I remember being stunned and frustrated when I was diagnosed that not even the medical establishment knew what it was that really caused or triggered type 1 diabetes. I was irritated that nobody could tell me why I'd been sick for nearly a year before finally going under, and why I couldn't get an explanation that made any sense.
Well, you can't get a good explanation - or a good cure - until people figure out what the hell's going on. Which they're still doing.
In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body's nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease that affects millions of Canadians.
Diabetic mice became healthy virtually overnight after researchers injected a substance to counteract the effect of malfunctioning pain neurons in the pancreas.....
Dr. Dosch had concluded in a 1999 paper that there were surprising similarities between diabetes and multiple sclerosis, a central nervous system disease. His interest was also piqued by the presence around the insulin-producing islets of an "enormous" number of nerves, pain neurons primarily used to signal the brain that tissue has been damaged.
Suspecting a link between the nerves and diabetes, he and Dr. Salter used an old experimental trick -- injecting capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot chili peppers, to kill the pancreatic sensory nerves in mice that had an equivalent of Type 1 diabetes.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Diabetes & Inflammation
Ways to Spend a Birthday
Woke up this morning and went into the kitchen to kick off the Saturday morning pancakes. To my surprise, I found my birthday present from the roomies on the kitchen table:
$30 Chipotle gift certificate!!!!!
OH MY CHIPOTLE MONEY!!!!
OH YES.
Now I'm heading out to the wilds of Middletown to go shooting with the not-Boyfriend, as his request (happy birthday to me - he also paid for the ammo). I printed off some paper targets last night, so I'll post my best one later.
If we get back at a reasonable hour, the roomies and I will then head off to go to dinner and a show.
Not a bad way to spend an age-related holiday.
Reasons to Get Up in the Morning
Had a dream last night that I got a check in the mail for $32,000.
Made me want to stay in bed a little longer so I could soak up the good from that alternate world.
Until then, I'm out of fun money for the month. Dinner last night was sausages and cabbage. It's a good thing I like sausages and cabbage.
Seriously, though, when I pay off these credit cards - even if I don't get a raise in the next two years - I'll have a thousand dollars a month in "extra" money.
Hello mortgage payment.
This is what I keep reminding myself.
Cheese and junk or mortgage payment?
Must. Be. Strong.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Flawless Victory!
Some nights you need to be useful and read and write and be all self-empowering and stuff.
And some nights you just need to spend a couple hours plyaingUT2K4 blowing the shit out of stuff.
That was deeply satisfying.
Hot Damn
Sometimes I write so well, I impress myself. heh heh
Seriously, I never thought I'd be write advertising and marketing copy to save my life. And now that I'm doing it... well, my learning curve sometimes impresses even me.
Just thought I'd share that.
Results of My Fitness Test
The results of my health & wellness fitness test came in today at work. The numbers each had little "Average, Normal, Excellent" comments next to them. Here are the comments:
Blood Pressure: Normal
Cardiovascular Fitness: Excellent
Muscular Strength & Endurance: Excellent
Abdominal curl-up: Above Average
Push-Ups: Well-Above Average/Excellent
Flexibility: Excellent
Body Composition (weight & body fat percentage): Well Below Average
hahah ahah aa hahh hahahhahhahaha ah ahahhaha ahhaahhaaa
I know how to get fit. I feel better when I'm fit. Getting thin, though... I'm miserable when I'm thin. Or just dying.
I don't eat bread, donuts, pasta, sweets, potato chips, potatoes, pizza, or fries. I've recently given up snacking on my expensive cheeses and pecans. This leaves me frozen raspberries, Greek yogurt, peanuts, and the occasional dark chocolate bar. I already work out an hour a day, five days a week. Pushing it more than that is going to get ridiculous.
I can tell you exactly what I'd need to excise from my diet in order to improve my "body composition."
Avocados, the walnuts on my salad, the crumbled blue cheese on my salad, switch out my 70 calorie salad dressing to 30 calorie dressing, and take the sour cream off everything.
You know what?
Not worth it.
We'll see what happens now that I'm not allowed to eat out and snack anymore because of my budget restrictions. I'm not going to ditch anymore foods from my diet, or I'll just end up undernourished, bitchy, and anemic.
And next time, I'll do 50 push-ups instead of 40. Just for shits and giggles.
I can be 180 lbs. I'm just not sure what it's worth to me, if I can already do 40 push-ups in a minute.
Cheese and avocados make me happy.
It's not like I have a lot left.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Quote of the Evening
Me: Am I really that scary?
Not-Boyfriend: Have you ever seen yourself shoot a gun?
Quote of the Day
"If you’ve made the wrong decision, accept it and change it. Don’t let ego stand in the way of good sense."
- Mridu Khullar
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
"You know, like nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great SKILLS."
The not-Boyfriend hacked my computer some months ago so that the "Start" menu read differently. He sent me an un-hack last week that would revert it back to saying "Start," but I thought that was pretty lame (also, I liked what it read, but after this week, I figured it might be easier on my heart if I changed it).
I mean, I *liked* having a customizable "Start" screen. So instead of running the unhack, I did a little poking around and found out how to hack my own Start menu.
Which I then did.
Cause I'm cool like that. 
Now that I know it works, I'll probably switch it around to something else, but that's a good test run. I think I'll change the one on my home computer to "Nyx."
I mean, that's the computer's name, after all.
I'm such a dork.
Man, I Feel Buff This Morning
I guess those 40 pushups will do that...
Getting regular workouts - 30-60 min a day - is really kicking my ass, too. My sugar's way better (waking up at 72 or 69 [which is a little lower than I'd like, actually, but after being awake a half hour, it's back to 90] instead of 145).
And, of course, I physically feel better.
I hate forcing the workouts for such a long time, every day, but after a while it does get easier. Not more fun, maybe, but easier. Routine.
Routine is the only way I get anything done.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Health & Wellness: Surprise!
Our health & wellness program at work officially starts next week, so to prep for that, we did optional fitness assessments with our health & wellness folks today.
As expected, I have a high BMI and I'm still comfortably over 200 lbs. My body fat percentage is also average-to-high at 26-31% (the readout I thought I saw was 31%, but the calculator I just used calculates me at 26%).
Despite or because of these numbers, our two fitness trainers were a little stunned at how well I did on my one-minute timed tests. 40 pushups (yes, real ones. She counted 40, but I only count 38 cause the last two were lame) and 50 situps. My flexibility was apparently the best of the whole lot of folks who came before me (they only have two more assessments to go). My blood pressure came out higher than it does at the doctor's, but it's still well within the healthy range (138/72. My last one at the doc was 110/64 or something ridiculous like that). My resting heartrate also came out at 88, but I think he did it wrong because when we did the post step-test heartrate, it came up at 76, lower than my resting heartrate. Must have just been nerves.
When I finished the last part of it, the flexibility bit, R., our male trainer, watched me blow past his flexibility record and said, "What's your regular workout routine again? Wow."
On the one hand, I think some of the shock had to do with the assumption that plump people (particularly when you say "diabetes") aren't fit, on the other hand, from the sound of things, I just did pretty well straight up in general compared to other folks in the office, which is always surprising, even if I do workout a lot.
Wednesday we get our gym tour of the YMCA across the street, and our workouts start Monday. Mine's 1-2:30pm. The nice thing about a midday workout Monday and Weds is that it means I don't have to stay late at the gym those nights. I can get straight home, so my only late days will be Tues, Thurs and the Fridays I feel like going.
Frees up some time.
Which means... more time for writing!
Get Your Shit Together
So I was on the phone with my not-Boyfriend last night, and, to put it bluntly, I kicked his ass. You can only put up with so much emo whining before you just crack.
You know what, everybody?
Life is hard.
Really fucking hard.
Getting what you want out of life?
Even fucking harder.
I have had a shitty couple of years. Let's be honest. I got a chronic illness that cost me 30K and 4 days in the hospital and takes up a staggering amount of time, money and energy to manage on a daily basis (not to mention self-control, discipline, and plain fucking hard work). I've been in four relationships, two of which ended in smoking ruin, been dumped twice (three times, actually, two people). I was laid off from my cushy but (let's face it) dull Chicago job, blew through my 401(K), fucked up my friendship with my best friend, rang up 17K in credit card debt (16, 17, 18? Really, who can keep track?), and had books rejected by agents and publishers across the board.
And you know what? I could have chosen to deal with any and all of these things: chronic illness, job loss, fucked relationship(s), the usual rejection, with giving up. With hiding under my bed and feeling sorry for myself. I could have denied the whole chronic illness thing and continued to subsist primarily on carbs and sob into my brown sugar oatmeal in the morning and run around wacked-shit crazy because my sugar levels were all over the fucking board, running around with crazy depression and weepiness and tell everybody "poor me! Poor me!"
Fuck that shit.
Why the hell would I choose to hide under my bed and cry all the time? What's the point in that? What does it accomplish? Lying around feeling sorry for myself doesn't change the situation.
I hate that I have to work my ass off just to feel "normal" now. I need an hour of exercise a day and a low-carb lifestyle to feel my best. And just to keep that up takes not just willpower, but fucking work. I have to adjust all my insulin levels and correct for lows and test all the time, because sugar's easier to manage if you have a set routine - sugar's always easier to manage when I'm sedentary, cause then I'm not having lows all the time and feeling like I want to rip people's heads off and unable to concentrate at work for 20 minutes while I even out again.
Ridiculous.
Instead, to be at my best, I have to go through a calibration phase every time I mix up my routine. So for the first week of a new workout routine I'm adjusting my sugar. Oh, sure, it gets easier once you have the new formula down, but the reason I like routine - eating and exercise - is because it's just so much fucking work to change it up. And I still have to change it up sometimes. And it sucks.
Also, having a fucking budget sucks. It really sucks. It sucks that I have to cut out all the fucking cheap-ass food (because it is, of course, full of carbs) but can't splurge on expensive cheese - the only stuff I can eat totally guilt free that I adore! - because, again, it's fucking expensive. it really sucks. It sucks to live on fajitas and spinach salad. It sucks not going out to eat all the time and buying diet cherry coke. I hate it.
But what I hate more than ANYTHING, more than any of this fucking WORK, is being a fucking loser. Is falling down and not getting the fuck up again. Everybody gets to whine and bitch and moan sometimes, you know? But when you're done bitching, you get the fuck up. You take it a step at a time. You figure out what you want and you start to build it, one block at a time.
You get your health together first, because if you're mentally wacky, you can't do shit. And that's pretty fucking hard, too. Not everybody has health insurance or people in their lives to love and support them through the hard shit. It's called fucking privilege, to have health insurance and a support network. So if you've got it, shut the fuck up and stop bitching and get your fucking shit together.
Get your shit together, not-Boyfriend.
24 Hours of Daylight
People would often ask me what 20 hours of daylight looked like in Fairbanks, or 20 hours of darkness.
Well, it's a lot like this 24-hours of daylight, only the sun does actually dip beneath the horizon for those four or five hours during the Fairbanksan summer.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Budgets
Wow, I hate budgets. I hate not getting what I want. I hate living like a lower middle class person instead of an upper middle class person. I hate having to think about money.
Grocery shopping is like fucking pulling teeth. I have to say no all the time, me, who's been getting by in life by saying "yes" to all the adventures and the risk taking and the traveling and the wacky relationships.
"No," now to what I want and desire but do not need is a fucking kick in the ass.
I hate growing up.
Steph and I were at the grocery store talking to the checkout clerk who said, "Oh, you're roommates? We've been having a lot of girls coming in today who are roommates! Oh, well, I guess you're not girls. You're ladies!"
Sweet gawd.
Ladies.
And I used to wish somebody would start calling me "ma'am" and showing me some respect when I was 15.
Thing is, I wouldn't go back to being 15 for just about anything, unless I knew everything then that I know now. I've worked really fucking hard to get where I am. Growing into it, now, making everything else work... well, that does imply that I'm more lady than girl, for fucking sure.
Being a girl was fun. Being a girl got me here.
But letting go of that break-neck freedom, that not-knowing, that not-caring, yeah, that's the part that sucks.
Being a tech writer, paying my own way, owning my own place? Well, you don't get something for nothing. You have to make a trade. I'm trading credit-card poverty and junk accumulation for an IRA and a yard of my own.
Looking at it that way, it's not a bad trade.
But fucking hard to get there.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Stuff to Do Today
1) Make pancakes
2) Finish reviewing tDW series synopses
3) Update full series character database from tDW appendix completed yesterday
4) Pay Verizon bill
5) Write 1000 words of Black Desert
6) Go grocery shopping (stay within $90 budget)
Things I have already blown off today:
1) Eye appointment. I really need to stay in-network. Money issue. Will reschedule at another place.
Things I might still blow off today:
2) Hair appointment. Is getting highlighted hair really worth all the extra time and expense? I certainly need an updated look in this a looks-obsessed culture, but I can afford the one-time cost, not regular maintainence. Do I want a house in two years or lighter hair?
Perhaps I can solve my need for an updated look with new glasses from above-mentioned in-network provider.
We'll see.
Blah blah.
