30 Minutes on the Elliptical

And I *still* didn't die.

Sweet.

Weights in the morning, an hour of walking during the day, cardio at night... add in some jump roping and I'll be totally ready for boxing classes in August.

God, I'm feeling better.

Have I mentioned how much better I'm feeling?

You're going to hear that a lot for the next couple of months. I apologize for the repetition. Deal.

Fuck, I was sick.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Walked over to the hospital and went over my numbers again with Dr. S. (the best part about this whole experience is probably that the hospital is within walking distance).

He'd put me on a one long-lasting Lantus shot every morning, then two or three more shots as needed every day before meals. First, the Lantus was too low, and I had really high sugar. Then the Lantus was too high, so I was bottoming out all the time and getting shaky and had to eat more to keep my sugar on track. So he cut the Lantus back a little, and cut my noonday shot out. Now I'm running a little too high again (over 200) in the evening.

So, I have two choices: add a small noonday shot back in, adjusted for the effect of the Lantus later, so I'd be up to four shots a day again; or, try a mixture of high and medium lasting insulins (premixed) and only take two shots a day, period.

I said, well, fuck it, let's try the two shots.

Well, OK, I did not use the word "fuck," however. My doctor is this older, skinny little Indian man with a long white beard, hooked nose, bushy eyebrows, and a tendency to smack his lips before and after he speaks. He always looks terribly serious. He has no bedside manner, and while he was with me, he took a call from some hysterical-sounding woman. From his end, this is what I heard: "Oh, he's fine, he's doing well.... yes, I think so... Then don't let him go out... Just don't let him go out. He's just going to go out and rape some woman... if he says he's going out looking for women, that's what he's going to do... Then go with him when he goes out... no, no, he's not serious... then let him go out for five minutes, OK?"

Don't ask me what that's about. I have no freaking idea.

So anyway, despite the lack of bedside manner, the guy absolutely knows his shit. I feel comfortable that he knows what the hell he's doing, and I trust his judgement. Which is what you really need in a doctor. I'm forthright enough to ask the questions I need to ask despite his gruff manner, so it works for me.

I love my Lantus, but I almost always say "yes" to new things. If you don't say "yes" you'll never know if the other stuff would have worked better than what you're currently using. So I'll risk a week or two of the "new" not working so great... At least then I'll *know*. And there's the possibility that it'll work *perfectly* and I'll have found the exact right fit. And a couple weeks of glaring at my sugar levels again is worth that.

The cost of this new medication, and a new, more compact glucose meter with a faster testing time?

$228

Hooray.

Speaking of health expenses, I also went and sorted out my hospital bill. I couldn't understand why it said I owed only $3300 of the $27,000 because it didn't say who the hell had paid the other $23,000.

"Oh, it's a contract the hospital has with your insurance company," the billing woman told me.

"Does that mean they paid it?"

"The hospital has a contract with the insurance company. You wouldn't understand."

"Uh-huh. OK, back up again, then. Did they pay it?"

"It means you only owe the $3300 if your insurance doesn't pay it."

"What about the other $23K?"

"Oh, don't worry about that."

"But... has my insurance paid it?"

"It's a contract the hospital has with --"

"OK, OK. Does that mean I don't ever have to pay the $23K no matter what my insurance says?"

"Exactly. All you'll ever be obligated to pay is the $3300, if your insurance won't pay that," she said, and grinned. "I bet you had a heart attack when you got that bill."

"Not really," I said, "I just laughed."

I was also ready to laugh when Dr. S. put me on the scale. I had already steeled myself for the numbers. Was I already over 190 again? Was my body totally freaking out and out of control and everything was going to explode and go to hell?

I stepped on the scale -

183

I've only gained 7 pounds since I got sick.

I assumed I'd put on twice that.

They say people with a history of eating disorders tend to suffer from that whole body dimorphism thing, where they think they're bigger than they actually are. Seven pounds is a really fucking healthy amount of weight to put on, thanks. 183 is a perfect weight for me, and I'd love to stay there, but shit happens, I know. Maybe my body will surprise me. I don't know that I've ever felt all that in control of my body. So getting diabetes really isn't changing much of anything, as far as altering my perception of self.

I always felt like there was something fundamentally broken with all of my systems.

After blowing money on medical supplies, I went to the local used bookstore where I have store credit and bought some Conan novels.

Because when all else in life is incredibly frustrating and out of whack and your endocrinologist is advising hysterical women on how to keep rapists off the street, there's always Conan novels.

Off to the Doctor

Sorting out insulin dosages.

Again.

Then, I will come home and feel sorry for myself for awhile.

Then, I will move on.

"Barbossa is Hungry" yum

Does anyone have an MP3 of the track, "Barbossa is Hungry" from the original Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack?

All of my music was eaten when my other computers crashed, and the actual disk I have is scatched up enough that it's ruined that song, and that happens to be the title track in my head for the second book in the fantasy series, Over Burning Cities.

Email me at my public address: kameron_hurley AT hotmail.com, and I'll send you my gmail address for swappage.

Thanks!

Dinner & Drinks

Jenn and I did dinner and drinks with James & Ysa last night. It was the first social outing (Wiscon doesn't count) I've done since I got sick, and if I didn't like James and Ysa so much, I probably would have bailed. I've still got a lot of strange fear bundled up inside of me.

I've been passing again and again on the multitude of Mary Anne's functions (brunches, buffets, writing get-togethers, dinners, teas, discussion groups, readings, etc), and was just too tired to get to Jennifer Stevenson's this weekend for a backyard pig roast (yea, yea, I know. I totally would have had fun, I'm sure).

But it was time to get myself out of the house. I had no excuses. James & Ysa live within walking distance, for fuck's sake.

Also, they have good cheese, good sausage, and good beer. I have discovered the greatness that is cheese curds (I like cheese, yes. Also: it's a low glucose food, which makes me happy).

I think the best part about finally being halfway normal for the first time in a year is that I get to drink beer without worry. Sure, I can only have *one* beer, but that's a huge improvement over the last six months.

So, slowly but surely, things get better. I get less fearful. The idea of shooting up insulin in someone else's bathroom doesn't weird me out anymore, cause it's a done deal. Now I can stop chewing over all this shit and just... well, live.

It's funny, the little things you worry about.

"Will it look weird if I only have one beer?"

"What if I get blood all over the bathroom?"

"What if they serve stuff I can't eat?" (which is dumb. I can eat anything, just not much of it)

Perhaps the weirdest thing of all was this morning. I insisted that Jenn and I leave James and Ysa's by 10pm so I could get to bed and be up by 5:20am. I was dreading the whole thing, because I knew how exhausted I get if I'm not in bed by 9pm. 10pm on a weeknight really pushes it...

Well.

When you've got super high blood sugar, you *do* need to sleep a lot more. Toward the end, I had to get 9 to 10 hours. The last week in Indy, I was going to bed at 8pm and getting up at 7am. Barely getting up, because I was still so groggy.

Last night, I went to bed closer to 11pm, and woke up at 3:30am and tossed and turned for awhile before finally getting back to sleep and jumping up again with my alarm.

No problem.

All of a sudden, all of these restrictions I've had for the last year - in bed on weekdays by 9, making sure my water bottle is full before my commute, making sure I go to the bathroom before said commute, carrying three different drinks and a full water bottle on plane rides as short as 36 minutes, making sure I got a drink for the ride home after every shopping trip, stocking up on bottled water, getting up three or four times a night to go to the bathroom, avoiding all liquor for fear that it exacerbated yeast infections, $30 a month in heavy medications for yeast infections, nightly baking soda bathes to soothe said yeast infections, an inability to wear my contact lenses because of poor blood circulation in my eyes - are gone.

All gone.

God, I was so sick.

You know, I could sit around and complain about the insulin, but it's the insulin that's helped make me stronger and healthier than I've been for an entire year.

You know what the best part is, though (after the beer)? I accomplished a lot of shit last year. Not nearly as much as I wanted to, but quite a bit just the same, and I did it while my body crashed and my health deteriorated.

Imagine how much ass I'm going to kick now that I'm a functional human being again.

heh heh heh

Pencils Made From Human Remains

There's so totally a good story in this.

TOTAL HOSPITAL BILL:

For the luxurious digs at Weiss Hospital, with the fine view of the skeletal in-progress parking structure and the oh-so-helpful nurse "Mary" with the fantastic "wash yourself" bedside manner and the neurotic young doctor who got down on one knee and apologized every time he ruthless dug into my arteries and splashed great rivulets of blood all over the bedding:

$27,318.58

Amount of piecemeal physician's costs still trickling in:

About: $1500

Amount I've spent out of pocket for medications to date:

About: $600

Amount of every check up with Doctor S., every three months for the rest of my life:

$178 (amount included in above total)

For a Grande Totale of:

$29,418.58

Or, roughly, about how much it cost me to get a Bachelor's Degree in 2001.

Not bad, for saving a life.

Still:

I've rather be living in Canada, thanks.

P.S. At least I know how much my book advance(s) need to be! Oh yay.

In Which the Protagonist Completes 20 Minutes on the Elliptical Machine & Doesn't Die

So, it turns out I can work out (you know, doing more than walking) and not die. Which should have been a no-brainer, but you know, after a lot of low sugar days the week before last, well, I was pretty primed for the possibility of failure.

I'm also really liking having biceps again. When my body was eating itself alive, the muscle was going right along with the fat, despite my regular morning free weights routine. I didn't realize just how much said muscle had been eaten until I posed the other day and discovered how kewl my biceps look.

Also: 68 pages of GW to go. When I have a fucking draft of this book, there's going to be a BIG PARTY.

I would invite you all, but I think we'd run out of beer.

From the Trenches Anthology, Cover

Hopefully available at WFC in November, containing a nice little brutal women piece of fiction from yours truly.

LeGuin, Boys’ Own Adventure, and the Fine Art of Genderfucking

Are there not enough good SF/F storytellers? Not enough good storytellers writing about radical feminism/gender/body politics?

Or, you know, is feminism just so five minutes ago that we’re all content to write about strong female heroines who are just assumed to be “equal” in whatever made-up society we throw together - where men are men and women are men, too?

Cause if that’s radical feminism, I’d love to see what we’d call a body of work today that was written in the same angry, brutal vein as Russ’s fiction.

We’d probably call it terrorism.

Blogging Break

Well, that does it!

I'm going to take a short break from the blog to sort out some personal stuff and avoid allowing BW to become a morass of random postage.

See you all on Monday.


“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
- Franz Kafka

"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."
- John-Paul Sartre

"I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong."
- Vita Sackville-West

"Life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself."
- anon

Your Ideal Pose

Find your own pose!

Oh, god, now I'm doing a quiz. This really IS becoming an LJ.

I need to write something quick about blood, fighting, abortion and the lack of women authors in SF&F.

Sweet fuck.

(via bond)

Ah, Solitude

Well, Jenn's out tonight, which is actually nice, because even though I love her, we've spent a lot of time together since I got sick, and I know she's been avoiding social stuff.

Bah.

I'm not an invalid.

It's also good for me, I think. I'm reminded of why I both love and hate living on my own (a state of being which will soon come to pass once again). I love having space to myself, having time to breathe and think without worrying about how someone else is reading everything I'm doing, and trying to come up with ways to make sure they're happy. I hate it because, well, it's easier for me to sit around feeling sorry for myself. I spent all those lonely hours in South Africa drinking bottles and bottles of Laborie pinotage and chain smoking. But, you know, I also finished writing a 200,000 word novel. 60,000 words of which were worth keeping.

Eh. I'm going to go read something, and drink some diet Coke.

I Really Need to Stop Buying Books

This is getting ridiculous.

But you know what? I can't stress or comfort-eat anymore. I mean, about the best I can do is be like, "Whoooo! I'm going to go all out tonight and have three graham crackers after dinner!" or "Oh, man, I'm *totally* going to live on the edge and eat a 1/2 cup of those honey roasted peanuts instead of a quarter cup!" Rockin'.

I'm also limited to one alcoholic beverage a day, with meals (maybe two beverages, if I eat some extra bread at dinner).

I don't smoke. I don't do drugs. All I shoot up is synthetic insulin.

Reading and writing are the only vices I have left.

Why do books have to cost money?

Preying on Human Curiousity

How to hack a bank. It's a lot easier than you think:

We figured we would try something different by baiting the same employees that were on high alert. We gathered all the worthless vendor giveaway thumb drives collected over the years and imprinted them with our own special piece of software. I had one of my guys write a Trojan that, when run, would collect passwords, logins and machine-specific information from the user’s computer, and then email the findings back to us.

People are fascinating.

Nick, on Wimmin's Work

Nick's got a post up about.. basically, how to actually make money writing fiction.

And yea, it means stepping out of the ghetto.

I remember getting a ton of very nice rejections from various SF/F mag editors for my story "Two Girls." The most frustrating rejection came from an editor who suggested I send it to a feminist magazine. I raged for at least ten minutes. I already fucking write in the ghetto! I don't want to further ghettoize myself!

But you know what? Bitch Magazine's got a higher circulation count than any of the "big three" genre mags.

Personally, I want to be a regular writer for Oprah Magazine.

Because I'm like that. Then maybe I can move on up to National Geographic....

As much as I'd like some in-genre recognition because I'd really like some decent novel advances and sales, the more shit that goes on in my life, the more I realize that what I should really be doing is trying to make some fucking money.

I've got credit card and hospital bills up to my ears, and medication alone for the diabetes shit is going to cost me an extra $2500-3000 a year. That doesn't include the every-three-months visit to the endocrinologist and the yearly visits to the optician and the podiatrist.

Other people get paid to write stuff that's far less interesting than some of the blog posts I shoot off in the course of an afternoon.

Fucking Sweet

Interview with Christopher Priest in this month's Locus.

Christopher Priest is my hero.

I recommend this (I've read it four times) and this (ah, my inspiration for war and bug tech), to start. It's fantastic mindfucking fiction.

In a totally literary way.

Wow, I Hate My Job

Really, really hate it.

Respond to my resumes, oh Google corp, oh Starbucks Corp, oh Various Businesses Downtown looking for coordinators/admins/assistants/secretaries/receptionists - I will even bring you coffee! Yes! I will stoop so low!

Anything but this disaster, this lowering of the bar one cell tower at a time...

Feminism Is Not A Fucking Dating Service

This whole "nice guy" thing is really making the rounds on the internets.

What's a poor, well-meaning young male to do?

The thing is, Pete continued, I don’t think girls want feminist guys! You know that whole thing where girls aren’t into nice guys but would rather have bad boys? It’s like they say they want one thing, but in reality they want another. If I want to meet girls and have fun, I have a lot more success when I don’t try and be pro-feminist. I mean, why should I be more feminist than the women around me?

And, as we all know, feminism isn't about being a decent human being and adhering to ideas of basic human rights. It's about getting laid.

McBoing gives our intrepid hero some much better advice than Hugo's gentle chortling about how difficult it is to be nice and get laid.

Nice guys do get laid. Trust me. But that's got nothing to do with feminism.

I could tell you that I really wanted to be a smart, strong woman, but men just aren't attracted to strong, smart women. So it wouldn't be in my best interests to be strong and smart, cause then I wouldn't get laid. So I'd make myself less of a person in order to make other people feel better?

People would tell me I was nuts.

And smack me upside the head.

Not chortle coyly.

Some Feminists at the "Feminist Fiction is So Five Minutes Ago" Panel

Rebecca Maines Kameron Hurley Susan Marie Groppi- Feminist Fiction is So Five Minutes Ago
Originally uploaded by tiellan.

I'll be damned. Sombody *did* get a photo of me at Wiscon.