Remembering Gabe: A One-Time-Only Catblogging

It has been said that the Internet finds its ultimate purpose in disseminating pictures of cats.  Who am I to buck the trend?  So, here's a one-time-only blog about my cat.

Gabe, pictured here, was my lovely purebred American Shorthair.  Although "retired" by the time he lived with me, he had been a show cat and had earned Grand Championships both as a "whole cat" and as a neuter.

Gabe, also known by a multitude of nicknames such as "The Fat White Hope", was wonderfully affectionate.  He loved to be picked up and held, and usually met me at the door when I got home.  He was a big cat, making for a very satisfying armful.  His size also made him fun to "thump" - he loved this - and he also enjoyed an occasional wrassle.

A people cat, yes.  A cat cat, not so much.  With other cats, Gabe was a scrapper and a bully.  With very little notice, he would decide that some other cat's hash needed settling and immediately set about getting that accomplished.  This moved from being a nuisance to my sister (then his owner) to a real problem when they acquired a fourth cat, a Maine Coon of tremendous size but retiring temperament.  Gabe decided immediately that the new family member was Satan Cat, and his subsequent actions led to his exile to the nicely finished basement.

Not long after that, I finished graduate school and joined Gabe in my sister's basement while I sought professional employment.  (I should probably stress that this move, unlike Gabe's, was not only voluntary but very welcome.)  When I moved to Kansas City, Gabe came with me, an arrangement that pleased all of us.  (You may be assured it pleased the Maine Coon!)

Gabe had fabulously scrunchable fur and a tail so strong it seemed to have a whole other cat in there, as a friend once said.  Surprisingly, he had an angelic little voice: Gabe was short for Gabriel, an angel mentioned in the Bible.

Although I've missed him since his passing at a ripe age a number of years ago, I remember him not with grief but with love, and also with many chuckles for his unique and wonderful personality.

Listening to Our Bodies....Except When They Lie

One often hears folks interested in wellness speaking of "learning to listen to one's body".  There's a lot to it, I suspect - greater sensitivity to the feedback we get from our bodies is doubtless helpful in many ways.  As a very important example, studies have shown that many obese people such as myself lose track of what actual, physical hunger even feels like because we're so wrapped up in cues of other kinds.  I know this is true of me.

But the bodies of folks with diabetes seem to lie to them at times.  I have often read of people who are experiencing a low blood sugar or an impending low, and therefore must eat, but feel a strong aversion to eating at that moment.  At the other end, people with dangerously high sugars sometimes feel enormous hunger. 

I think the weeks after diagnosis had me in an analogous situation.  I was put on metformin, a drug commonly prescribed for Type 2s  (and some Type 1s) which acts by minimizing insulin resistant.  I was fortunate to tolerate it well, and from the very next day showed fasting readings within the target range.  However, I began feeling tremendously, ravenously, almost unsatisfiably hungry.  There's a theory that as my blood sugars dropped to desirable levels, they went way below what my body had come to "think of" as normal.  Therefore, my body was frantically trying to get me to eat my BGs back to the prediagnosis levels.

The result of this for me was near disastrous.  Although at diagnosis I was successfully losing weight through a nationally advertised program, the first few weeks following the beginning of treatment saw me gain ten to fifteen pounds.  Although I adjusted to the new blood levels in a few weeks, I want to stress that this had not been social eating, or emotional eating, or habitual eating, or giving into any of the other "false hungers" to which a person may be subject.  This was my body feeling in very real (although mistaken) need for immediate nourishment and plenty of it.  My body was lying to me.

So, for those of us with broken metabolisms, we need to learn to listen to our bodies.  Except when our bodies are wrong.

Small Victories

I was recently reading a post by Babs Campbell, and one phrase she used plugged into something I've been thinking a bit about.  In their first meeting, she wrote, her endo had said "You learn to eat right when you congratulate yourself on minor wins rather than attacking yourself for occasional misses."

As is true with many people, I'm much more proficient at the "attacking yourself" than I am at the "congratulating myself".  Sometimes, my efforts at healthy living feel like an unending Sahara Desert of failure.  The truth, of course, is much more complicated -- each day is a mix of good and less-than-good choices.  While I know in my head that I can't win by stressing the negative, taking credit for the victories and being gentle about the losses runs really counter to the way I handle things.

I'm going to work on taking a quick inventory of the small wins at the end of each day.  This may help turn around the sense of powerlessness I often feel over my own behavior in this area.

Easily Amused

Yes, I confess, I am overly introspective and occasionally moody.  It's true, I'm afraid, that a curmudgeonly streak sometimes has me grumbling over stuff that's perfectly harmless.  But, I also love to laugh (even when the laughter is mostly on the inside).  So, as Bill Murray's character (in Caddyshack, I think?) might have said, I've got that going for me, which is nice.  

I like to laugh at the vicissitudes of life.  I like to laugh at the quirks of human behavior, especially when discovered in myself.  In fact, I once knew a woman who claimed that I don't have a sense of humor at all, but rather a highly attuned sense of the askew.  There's something to that.

I love life's small ironies.  A few years ago, I found myself unable to find a computer file I had created that contained a record of changes made to a database, used to check those changes against the paperwork.  After a frustrating and slightly anxious half hour, I finally found it.  And the reason I had trouble was that, in naming the file, I had misspelled the word "proofreading".  I chuckled over that for days, and now and then pull it out of my memory to savor it, as a greedy collector might with an especially prized acquisition.

Not only to I love to laugh, I love to bring laughter out of others.  Those who follow me on Twitter know that I enjoy being something of a wise guy (though never, I hope, in a mean way).  I find fun in choosing to misinterpret a comment or ponder a misspelling.  Recently Sajabla mentioned her upcoming JDRF "wlak".  Of course I knew what she meant (and you should go donate to it right now), but first commented on it and then entertained myself for a few moments wondering just what a "wlak" might mean.  I finally decided that wlak is the latest Asian herbs quack are promoting as a diabetes cure.

Humor plays an important role for me.  It dissolves self-pity and aggravation.  A bit of laughter can deflate a little bit of self importance, and a really good laugh is sometimes sufficient to take the edge off a bad day.  And, of course, it's very helpful in dealing with diabetes.

I began this post with a couple of confessions.  If accused of being "easily amused", I'd have to plead guilty.  But what makes that a bad thing?!?

High Anxiety

I want to write about my experiences with high blood sugars.  I've been very reluctant to take on this topic for two reasons:

1. I certainly recognize that many other diabetics have frequent experiences that are far, far more unpleasant than those I've had.  
2. At my current disease state, a high level of blood sugar is almost certainly the result of a poor food choice rather than a miscalculation, a circumstance out of my immediate control, or just diabetes being difficult.  So, the whole topic brings me back to that whole diabetes guilt thing. 

That all being said, I think it's an important topic for what I want to do with this blog.  It is part of my experience with the disease.

My highest blood sugar numbers that I've known about have been in the low 300s.  I'm quite certain that I had higher numbers than that before diagnosis, based on what I know now.  There have also been a few occasions when I might have been higher but was too chicken to test.

The highest I usually see is in the mid-200s.  And though it's very unreliable to gauge BG by how one feels, I've come to recognize symptoms that often accompany such readings for me. These include a feeling of edginess, (more) difficulty in concentration, and impaired emotional control. (That is, my mood can swing like a Cirque de Soleil act.)  I often feel anxious as well. This all does not exactly constitute suffering, but it still bites.

When I do have this experience, I find that exercise brings me pretty down pretty rapidly.  If I'm in a circumstance such that I can, I go outside and walk as hard as I can for twenty minutes or so.  I also find that regular exercise tends to minimize how high the reading gets after a meal and how rapidly it comes down afterward.

So I guess I should be exercising more, huh?

Cheap Healthy Eats: The Basic Tradeoff

Earlier today, I read a post in Chris Stocker's blog "The Life of a Diabetic" entitled  "Eating Healthy for Diabetes Doesn't Have to be Expensive." In it, he describes the changes he's made in buying some materials to make his lunch instead of eating out every day, at a nice little savings.  I want to expand out on that a bit with some thoughts of my own.

Disclaimer: Nobody knows better than me that food is complicated.  None of the below should be seen even necessarily a description of what I do (unless I say so) let alone a sermon on what you should do.

Over the last several decades, our culture has sought ways to spend money to save time.  All sorts of goods and services have been developed to allow us to trade some money to save some time.  This is very true of the food industry.  Thus, one way to save some money on our food is to make that essential trade the other way -- spending a little more time to save some money.

Our grocery stores are rife with opportunities to do this: whole chickens are cheaper per serving than boneless skinless chicken breasts, stalk celery is cheaper per crunch than bags of precut, "regular" oatmeal is cheaper per breakfast than instant, and bulk spinach is cheaper than bags of prewashed. Generally, the closer you can get to the food as it exists in nature, the less you'll spend, because you're not paying somebody else to do the prep. 

There are exceptions to this: it's my understanding that baking bread, for example, doesn't become economical until it's pretty high quality bread that you're replacing.  There are other cases where the savings only manifest if you compare items of similar quality: it's pretty cheap to make your own frozen burritos, but it's not as cheap as the low-end burritos, at least some of which are wrapped in TWO tortillas. (That means there's what, two tablespoons of actual filling?)

I'm not a home economist, but it's my impression that part of what we mean when we say that "eating healthy is more expensive" is that we want our healthy food to be as ready to eat as the less healthy food we want to replace.  If we can invest some time, we might find that it works better at the cash register.

Additionally, it's worth remembering that some foods are very cheap indeed if we're willing to do more of the prep.  I'm not sure there's a better protein bargain in the whole store than dried beans, a bargain we can take advantage of with a little advance planning.   And many frozen vegetables are quite inexpensive if we're willing to throw them in a bowl with a little water and some plastic wrap in order to microwave them rather than buy the steamer packs. 

So, as we look to replace unhealthy foods with healthier ones, we might think about where we can work a little more food prep time into our schedules.  That might not only save us some money but help us consume fewer of the additives found in most more highly-processed foods.  Plus, doing more of our own prep allows us to add our own flavorful touches.

Again, I'm not a home economist.  I don't know how much of your own cooking you'd need to do to make a healthy diet cheaper than one based in convenience foods.  But I'm certain that spending a little more time in the kitchen can soften the blow considerably.

Out? Seriously?

Yesterday morning, I took the Myers-Briggs test in connection with a workshop I'm participating in.  I've taken it a couple of times before, but the last time was between twenty and thirty years ago.  If you're not familiar with it, this test gives you a series of statements and you're asked to assign a number for how like you that statement is.  Your results then place your preferences along four sets of contrasting pairs of qualities and results in a four-letter description.  (ENFJ, for example).  You can then look up a description of that personality type and get advice on all sorts of things, depending on what the particular version of the test was intended to accomplish.

One set of questions is intended to establish whether one tends towards extroversion or introversion.  I was startled as I answered the questions to realize that my responses were different than they would have been a few years ago.  I've always tended more towards introversion, but this tendency is much more pronounced than it once was. My belief is that this increased level of introversion results from things I've experienced in my life.  I do see diabetes as one of these things that's changed me in this way, but not in my case a major influence.

Do I see this change in me as a good thing?  Well, it's a mixed bag.  I'm more tolerant than I once was, which is good, and I see myself as more compassionate and considerate of the feelings of others. I'm more conflict-averse, which can be both good and bad. I'm also more risk-averse, which is more clearly regrettable.  It's pretty clear, though, that I really ought to get out more.  

In most ways, I don't mind being the way I am.  There's a very nice woman at work who arranges monthly birthday recognitions.  We have goodies, we sing, and she makes fun hats for the honorees.  She can't believe that I won't provide the date of my birthday, but I have NO desire to be sung to while wearing a fun hat. I'm perfectly comfortable with that stance. :)

I'm not entirely isolated, of course: I do have a few close friends that I get together with fairly regularly, and the diabetes online community helps me to feel connected.  But I suppose it wouldn't KILL me to get out once in a while.  :)