My catabolic life.

At times its hard to not feel like the sky is falling.  I take relief in knowing that not all weeks will be like this past one.  Wow, did that not work out.  I'm putting this week behind me and hoping not to dwell on it.

I started the week chasing my tail and never got up to where I needed to be.  The week began with a sleepless Sunday night as my dog who has concurrently been sick with an inflamed digestive tract (weeks worth of diarrhea).  Well it now appears that the (suspected) wheat/grains or other ingredients in her chow have been chronically irritating her bowels so as to leak out the proteins of her blood (albumin) and calcium to a severe enough extent that she suffered with a seizure/ stoke.  I don't know what it was, but she was not herself and her eyes were not pointed in the same direction.  Scary shit.

From there the sleep deprivation was too much for me to recover from.  After 2 hours of sleep, it has taken 3 x 10 hours/night of sleep for me to finally feel caught up.  By screwing up my sleep I was too tired to manage my numbers as well as I had previously.  I didn't have everything set up ahead of time nor did I maintain inventory of where my meter's were, or more importantly, the fact that my home source of Novolog (my fast acting meal-time insulin) has been open for almost 45 days now.

I was warned that 30 days was the limit.  But between the price of this stuff and the hassle of the volume of trips to the pharmacy this fact fell through the cracks.  Until the 2nd morning of waking up with severe intestinal cramps and very high blood sugar (likely caused by my portion of mealtime insulin not covering the carbs that I sleepily consumed for dinner the night before).  I was too exhausted to stay awake to test 1hr or 2hr post meal blood glucose measurement.  I just needed to sleep.  I wasn't capable of anything but sleep.

But 300 mg/dL glucose and intestinal cramps are plenty reminder that I cannot afford to make this mistake again.  It requires an entire day to steadily reduce my blood glucose levels to a level at which I am not causing physical harm to my body and every vital organ.  The long term side effects are serious.  It upsets me to know that my carelessness as to miss an expiration date on a medicine has resulted in irreversible damage to my body that if anything can be translated into days of my future life lost, along with a rather unpleasant present day.

The process of waking up after having my numbers creep up is like slowly boiling your body.  In the comfort of sleep I slowly reach a level of 160 which is my safe limit.  And while it is a great limit at which to target as a pre-exercise level, anything above that will set up a reverse osmotic gradiet which will prevent my kidneys from properly filtering my waste products.  I experience severe headaches and an elimination of water that at essence, being pulled directly out of my muscles and blood supply and into a very dilute urine.  My mouth is severely dry.  I void my body of carefully built up nutrients.  Waking up high is only made worse by the transition of medicating my way back down.  This round of control loss resulted in a peak as high as 300 and a steady 8 hour decline to 100 mg/dL which felt like my brain was being juiced like a lemon.  Not the best way to spend a Saturday.

I'm trying to simplify my life.  I will be sending off my Weimaraner Bella to be staying with a friend.  I haven't been able to provide her with the attention or exercise she needs.  I'm going to focus on improving my health and steadying the ship.  In the meanwhile, Moab will be benefiting for the pulpy byproducts of my vegetable juice based snacks.  She loves the pulp and over the past 4 days of a rice-pulp-broth and egg-white diet, she has rapidly turned the corner toward good health.  (Still some bladder control issues, but greatly improved on all other fronts).  More test results are due for her later this week.  But I am optimistic that a dietary change is all the treatment she will require.