On a less important note...

[kickaha]

I got a glucose meter today. Whee! Toys!

The lancet is truly almost painless. The point on my finger that I pricked an hour ago is less sore than the place on my finger where they nurse at the clinic jammed the needle in last Wed.

Oh yeah - this afternoon I got mildly lightheaded, a bit fogged in the head, and had a slight tingling in the cheeks and lips that has always indicated to me, blood sugar is low, elf needs food badly. So I checked it.

98.

Not low blood sugar, as I read it. It had been two hours since a rather large meal of eggs, ham, cheese, potatoes, etc, but still. I don't think a 98 glucose reading should be giving me those symptoms.

BTW, since I do have verbal diarrhea (I can hear a collective gasp of "no, REALLY?!?") I'm more than happy to start plopping this crud behind a filter if'n y'all want me to. I'm likely going to be babbling about it endlessly... I mean hell, I just got handed a nifty puzzle to solve. You think I'm going to be able to let this one be? Fuck no. :)

Comments

[saffyre-dragon.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in hearing about your nifty little puzzle. I have difficulties with low blood sugar (which seems to have gotten worse over the years) so it's fascinating for me to read the progress of someone who's actually doing something about it.

[treebyleaf.livejournal.com]

Babble away-- and keep taking care of yourself.

[treebyleaf.livejournal.com]

I will hit "need food now" melt-downs that shows all symptoms of a hypoglycemic blood-sugar crash. Three hypoglycemics I've met who've seen this swear I am hypoglycemic... so I showed the symptoms before I knew there was a malady out there that collected those symptoms. I even go through something I call the "treeby-sugar-crash-and-burn"-- too big of a refined sugar sweet treat is my ticket to misery.

There's just one problem from a medical perspective.
You guessed it-- I have absolutely normal, steady blood sugar levels.

I think that with so more of us going diabetic at a younger age every year, we've lost a broad focus on the complexity of ways food interacts with the body. I've watched a stunning revival by a someone with a super-fast-metabolism who was nearly non-functional until a friend had the bright idea of insisting she drink a potassium supplement shake. I'm no doctor, but on a websearch I see that low calcium brings on a tingling sensation, especially in the lips and extremities?

For myself, I think my own problems are "kind of" psychosomatic. I think my body came out of my battle with disease hyper-aware and paranoid, willing to go to great lengths to draw my mental attention to small things, and it's hard for me not to follow the pull of the puppet strings.

You, I'm concerned about, because I think it would be just like your life for this to be a *combination* of problems presenting a falsely coherent symptomology. A nifty puzzle indeed!

Anyway, good luck with today.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I think you have a good warning there not to get to wrapped up in finding The One True Answer To Everything Wrong. My brain has a habit of always trying to find 'the larger picture', the initial cause in a chain of cause and effects, and it would be too easy for me to get running down a dead end that looks like it unifies it all.

But dammit, this just makes sense so far... :}

Ah well - test, retest, check, recheck, and hopefully one day I'll have an idea about what the cause is, and how to treat it, instead of just reacting to symptoms all the time.

I'll have to check out the calcium link, thanks. (Although that doesn't explain why sugar, protein, salt, and coffee perk me up and make them go away... :/ Hmm. Calcium ions are used for regulating cellular membrane permeance, and salt changes that osmotic effect radically... curiouser and curiouser...)