carbonel

My blood sugar and A1C had been in the prediabetic range for several years, but this June there was a spectacular increase. This happened just before I spent the weekend at Scintillation (a small SF convention in Montreal), so it was much on my mind at that time, but I wasn't ready to talk about it until things were better.

And then things did get better, but pddb recently pointed out that I'd totally forgotten to mention it here.

So yeah, I'm now a type 2 diabetic. Thankfully, my blood sugar (which I test daily) is being managed well with some changes in diet and a maximum dose of Metformin. Initially, it was high enough that my diabetes educator had thought I'd need to go on insulin, but for now it's mostly running between 90 and 125. That may not last forever, but with daily testing I'll have plenty of notice. (I did ask about Ozempic, and the educator pointed out that on Medicare it would run me about $1,000 per month out of pocket. So I'm passing on that for now.)

I'm trying to eat more vegetables -- mostly I've become good at making stir-fry with lots of veggies and a few ounces of meat -- and I've replaced sweets and ice cream with fruit. I'm a big fan of watermelon and will be sad when that's no longer in season. And I'm trying to limit carbohydrates in meals to 50 grams or under -- which is still a lot more than during the several years when I was doing much more stringent low-carbing.

I've lost around fifteen pounds (which doesn't show, best I can tell), which I mostly attribute to the fact that one of the side-effects of Metformin is decreased appetite.

Other than that, life goes on pretty much as usual. I'm still spinning a lot, and five of the six items I entered in the Minnesota State Fair won ribbons. Just one blue ribbon, but that one came with a $25 gift certificate to StevenBe, which is a nice bonus. And in January, I'll be taking my longest cruise yet, with friends, to Hawaii. Most of that will be travel time, but I'm looking forward to the entire thing.

1. I have an appointment for my first COVID-19 vaccination! I'd been trying for over a week, ever since Minnesota opened things up to group 1b, tier 3, where I fell (over 45 with at least one qualifying condition). Lots of places were still only giving appointments to tier 2, and the ones open to tier 3 didn't have availability. I'm thankful to mizzlaurajean, who suggested signing up with Fairview. When I did, they were only giving appointments to tier 2, but that changed yesterday, and I now have an appointment for next Thursday, at a clinic a few miles away.

2. I made an appointment for my second and very overdue colonoscopy. The first one was mostly notable for being timed in such a way that I got no sleep the night before. This time, I hope, will go better in that regard.

3. Yesterday, I had the prep work done on a new dental crown. I spent the time listening to the audiobook of an Elizabeth Moon novel, and that was much more distracting than my usual attempt to follow an episode of a cooking or home improvement TV show. A+, will do again.

4. Still trying (obviously, not hard enough) to sell my 2001 Honda Accord.

5. A month or so ago, I went to IKEA for something entirely different, and came home with a set of Kallax shelves and cloth baskets, intending to use them to organize my spinning supplies. I even figured out a place for the unit in my living room. Unfortunately, I couldn't lift it myself -- I was barely able to drag it out of the car -- so I guess it's going to live in my garage until After Times.

6. All of my pandemic-related good intentions about destashing my house contents and organizing things have have mostly come to naught. If I had to pass an adulting test, there are sections where I would not get a passing grade. I am frustrated and depressed about this, none of which is actually inspiring me to action.

I had a dental adventure of sorts. On March 19, my dentist announced that the office would be closing, except for emergencies.

That same day, a piece chipped off of one of my molar crowns, leaving most of it intact, though there was a sharpish edge remaining. But as long as I didn't poke at it with my tongue, it didn't cause problems, and I figured I could live with it for another couple of months.

On Monday, another big piece chipped off, leaving a hole for food to get stuck in and another sharp edge. Possibly related to this, I found that I kept chomping my cheek as I chewed, making eating difficult.

On Tuesday, I called the dental office and left a message. He called back an hour or so later, and we had an interesting negotiation. My situation wasn't an emergency. But a broken crown that goes down into the tooth is considered one. Turns out he's allowed to perform procedures to *prevent* an emergency. What he really wanted was a photo for documentation, but since it was at the back of the mouth and I live alone, I couldn't manage that. But he said I could come in that afternoon for an appointment, and he would do a temporary repair. (Whew.)

It was weird going into the empty office, and the dentist was definitely a bit off his game having to wrangle all the equipment himself. But as long as I don't indulge in jujubes or chomping on jawbreakers, the repair has a good chance of holding up until things open up again.

On my way home, I stopped at Cub and picked up a few groceries, including a two-pound bag each of white and brown rice. Hooray! It wasn't until I got home that I realized I'd forgotten to check if they had whole wheat flour. Oh, well.

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On a totally unrelated subject, I really appreciate all the egg suggestions. A bunch of them are things I definitely want to try and never would have without a bit of a push.

So far, I have made beef fried rice (which I hadn't before) that used up two eggs, and curried chicken salad, with another two eggs. I hard-boiled six eggs, so I have four of those left. And I bought sour cream, so a sour cream pound cake is planned for this evening. That'll be six more eggs. Soon I hope I'll be able to transfer the remaining dozen eggs into a normal egg carton and get the oversized one out of the fridge.

I don't often think this, because I don't do proper cooking all that much, but right now I wish I had someone besides me to cook for. Good food is for sharing.

This morning, I drove to the gym as usual on Tuesdays. Not, however, as usual, I slipped on a patch of ice on the way from my car to the gym. I went down flat on my side, and I did something to my right knee and ankle. My knee hurts, but I think it’s just a bruise. But there’s something off on my ankle, because it hurts a lot when I put any weight on the ball of my foot. I can hobble around by putting the weight on my heel, but that feels very clumsy.

I’ve been doing the RIE part of RICE; I don’t have anything suitable for compression. Also taking ibuprofen.

This is very annoying; it’s the second full-length fall I’ve taken in the last six months. (The other one was in Copenhagen; I tripped on a curb, and had some impressive soft-tissue injury on my left hip.)

This afternoon, I called the nurse line at the clinic. When she heard about the problem with weight bearing, she recommended that I go to Urgent Care or Tria Orthopedic. I chose the latter because it was close (plus orthopedic).

After some X rays and an exam, the diagnosis was a calf strain (thankfully not an Achilles tendon issue). I'm on crutches for two weeks or until it improves. If it's not better by then, I'll have to go in for a follow-up.

Bleah.

On Monday afternoon, I started coughing. I attributed this to my having inhaled some baby powder, but it kept going on and on. On Monday night, I took my temperature, and it was 100.2. So definitely not the baby powder. I revised my theory to acute bronchitis.

Tuesday was miserable. I took aspirin and Sudafed, but it didn't seem to help the fever, which peaked at 102.4. I didn't eat anything, though I did try to keep hydrated by drinking water.

On Wednesday, the aspirin finally seemed to do the job, and the fever got down to 100.0. I ate some chicken soup. It stayed down, but that's about all I can say for it.

Today, Thursday, the cough has turned into a productive one, and wow does my diaphragm hurt when I cough. I ate my last can of emergency for-sickness can of chicken soup. The fever is mostly gone, but I hurt all over. I worked a half-day -- the downside of working at home is that I can do that sort of thing instead of just hibernating.

Tomorrow, I would really like to feel healthy again. I can cope with the sniffles and coughing, but I want the brain fog to be gone. I also wish to be able to develop some interest in food. At the moment, nothing sounds good. (Would that I could invoke this feeling at will without being sick; it would be great for weight control.) For people who know me, the best exemplar of just how miserable I've been feeling is that I've done zero spinning since Monday night.

In the middle of all of this, I had to cope with a change in travel plans. In mid-February, I was originally supposed to fly to Hong Kong, spend a couple of days there on my own, then meet my mother on a cruise and continue with her to Singapore. Except that because of the coronavirus situation (12 confirmed cases in Hong Kong), the cruise line decided ("in an abundance of caution," said the email) to cancel the Hong Kong stop and change it to Taipei.

So I had to be functional enough to consider the options. Delta has good flights to Hong Kong and from Singapore (from and to MSP). It does not have good flights to Taipei. There's a good chance that either the cruise line or the insurance policy I purchased long ago will cover the cost, but only at the original level -- and the reason the Delta MSP-TPE flights are so expensive is that only business class seats are available. It turned out that the best option was to throw away the MSP-Hong Kong segment entirely, and buy a new one-way MSP-TPE flight on United. Delta wouldn't give me any credit for the unused leg, because the current price for the one-way fare is more than I paid for the entire ticket, but the agent was willing, under the circumstances, to convert the open-jaw fare to a one-way.

I'm seriously bummed, because I was really looking forward to those days in Hong Kong, but there's nothing I can do about it. I'll only be on my own in Taipei overnight, or I would try to get together with jiawen.

And I'd damned well better be completely healthy by then.

Me and Peggy Lee:

Fever! in the morning
Fever all through the night

Currently 101.3, and I'm about to take another dose of aspirin.

Five years ago (or so), I developed a macular hole in my left eye. It was like having a bullet hole in the middle of the glass that was my field of vision. Lots of people develop them as side effect of passing age 50, and most of them close spontaneously. Mine didn't; it got worse. I had surgery (vitrectomy) that allowed the hole to heal, but I the flaw in the middle of my left eye's field of vision remained. (I'm not complaining too much; 20 years before, I might simply have gone blind in that eye, because the surgery didn't exist.)

Four years ago, I developed a cataract in the left eye, which was a known and predicted side effect of the previous vitrectomy. The surgery was uneventful, and after the surgery, the blurriness and cloudiness I'd been experiencing went away.

This year, in early August, the vision in my left eye started getting blurry and cloudy again. It came on gradually, but a week or so ago I realized that I couldn't read my computer screen with my left eye. (Normally, my vision in that eye isn't perfect (see above), but it's around 20/30 with correction.) Around the same time, I realized that I needed a correction in my right eyes as well.

I was able to get an appointment with the ophthalmologist on the day I called (about a week ago), and the diagnosis regarding the left eye was as expected -- I had developed a film behind the lens that was clouding my vision. This is something that could be dealt with via a laser procedure. Not quite surgery, but performed by a surgeon. The surgeons, it turns out, are very busy people -- the first open date on the schedule was October 23. I mentioned that the eye problems were interfering with my ability to work, and I would be happy to fit into any cancellation on short notice. Yesterday, I got a call asking if September 18 would work, and I said yes.

In the meantime, my left eye is useless for reading (but is okay for most things where fuzziness isn't as important), and my right eye needs a new lens for my glasses. My understanding was that I shouldn't get that new lens until I can have both eyes tested properly -- which means not until after the procedure. Mostly I'm coping, but the print seems to crawl around on the page from time to time, and I've been bumping up the print size when I'm reading electronic versions. Thus the title of this post.

I'll be very glad when this is over and fixed as well as can be -- an I'm even gladder that I'm living in the future, where such fixes exist in the first place.

This is what happened tonight. It matches what happens too many other nights.

Around 11:30, I take a couple of low-dose melatonin, and read and play Candy Crush until 12:30, when I'm falling asleep over the iPad.

Turn APAP on.

Try to adjust nasal pillows so I can breathe through them, without adjusting other headgear. Succeed.

Now to adjust straps attached to them so they stay in place.

Top strap is flopping on forehead. Tighten it.

Now the nasal pillows have moved, and I can't breathe through my nose.

Readjust bottom straps. Seems to be okay.

Turn off lights and lie down, adjusting pillow pillows (the real ones).

Everything is slightly off. The nasal pillows are leaking air and blowing on my face. Try to get things adjusted with minor tweaks. Fail.

Turn lights on again. Take off headgear and try to readjust straps.

Put the whole assembly back on.

The Velcro on the bottom straps doesn't want to attach properly. Fiddle with it some more. Can't get anything right.

By now am wide awake. Also crying in frustration. Which means my nose is plugged, which is decidedly less than optimum for using the nasal pillows.

This is the fourth night in a row that I've had this fight. One night I gave up and slept without APAP (lose). One night I managed to fall asleep with it, but woke up around 4 am with nasty cramps and spent the next hour in the bathroom (not the fault of the APAP, I suppose). One night I triumphed, and slept seven hours. What will it be tonight?

Statistics seem to indicate that if I keep fiddling and adjusting, eventually I will be able to fall asleep with the device on. But it shouldn't be a nightly struggle. There has to be a better solution, but I'm damned if I know what it is. I've tried the two major brands of nasal pillows on the market, and neither one works terribly well for me. I really dislike the full-face mask -- one major reason I had surgery this year was so I wouldn't need that. Maybe a nose-only mask would work -- I haven't tried that since the surgery.

All I know is that right now it's 1:15 am, and my alarm will go off at 7:30. In between now and then, I'd really like to get some good-quality sleep. But I guess right now, I'll play some more Candy Crush.

First a plumbing emergency, for which the guy from Ron the Sewer Rat just arrived.

Now the nurse at Park Nicollet is recommending that I go to the ER for a probable leg clot.

And somewhere in there, I really need to get to the Post Office.

It was a lovely time, made especially poignant by the knowledge that it was the last one. The one panel (A Good Read) I was on went reasonably well, I think. The other panelists were not as thrilled by the book I chose (Point of Hopes by Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett) as I'd hoped. Bringing copies of the three books I had in dead tree format turned out to be worth the space and weight.

I quite enjoyed the Saturday night party, especially the musical bits. As things grew late, a bunch of us sang rounds, and at one point someone asked if anyone knew "Hine Ma Tov." There are several versions of this, and Ruth and I broke into a jazzy version that we both knew, but probably from entirely different origins. When we finished, tnh said something like "That's very scary." Heh. And we hadn't even had a chance to demonstrate all the things you can sing "Adon Olam to, which, on due consideration, is probably just as well.

Unfortunately, by the time the plane landed, it was quite clear that on top of the old cough from the cold three months ago, I now have a shiny new cold. Bleah.

I have my preop physical next Monday, and I'll find out then if the surgery has to be delayed.