From what I can tell, having juvenile diabetes in today's world is not unlike having a free, lifetime membership to Weight Watchers.

Gallows humor

Last night, I texted two friends (who would get and appreciate this): "Trying to decide which is worse: Gay sex, or sleeping in this chair."

One of them is gay, incidentally, and I have no problem with gay sex. It's a comment based on something we say often-- probably not translating well here, but there it is. This blog is also a journal for me.

One texted back almost immediately (1:53 a.m.): "The chair."

John told me yesterday that I should enjoy the learning and ask as many questions as possible, but I should also freely make fun of people. In that light, I will say that when I met the diabetes team leader, who was perky and skinny and tan, while I was sitting, bleary-eyed, in my pajamas, I mentioned that my knowledge of diabetes was almost completely academic.

She asked me if I worked in academia.

Seriously?

Eat, Drink, Pee

Christian is enjoying his breakfast of cornflakes, milk, and apple juice. He has twice as much liquid as solid. He has to pee into this plastic tub in the bathroom, and they keep track of everything going in and out.

Last night after he fell asleep, the nurse showed me the shower room, the nutrition room (from which I took a milk in the futile hopes that it would help me sleep), and told me about the Ronald McDonald room. I guess they might have a tad better sleeping arrangements there than this foldout chair that I have.

I called maintenance to have the room temperature lowered just two degrees. It makes a difference.

After thrashing around on the chair, I spied a Mommy-sized space on Christian's bed, so I climbed in with him and was finally able to sleep. Until they woke him up to pee at 5:30 and gave him an insulin shot. And then woke him at 6:00 for breakfast. He asked where my breakfast was, and I laughed and told him that I'm on my own. I'll find something later. Right now, sleep is so much more important. So, I'm chatting with him and writing to you.

I asked him finally this morning if he knew what diabetes was. He didn't, of course, so I gave him a rudimentary explanation:

You have an organ called a pancreas. It makes insulin that tells your body what to do with the sugar it eats, tells it to send the sugar to your cells. They told us yesterday that they think sometimes a virus attacks the pancreas, reducing and slowly killing off insulin production. So, when your body doesn't produce insulin, your sugar stays in your blood. When the levels rise to the degree that they had in Christian, sometimes it can ruin your kidneys and lead to all kinds of bad things.

So, he will learn to eat foods that don't put more sugar into his blood than his insulin shots can tell it where to go. And if he were to do something like eat three really sugary doughnuts, he'd learn that he has to take more insulin to make up for that.

I hope I have it right and haven't confused him too much.

I realized two things last night:

1) Nobody on Lost or Battlestar Galactica had diabetes. It colors how I view those shows now, just a bit. Diabetes would have been a genuine tragedy. But it also seems somehow unfair that patients with diabetes don't get to share in the fun.

2) I need to ask about getting Christian a medic alert bracelet.

Christian just spilled a little juice. Got to go.

I don't yet have a title for this post. A night to remember? Too corny?

I could KICK myself for not seeing that Christian's symptoms pointed to Juvenile Diabetes. He drinks a lot and pees often. I know that this can mean diabetes. So, why did other explanations always seem plausible?

This actually started last night, with a discussion I had with Sam. I don't really want to get into that here right now, but it resulted in my deciding he could stay home today. Take a mental health day. Let's just say that in some ways, he really does take after his mother.

So, this morning when Christian told me he had an ear ache and had felt faint in the tub, I wasn't inclined to keep him home. I told him that if you stand up quickly after being in hot water, you will feel faint. This in spite of his saying he had felt faint when he got up to use the bathroom last weekend. I took his temperature. No fever. I told him to go see the school nurse, and if she said he looked like he had an ear infection, I'd take him to the doctor.

The phone started ringing as soon as I walked through the door after dropping them off. So, I went back to get Christian, whose ear hurt and who was also tired from being up with his sore ear. I called and got an appointment with the doctor for this afternoon. Their dad was to take the kids for the weekend, so I called and had him meet me at the dr. with Tommy.

When we got to the doctor, I mentioned that Christian has gotten really skinny lately, and I wanted them to see if maybe he was anemic, because he seemed... frail.

Weighing him revealed an 8 pound weight loss since February. That sounds like a Will Smith movie, doesn't it? Sorry, poor joke. Anyway, our dr. asked the student physician what is most likely to cause that kind of weight loss in a child. The student physician didn't know. The doc said they could test for diabetes immediately. I said, "Doesn't he have to fast and drink a disgusting liquid?" No, with the kind of weight loss he has had, if his blood sugar was above 300, this test would detect it.

My ex asked what normal blood sugars would be: 60-100. Christian's couldn't be counted by their office's machine, indicating that it was over 500.

I didn't know at the time, but this can lead to high PH levels and the breakdown of kidney function. Basically, he could have slid into coma or death. Just gone to sleep...

Fortunately, Christian's blood isn't the kind that becomes acidic. So, he probably would have simply continued to lose weight until we freaked out and took him in. Still, it was a fortuitous ear infection. As my ex wryly noted, that school nurse probably deserves a gift basket.

The doc sent us over to the ER. They gave him an IV and treated his ear infection and hydrated him. An arterial blood oxygen test showed us that his kidneys were fine. Big, huge relief. I mean, I could see it in our physician's eyes (bless the man, he had been planning to leave the office early and instead ended up with us in the hospital).

The whole time were were at the ER, poor Tommy and Sam were hanging out in the waiting room until Dereck came and brought me an emergency bag with knitting, laptop, and phone charger in it and took them home for dinner.

Then, once we figured out he was stable in the hospital, they contacted the children's floor down in Columbia and I drove him down here. They insisted that he come tonight. They have now started him on insulin with a snack: pb and j with two graham crackers and two things of 2% milk. I was surprised to see so many carbs, but the nurse told me that he will eventually be allowed to eat ANYTHING, as long as he makes up for it with the insulin.

The reason for the hospitalization is that they spend 4-5 days here with us training all of us in nutrition, diet, and insulin shots. We are going to get all of the tools we need here to go home with his diabetes. I know that this is going to mean a lot of changes for all of us. However, after first worrying whether or not he had something like leukemia causing his weight loss and THEN worrying about his kidneys and him slipping into a coma, the rest of it all seems pretty manageable.

Christian is also getting over his initial shock. He is greatly relieved that he can still have soda-- it just has to be Diet now and forever. I think the whole family will be healthier once we learn about how to manage Christian's diet. It's hard to justify eating a bunch of crap when your kid isn't allowed to.

I felt like a bad mother when they asked if anybody smoked. Yes, I do. The nurse (who is really very nice) told me primly that I'd have to leave the entire campus of the hospital to smoke. Grrrr. Well, Missy, what you don't know is that I'll be FINE while I'm here. So there.

Now that Christian has had his snack, I'm shutting off Harry Potter and the lights, and I'll unfold my chair and set it up so we can try to get some sleep. I doubt I'll get much while we are here, which sucks. But wow, things could be so much worse.

I'm just waiting on a phone call

As it so often happens in this business, suddenly work and clients are pouring in. I stopped typing for a minute to find wood to knock on. I settled for the metal locker in my studio because that was the closest thing, and it's the thought that counts.

This Monday morning, I am sitting wearily in my studio waiting for a phone call. I am also sitting here with Chris, and we are drinking coffee and watching Lost. Not that we have given up on House, of course. We are simply branching out.

Friday, I finished some work I had had, and today I need to do more. But right now, I'm too sleepy to do anything but type a few thoughts and drink my coffee and, well, a cigarette or two won't hurt...

On Friday night, I had a headache so I stayed home. Dereck had gone out for dinner with a thesis committee he was on. While I was at home watching House with Chris (I made him watch the season finale of Season 4, which is awesome), my friend Jamie called. Jamie is a poet. He and his wife Karen, who is also a poet, were going to come by with their friend Mary. They didn't end up coming by. Dereck told me later that Mary is also a poet, and she was giving a reading on Saturday. It turns out there was a whole conference last weekend that I would have loved to have gone to, but that's life.

So, Saturday afternoon, I went to hear Mary read. And she was wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. Of course, none of the poems she read Saturday are published yet. I recognized a lot of myself in her poems. I was lucky that I had a chance to go and hang out with her and Jamie and Karen and their friend Allegra that evening for an hour.

They were playing with a dream website and we were talking about recurring dreams. I mentioned that my recurring anxiety dreams are always that I am in an airport, train station, or hotel that is like a labyrinth. I can't ever get to my destination because I am stuck, but I end up having such interesting adventures that I end up not caring. And for the first time, it occurred to me that maybe my dreams are trying to tell me that even if I am not at the point in my life that I may think I need to be, even if it feels like I am being waylaid en route to my destination, maybe the journey IS the point. And maybe the fact that it's so interesting along the way makes up for not arriving.

Mary looked at me and said, "I've known you for ten minutes and I knew that's what your dreams meant. This means that you need to stop worrying about not writing. Live your life, take care of your children. This is more interesting."

I mentioned to her that when I first became friends with Jamie (I met him before I met Karen because she teaches in Southern Missouri), I was excited to have a poet to talk shop with. However, we almost never talk shop. She said, "All of my closest friends are poets, and I can assure you, we never talk about the craft of poetry. We share a worldview so we hang out."

Yes.

I was also thinking yesterday of how fortunate I have been to meet so many interesting people in my life-- many of them right here. It made me feel better about where I live. I was also thinking about Emily Dickinson. She rarely left her house. Yet, what a very vivid life of the mind she had!

Every once in awhile I have to rattle my cage and then I eventually accept again my perimeters. Until I don't.

I did start knitting. I am making another shawl. I have gotten a lot done on it so far-- I love the pattern. It's very easy and repetitive, which suits me. It has enough variation to keep me from getting bored. I am enjoying the process and the soft alpaca yarn, but I am always impatient when I am working for the final project. And then to start another one. I have two more projects in mind after this one, and lovely yarn to use for them.

Here is my shawl so far:


I hope things are going well for you.

And a little crabby too

Last night, I was invited out for a drink with some very close friends. We usually just hang out at somebody's house, but last night, we went out (in anticipation of another friend's birthday, actually). Anyway, I just ordered a coke, and the whole time I was there, I wanted to leave. In fact, Dereck was halfway through his Bloody Mary when I announced that we had to leave after that drink because I had things to do at home.

What I had to do was put Sam to bed and write a post about last night's episode of House. Not very pressing, either of them. Sam was okay either way, and the post could have waited for morning. I don't know why, but I very urgently felt that I needed to be at home, and then to stay at home. So, when the birthday friend arrived at the DuKum and I received multiple text messages, I begged off.

Nothing significant to report as a result of that. Sam kept texting me from his bed because he couldn't sleep. He had taken a nap after school, so today, I am trying to keep him from collapsing from the tired. Tommy was then up with his cold. Christian was then up trying to get ear plugs into his ears because Tommy has been snoring.

The kids were bouncing up and down like jacks in the box. I finally just gave up myself and headed to my bed. Where I heard Sam creaking as he turned in bed, where I sighed and tried various sleep positions, where the phone rang at 1:43, and I had to get up at 2:15 finally to settle loud bickering from the younger set's room. Christian was keeping Tommy awake to prevent the snoring, and Tommy was weeping with exhaustion. I settled Christian into the TV room futon and stumbled back to bed. By this time, Dereck was awake and feeling frisky, but I kissed him and soundly fell asleep, so he got up and started taking quizzes on Facebook.

I was amazed this morning when the kids got up and got themselves ready for school according to schedule. I thought for sure they'd all sleep in and then wake in a panic. I would have kept Tommy home with his cold except they are doing state testing this week and I get text messages several times a day stressing the importance of attendance. And actually, Tommy was the only kid in a half-way decent mood this morning.

So, we are all tired. I would have slept in later today, but my guilt at the fact that my family had to push through the tired kept me from doing so. As a result, I don't feel like going to karaoke tonight or doing much else, either. Did I mention that we are all tired?

I think this is why I don't blog more often. I find my life boring to write about. And, yes, a little boring to live. We had a very nice weekend with friends with St. Louis. We got snowed in with a delightful baby boy, and there was lots of knitting and crocheting and lots of episodes of House. It was very pleasant, but that doesn't sound very interesting to read about, does it?

Right now, at this period of my life, which is recurrent by the way, I am so bored and depressed with living in this town. I will be 40 in April. Turning 30 didn't bother me: I had three kids, owned a house, was starting grad school.

Turning 40 only bothers me because I no longer feel like I have my life stretched out ahead of me. When you're in your twenties, your life is stretched out, but you don't see all of the possibilities. You see the blank sheet of paper that you're terrified to write on. You edit yourself, you hold back, or you don't see all of the possibilities-- you only see the blank sheet.

Now that the past twenty years of my life has already been written, I can look back and see so much room for editing. That point where I got married right after college graduation? That could have been filled with grad school, travel to Europe, and/or Peace Corps. I could have followed my dreams of being a writer and moved to New York City to pursue it. And then maybe I wouldn't feel so much contempt for the other people I see driving their kids to school. I sometimes feel like this town, these people, well, none of us really matter. Our lives don't matter. We are just a small blot on the planet. People in NYC or Chicago or LA are somehow living lives more vividly, in living color. And as a result, I find I don't take particular care for my appearance here-- because I just don't care.

So, my biggest problem with turning 40 is that I am still living here, have lived here for FIFTEEN YEARS. That seems huge to me. How many years have I lost? How many dreams are dead now? How many can I revive? I can see the light at the end of the tunnel: Tommy will graduate from high school seven years from now. I will be 47. What will I have time for? If I get the PhD, will I be able to get a job? Will I be able to move? If I move, will I discover that I don't matter any more than I do here, that the people there don't matter, that it doesn't make any difference?

I have always hated the adage to bloom where you're planted. That is just stupid to me: Instead, go plant yourself somewhere else! Why would I want to settle for this????

Then, I think in terms of practicalities: It takes me 5 minutes to get everywhere. We can afford to live here (sometimes! Ha ha ha!). The kids are safe. We have great friends here, and the people here ARE great, my disdain notwithstanding. How will we meet people if we move? We will move anonymously through bigger supermarkets and have more anonymous Starbucks to go to, but we will lose connections to place and people that we have here.

I don't know what the answers are. I don't know what about my life I will regret. One friend tells me that I have books in me to write. I had better start writing them. Part of my problem isn't just the fatigue that I have written about over and over. Everyone is tired. EVERYONE is tired. That's what happens when you reach a certain age. My problem is my refusal to start new projects unless I feel as perfectly refreshed as the princess without her pea. Now that I work at home, I don't push through the tired. I go to bed. So, I need to start doing more when I'm tired. I need to make my bucket list (oh, please forgive me).

Did I mention that I'm a little tired today?

But I'm not going to take a nap. I am going to print out a knitting pattern and start knitting it, and I am going to start thinking about what I'd like the rest of my life to look like.

Makes me to laugh

My youngest came home with this joke last night, and it never fails to make me laugh when I think about it.

Two men were sitting at a bar, drinking. The bartender washed dishes behind the bar and watched them. The first man drank a shot, jumped out the window, and came back in another window. Then he sat back down.

The second man asked, "How did you do that?"

The first man shrugged. Then, he drank another shot, jumped out the window again, and again returned through another window.

The second man drank a shot and jumped out the window, plunging to his death 50 feet below.

The bartender said to the first man: "You're mean when you're drunk, Superman."