Filed under: Life
I have Type 2 Diabeetes. I found out last month while lying on a gurney in the ER, pale and weak and hemorrhaging from a rampant period. It had started two weeks before, got really heavy, and never stopped. It caused my hemoglobin count to drop from a healthy 13 all the way down to a 4. It nearly destroyed my kidneys.
I didn’t know that diabetes caused all of this, but it did. Diabetes interfered with my body’s ability to produce enough progestin to counterbalance my estrogen levels. So when my “monthly” came, it never got the “stop” signal. Because it never stopped, I hemorrhaged. Because I hemorrhaged, I developed anemia and the stress caused my blood pressure to rise. And because of high blood pressure and high blood glucose levels, my kidneys very nearly failed. I very nearly died last month. From diabetes.
Everyone knows about diabetes. But not everyone appreciates how deadly this disease is. That’s because there’s not enough straight talk about the dangers of uncontrolled diabetes. To me, diabetes is like a slow killer, knocking you down piecemeal with an array of medical complications. You could go blind from it, or lose a foot. Or, more seriously, you could develop heart disease. If heart disease won’t scare you, then maybe chronic renal disease will. Maybe the possibility that your kidneys will gradually and surely fail over a period of five to seven years will be enough to get you thinking twice about the dangers of diabetes. It did for me.
My situation presented some challenges for my doctors. Bad kidneys meant that I couldn’t take certain effective diabetes medications. Insulin shots three times a day weren’t very practical. Plus the doctors found out that I was too “sensitive” to the shots. My blood glucose would drop significantly and I’d get hypoglycemic in minutes. That wasn’t a very good way of controlling my blood sugar levels. The goal then was that I had to help my body use and keep whatever insulin it could produce on its own. My doctors, along with the help of a dietician, hatched a great plan for me: I was to use diet and exercise as my primary anti-diabetes weapons.** Medication would come second.
I’m on a 1200-calorie per day low sodium “diabetic” diet. I eat three well-balanced meals, carbs included, and snack twice a day. I take lunch walks every day and I exercise three times a week. I take my diabetes medication only in situations where my blood glucose reading is 180 mg/dL or higher. I test daily, at different times of the day. In the six weeks since my diagnosis I’ve only gone over 180 mg/dL twice. My doctor is proud of me. He knows I’m serious about this. I have to be.
I still have diabetes, but diabetes doesn’t have me. I’m the one in control. I hope my story inspires some of you out there to take control of your diabetes. I also hope that I can inspire others to learn more about this deadly disease and how to treat and/or avoid it.
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** It’s VERY important to note that my diabetes treatment plan was tailor-made for my own situation. Yours will differ, and I can’t stress enough how important it is to see your doctor for the right advice and mode of treatment. Best of luck to you. We’re all in this fight together.
Filed under: Update
Bully, the Malawi Cichlid
When I got him, he was just under an inch long. Bright blue with black stripes and eyes that glared just as boldly as they’re doing in the photo above. Bully was one of four mixed breed Malawi Cichlids I purchased in 2001 to replace the three that were killed by an Auratus that dominated the brand new aquarium in my study in San Diego. For the first few days, little Bully hid in the crevices of river rock that lined the bottom of the tank, just like the rest of the cichlids. After a while he got used to his surroundings and was brave enough to guard his little hiding hole whenever another fish swam nearby. But the Auratus still ruled. It killed one more fish right in front of my eyes just two weeks after I brought the lot home.
One day, about a month later, I left for a three-day weekend to the Bay Area. I bought one of those slow-dissolving food pyramids for the tank and dropped it right down in the middle so that all the fish could access the food when it was released. Bully watched me drop it in from the safety of his hole. Crazy little guy. Guess he was still afraid of that Auratus.
I spent the entire weekend wondering how many fish would remain in the tank when I got back. I was betting on two, maybe three. But when I got back home, all of the fish had survived. They were all hiding. Even … the Auratus? Really? Yep, it was hiding in the top right corner of the tank behind the thermostat. Bully, on the other hand, wasn’t hiding. He was hovering – right above the near fully dissolved food pyramid, fins erect and eyes emblazoned.
Three days later Bully killed the Auratus.
He’s been my number one fish for eight years. He survived three failed filters, an incident with a malfunctioning thermostat, water chemistry imbalances, a swim bladder infection, swollen eyes, and even a 10-hour drive up the length of California in the front seat of a moving truck four years ago when I moved out of San Diego. It was always fun to watch him re-landscape his environment. He’d blow the silver sand around to hollow out a bowl-shaped space below his home under the rocks. He’d even try to push the thermostat and airstone out of the way. His last few years were calm and uneventful. Mostly because I didn’t bother him with other tankmates. He’d killed a total of ten over the years.
Bully died last week while I was in the hospital. I was told that he went peacefully, that there was nothing wrong with the water chemistry or filtration or heating. He had no visible injuries or anomalies. He just plain died of old age. It was probably a good thing I didn’t get to see him lying belly up in the bottom of his tank. It would’ve seemed surreal to me, this fish that survived so much with its fighting spirit. At the time of death he was six inches long and one and a half inches wide. Bright yellow and eyes emblazoned as always. I’ll miss him.
Filed under: Reading
It’s been a while since I last posted a reading list. This one I’m really excited about because the books came highly recommended from the staff at Book Passage and Green Apple Books. There’s also two titles from Powell’s Indispensible Book Club, plus one pick I found while surfing Borders dot com.
- The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales – a novella that I’m currently reading in chunks because the scenes are quite vivid and intense.
- Alive in Necropolis by Doug Durst – San Francisco’s current One City One Book selection with a story based in Colma, CA.
- The Tenant by Roland Topor – something about the premise of this book reminded me of Kafka’s The Trial, one of my favorite novels.
- A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans – the cashier at Book Passage told me to brace myself before diving into this one. I’m intrigued.
- City of Thieves by David Benioff – saw this title sitting on three different staff pick tables at three different book shops, so naturally I went for it.
- Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen – read a couple passages while browsing at Green Apple and got sold on it.
- Into the Beutiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea – if it’s anything like The Hummingbird’s Daughter, then I’ll be a happy reader.
- How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall – got it in the mail from Powell’s and I trust their judgment completely.
- Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard – just in time for Halloween.
Eventually I’ll write a review about one or two of these books. Until then, it’s back to reading for me!
Filed under: Technology
I’m typing on it right now, because it’s AWESOME. The silver chicklet-style keys of the Toshiba NB205 netbook. My latest acquisition and go-to business traveller.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked my gen 2 Asus Eee PC. Praised it in a blog entry last year. But I need my space. Hard drive space. And I need my keys to be, well, comfortable to type on.
So I did my homework and opted for the Toshiba. Took it on a road trip just two days after taking it out of the box. And it held up real good. Here’s the dish:
A 4-day excursion to sunny San Diego for a conference and to get work done on the side. I needed to connect to the ‘Net, type (a LOT), and carry the netbook everywhere because I really didn’t want to leave the little guy in my room while I was out sipping margaritas – er – billing extra time. Yeah.
The Toshiba satisfied most of my needs. I was limited only by WiFi reception (abysmal in the lobby and conference rooms, excellent in my hotel room). Portability was a dream. I toted the Toshiba, seminar papers, my sunglasses case, BlackBerry, three pens, a bottle of Vitamin Water, and one envelope in the 12×10x1 inch cloth messenger bag they distributed to us convention attendees. And it didn’t kill my shoulder.
The best part was the keyboard. I looked at a lot of netbook models. Tried each one with a test sentence* “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs,” and found the Toshiba’s keyboard quick, responsive, durable, and spacious. Both Shift keys are big and accessible. The Tab key, though small, was easy to distinguish from the letter Q right next to it. And there are ridges on the F and J keys to help you place your fingers when you’re typing in low light.
The Toshiba’s touchpad is large and sensitive enough for moving the mouse pointer along. It also defaults to a left-click when you tap on it. But I found the up/down scrolling feature a bit testy. You have to drag your finger along the right edge of the touchpad to scroll up or down, but only after applying some serious pressure on the top right corner. It’s not as sensitive to that action as, say, the MacBook’s two-finger up/down scrolling.
The speaker is puny and the screen could use more real estate and less bezel. There’s also a feature that will temporarily stop the hard drive from spinning if vibration is detected. Great for bumpy roads, not so great when you’re typing heavily while lying atop your bed like I’m doing right now.
But the battery life is killer. Toshiba claims up to 9 hours on battery and I tested that statement. It’s just about right. Throughout the convention, I kept putting it on standby and restarting it less than an hour later. I was also typing copious notes into Microsoft Word, checking webmail, and doing all of this while boldly and intentionally leaving the power cord in my hotel room. I was also accessing my firm’s server via Citrix (also known as You’re Never Really Away From Work Y’Know) to run a database loaded with lots of TIFF images and Excel spreadsheets. I did a lot of mousing around an clicking then. And the Toshiba’s battery held up. Took five hours to drop from 95 to 51% capacity. Not bad!
So, from a strict business traveller standpoint, I’m happy with the Toshiba NB205. It’s got enough storage and juice to run Office, stream a couple YouTube clips, and bill like crazy on the ActiveX-based Citrix remote server. Plus it’s stylin’ Everyone else at the conference had blah black laptops. Snore!
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* This test sentence, btw, uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. It’s a cool way to test keyboards.
Filed under: Photography
I haven’t touched film in two months. I’ll blame that on work.
Dug out a box of color photos, some of them really old, and selected three to post on my photoblog. Looking through the pictures I recalled each time I took them. There was an idea brewing in my noggin’ which either worked or didn’t. This was me, the amateur, shooting. Some of the photos came out real cool thanks to the equipment. Others not so cool. Back then you had to wait an hour to a few days to see how well you shot it, and there was no ‘delete’ button.
Anyway, I still shoot every now and then. Mostly through my cell phone because summer in the City is lively and I can shoot and Twitter at will. Last week while toying around with some swag from last month’s Comic Con in San Diego, I took this picture of a glow in the dark Icebat:
that's one ugly vinyl, no?
I had to use the monopod and the Night Setting on my G10 to take it. One of these days I’ll try it again using the Holga. Just for the hell of it.
