate. The techbros are one of our most militant enemy groups. Not our fault they can’t get laid. And yet.
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I’m having one of those moments again where I want to natter on endlessly. Can’t tell, can ya.
I need friends here or something.