Sugarcoating the truth

Alright, I swear, this will be the LAST post about diabetes for awhile (and the crowd cheered and said "Yea, verily!" and all was well.)

So, last night, I went to a business dinner for an organization that I have had a loose association with for a couple of years. I became a full-fledged member in 2007 (yeah, me! One of my resolutions fulfilled - to actually join the damn thing.)

Every quarter, this (what do I call it? a club? organization? professional fraternity? Whatever, let's call it a club, for ease. That's shorter to type, and I am lazy, so "club" it is) club has a dinner meeting at a local hotel. Sorta swanky, you know, for a small-time group. I had been a few times as a non-member, and this really cranky girl that seems to babysit the sign-in table EVERY TIME was there, as usual. I don't know what I ever did to this person, but she hates my guts, I swear it. Here is how our conversation went down . . .

Her: (keeping in mind that we have been introduced SEVERAL times, and have had many conversations, yet she still looks at me blankly, no recognition whatsoever) Welcome to the Club. Can I help you?

Me: Um . . . sure. I need to sign in, I guess?

Her: Certainly. What is your name? (again, NO recognition, even though I could pick this girl out of a crowd of fat, celibate, bitter, late 30s, rapidly decaying eggs and patience, cat-collecting, cross-stitching, Chicken Soup for the Soul-reading bitches fighting over yarn strands at Michael's Crafts ANY day of the week. Let's just call her Bitter Cat Collecting Cunt, or BCCC for short.)

Me: Rita

BCCC: Oh, yes, THAT's right. (smug look on her face, as though she just solved pi.) Rita. Please sign in on the register (indicating my name on the roster facing away from her, upside down.)

Me: (reviewing the register, seeing about 30 names total there, wondering how this woman could simultaneously NOT recognize me and yet point to my name the minute I utter it) Thanks.

BCCC: Here is a drink ticket. The sponsor allocates a ticket per person that you can redeem at the bar for the drink of your choice (again, I know this - I have been here 4 or 5 times)

Me: Thanks just the same, I'll leave the ticket for someone else.

BCCC: Are you sure?

Me: Yes, quite sure, thanks.

BCCC: (leaning in closer, conspiratorially, giving me a knowing nod) Recovering?

Me: (trying to decipher that for a split second) Huh? Recovering? No. Diabetic. (Why did I feel compelled to tell her that? Maybe I should have just let her believe I was an alcoholic.)

BCCC: (smug look back, slight eye roll) Of COURSE (not believing me at all, obviously.)

Me: (feeling like I need to defend myself, but staring at her unblinking)

BCCC: It's just . . . well . . . you always took them before (so she DOES recognize me. She just chooses to pretend she doesn't. Interesting.)

Well, at least I have fulfilled ONE resolution: to join this damn club, cause I have blown the OTHER resolution to hell and back (to get along better with women).

Resolution or not, fuck her. I hate her.

I wonder if I can get my club registration refunded.



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Epilogue:

OK, well, I sort of sugarcoated the ending, because there was more that wasn't very flattering, but in the interest of full disclosure, and with Kirk's encouragement, I will tell the rest of the story:

This club is kind of a tight group of people that do what I do. It's good to belong to, because we give each other job leads. Some of the members and I go way back. Like I said, I have gone to their meetings over the past few years, but never officially joined, so anyway, yeah, finally joined.

Last night's meeting was concentrated on some new certifications that have just come available for people like me. They are equal to, say, an MCSE for engineers. The certification is a progression of difficult, expensive tests, and several people at the meeting (me included) have been preparing for the first level of testing. BCCC loudly announced that she was prepared to submit to her testing this month and would give us her feedback on the testing process, etc. at the next quarterly meeting. She was saying a bunch of other stuff about how much experience she had, and how well-prepared she felt she was, what she had studied, who she had worked for to bring her to this point in her career, blah blah, bunch of other stuff but I stopped listening cause, well, I hate her.

During the meeting, we were reviewing a sample test. There was a big screen and the questions were flashed up on the wall, with multiple choices. Since it was an informal setting, 20-30 of us were just discussing what the answers might be, taking informal polls, submitting the answers, and seeing who was right, wrong, etc. BCCC had a dissertation to make about EVERY fucking question, which of COURSE drew smartass comments and arguments from me on a continual basis, mostly because she was wrong, and partly because I hated her, and partly because it made people laugh, which I love.

After a few questions, most of the people just sat there passively, and only a few of us were actually discussing the questions and answers. Somehow, the whole thing ended up boiling down to a pissing contest between BCCC and I and it sort of divided the group into those rooting for me, and those rooting for her, and we were going head to head, question for question, and not only was I getting them right, I was cracking on her, which seemed to irritate the shit out of her, and delight the people around us.

In a nutshell, I whipped her ass in front of the people there, and a few people that work for her. I mean, fuck, I have been doing this work for 15 years, and to be blunt, she's a pushy cunt that has just a couple years of experience and she overestimated her own knowledge, or underestimated mine, or both.

For ME, it was a triumph, because I smoked her pompous ass. The BEST part was . . . at the end of the meeting, there was a door prize drawing and BCCC, being one of the club officers, had a bag with tickets in it (they had given out tickets for the raffle earlier) . For whatever reason, she walked toward me to let me draw the ticket - the prize was a $1,000 study course for the tests. While I was fishing in the bag for a ticket, she was snippy and said loudly to the room "No hard feelings, just don't cheat and draw your own ticket!" which drew a couple of giggles, and I said "I think we can all agree that you need this study guide WAY more than I do; I'll see if I can rig it for you," which met with howls of laughter from people that looked like they hadn't cracked a smile all year.

I'm still working on a theory of why women that I should have lots in common with hate my guts.

The numbers game

"So, Rita, how you feeling these days?"

That's the terms that my friends use these days to ask about my diabetes. I never know how much of an answer to give. "Fine" seems trite, but a more detailed explanation, like "Well, my A1C number is higher than my doctor would like, but I am on a combination of meds, which initially didn't have much effect, so now I am sticking to a under 20 grams per day carb plan plus meds, which seems to be helping a bit" causes people's faces to freeze into polite, but faraway stares, eyes glazed over.

So, it's better to just say, "Fine, thanks!" So I do.

The truth is, I am learning to live with it. I have made some progress:

• I don't cringe and feel like I am losing consciousness when I prick my finger anymore, which is a relief.
• I am not plagued with panic about how long I will stay healthy anymore. The thoughts of possibly having to inject insulin in the near future don't feel as much like a death sentence as they did back in September, when I was first diagnosed.
• I have managed to kick the bread/sugar/rice/pasta/potato habit and most (not all) of the resentment that went along with it. The numbers on the scale were never enough of an incentive, but for some reason, the fear of the blood monitor flashing a high number at me is enough to keep me on the straight and narrow, something I have never been able to do in the past.
• The magic number is 125. More days than not, I am at or under that.
• The numbers on the scale are slowly going down, but they no longer matter to me. Neither does the incentive/punishment of fitting or not fitting into certain clothes, looking or not looking like a certain person, or any of the hundreds of other things I used to entice/torture/bribe/withhold from myself in an effort to forcibly change my ingrained bad habits. Outward appearance used to be my sole focus; I spent alot of time and effort on worrying about how I looked, or didn't look, or should look. I never considered or cared about the toll that was being exacted on my health. That seems to have all slipped away. The only thing that matters now is preserving my life.

Despite all of these epiphanies, I still have several "areas for growth" (that's Human Resources politically correct terminology for things that I am still fucking up):

• I don't exercise nearly enough. For diabetics, exercise is crucial to keep your sugar levels straight. For some reason, that hasn't clicked in my head yet.
• I don't drink nearly enough water. Never have, still don't.
• I only test my blood sugar level in the mornings. I really should test through the day. I don't.
• I don't eat three meals and three snacks a day. The Diabetic Association frowns upon that, and me, probably. But truth is, I threw their diet in the garbage after the first month.
• I still lean heavily on "mock" foods, like diet candy, diet soda, and other stuff that lets me fool myself into thinking that I can still eat junk. I should kick those, too, even if they are supposedly "legal". It's probably as risky as an alcoholic drinking "near beer". It feels like its just a small step back onto the real stuff. That would kill me.
• I haven't done anything to decrease my level of stress, another big important thing for people living with diabetes. I don't know how.
• I have put off going back to the doctor to have a new A1C level drawn. They have called me twice. I am going to go next week. That's what I said last week. And the week before.

So, for all of you who have asked, thank you. This is probably way more than you wanted to know. Maybe seeing these words on my screen from time to time will inspire me to "challenge myself with opportunities to enhance my growth areas", or whatever.

Breathing deep and treading water

So . . . hmm.

Last night, I took the kids to Johnny's NY Pizza to meet up with my uncle (my mother's brother) for dinner. He wanted all of us kids to gather there to talk with him about my parents, their (delapidated) house, their (dwindling) finances, etc.

We all gathered there, me and my kids, my sister and her family, one brother, his kids, and my uncle brought my mom. It's not often that we all gather together, and I can't remember the last time all 6 of my mom's grandkids were in one spot at the same time.

When the food starts to arrive (calzones, spaghetti, and pizza for most, Greek salad and some kind of low carb chicken wrap thingy for me, not bad), the conversation turns to me, and not in a good way.

"You know, you can cure that diabetes with deep breathing and lots of drinking water," Uncle announces to me and the rest of the table. He goes on in this vein, making me feel like, evidently, I have failed to care for myself properly, and with a few obvious changes that I should know, I could be restored to perfect health.

This, embarassingly enough, spins into a discussion about weight management there at the table, which feels strangely familiar to me. For whatever reason, my family has always felt free to discuss me in this way whenever we have gatherings; I can't ever remember it being any different. Being a fat girl in an normally-weighted family is no fun, trust me.

Sometimes the discussions start out on a good note ("Hey! You've lost weight!"), and sometimes they start with a confidential whisper ("Rita, you have to try this new diet that my best friend's mother's hairstylist found.) It's a strange thing to be dissected that way by people that are supposed to love you, but I figured that was just my penance for being a fat girl in a thin family.

He said some other stuff between bites of pizza that I wasn't really listening to, because I was thinking about when he would come to visit us when I was a little girl; he would produce a portable minibar out of the trunk of his Cadillac, and he would have a (nearly) permanent glass of some concoction or other in his hand for the entire visit. I always looked forward to his visits; he lived in Florida in a beautiful house with an indoor pool, played golf, had lots of money, and was always the life of the party. Very Rat Pack. Very charismatic. It dawned on me that even though I admired him, I never felt very good around him.

He was still lecturing when I started thinking closely about my mother's siblings. While he wasn't diabetic or heavy, he was an alcoholic. Ditto for one of my mother's sisters. Two of her brothers were diabetics (one also alcoholic), both ended up on dialysis, losing this or that limb as things progressed. Their offspring (my siblings and first cousins) are comprised of a fairly high percentage of regularly-weighted alcoholics and addicts (my oldest brother included in that count.) In the entire family, there really is only one other cousin that is heavy like me, and like me, he becomes the center and focus of most of the family's clucking and fingerpointing. He just had a quad bypass last month, and everyone down to a person seemed to openly blame him for his poor health, but never mentioned his brother, who has been a longtime addict and alcoholic. Interesting.

It didn't dawn on me then, but it was crystal clear to me last night, sitting in that pizza joint, picking at salad, and listening to a sermon: no one really ever discusses the rampant alcoholism, drug addiction and diabetes in my mother's family, but discussing weight is fair game.

I also realized that maybe my dad wasn't the only one in my family deep in denial. Taking a closer look, it might be the whole damn bunch.

Getting by with a little help from my friends . . .

So, some of you know, some don't (the ones of you that DO know are probably tired of the complaining), but I am a newly diagnosed diabetic.

After a really wierd woozy reaction at a Braves game a few weeks back, I visited the doctor when I was still feeling wierd a few days later. It didn't take him very long to find the culprit, and just like that, I was given the news.

It took a couple of weeks to stop cursing God, Dairy Queen, Russell Stover, potato farmers, my potato famine-surviving ancestors and their fucking "thrifty" genes, people who have ever caused me any stress at any point in my life, my parents, my ex-husband (the rotten bastard), my CURRENT husband (poor guy, putting up with my bullshit) and my damnable luck and tendency to forlornly turn to Chunky Monkey like a smack addict when I am feeling the pressure, but I think I have reached a place of acceptance and have started forming a battle plan.

It hasn't been easy, trust me. Counting calories, planning out meals and snacks (planning? what is this planning you speak of?), incorporating regular exercise into my day (what?!?) and eliminating as much stress as possible from my daily routine has been like being a stranger in a strange land.

I have pretty good incentive to stick to the straight and narrow, though. Unfortunately, along with my sarcasm and sense of humor, I have also inherited my sketchy sugar management from my dad. Family lore is that my grandfather (my father's father) would often be caught in the pantry sneaking spoonfuls of jelly and other sweet treats. He dropped dead at 55, in the midst of a screaming match with my uncle's (now ex) wife. My dad, every bit his father's son, is a "diabetic in denial". I guess if he had ever bothered to actually GO to the doctor, he would have probably been diagnosed several decades ago, but instead, we watched him suck sugar like a Hoover vacuum. He held his own until his early 60s, when everything started to go to shit. He has lost most of his eyesight (common complication of poorly managed diabetes), and he is wheelchair-bound, unable to walk at all now (ditto).

Based on that kind of history, I am not 100% shocked with my diagnosis. I have had doctors give me the stinkeye for years because of my weight, and because the law of averages states that someone that has my history would certainly BE diabetic, but I would gloat every time my blood tests would come back normal, inviting fate to pucker up and kiss my chubby round ass, feeling like I had escaped the clutches of death for one more round.

It's been a long, hard chase, but I have finally been caught.

Sooooooo . . . in the interest of breaking the family cycle of denial and bodily failure, I have decided to fight back. I have loaded my quiver with a few good arrows. Luckily for me, I recognized the patterns a while back, and I had made some changes that may have given me a leg up. Along with changing up the diet, adding a handful of vitamins, reading books and online info, I have formed a grudging respect for MyFoodDiary.com, the online place of reckoning for what goes into my mouth all day long. Like a daily confessional, I throw myself at the feet of Saint FoodDiary, and await the penance or the reward.

Another member of my taskforce is MapMyRun (http://www.mapmyrun.com/index.php ). This thing lets you click on maps of your neighborhood to chart your walk/run paths, lets you save the paths, and provides the distance of the walk, etc.

At this point, its a crapshoot. I could be a model patient and reverse the trend. I could do everything right, and still end up being a human pincushion, shooting insulin all day long. Time will tell.

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I am surrendering to gravity and the unknown
Catch me, heal me. . . lift me back up to the sun
Help me survive - I want to live
Gravity / A Perfect Circle
(thanks for turning me on to this one, Jimbo. It's become a mantra.)