The Lower Frequencies

Since it’s the first day of a new year, it’s time to make some resolutions  – and then begin paving Hell with them the rest of the year (as Twain said).

First up, I’m writing more often.  I’ve written this one before, and Hell has a nice walkway through its eighth circle because of it, but this time I have a bit more motivation: on Monday, I went in for  a physical/check-up (after two years of not really worrying about it), and fully expected to be told that I had high cholesterol. And I do (blood pressure’s perfect, though). But that’s not what the doctor called me about that afternoon .

It seems I have diabetes.

Yeah, I know, right? I’m 6’3” and 195 pounds – I’m not the typical diabetes candidate.  I’m definitely not obese and I do work out (irregularly lately), but my piss-poor eating habits seem to have caught up to me in a way I never expected.  One of my symptoms (there were a few) appeared about two weeks ago – eye blurriness.  I thought grading papers was the culprit, or I was spending too much time reading on my iPhone, but, nope, that was my high glucose levels affecting my vision, trying to tell me to straighten the hell up. Honestly, I’m angry at a lot of different things right now, myself included, and what I think is the whole fucking injustice of it all, but I know have to change some pretty significant parts of my life. I now have to wake up and go prick my finger to check my glucose level first thing every morning – I’m three days in and I can’t tell you how disappointing it is to see 288 staring back at you when you think you were eating responsibly the previous day (for those who don’t know, I need to shoot for 70-100 on a fasting sample to be considered normal).  It’s unrealistic to think it will change after three days (and, hey, my fasting sample was well over 300 on Monday), and Laura (who has been utterly fantastic about this – I’ve been very low) has reminded me that it’s taken years to get myself to this condition.  I can’t expect it to repair itself overnight. And she’s right.

Speaking of diet, I’m no longer allowed to eat anything with abandon, and now I’m constantly thinking of the types of food that will be exceptions/forbidden.  Fried chicken, most fast food, most sweets – saturated fats and all that. I did find out peanut M&Ms are okay, so there’s that.  The past couple days I’ve looked through our pantry and have recognized just how much crap I’ve got in there.  There’s a definite lack of appropriate snack food there for me.  Now I’m trying to figure out what kind of snacks I can eat and what kinds of food I’ll be able to take to school for my lunches.

Beyond diet, I need to exercise more regularly, which I don’t mind, but I would have rather had been more intrinsically motivated than have my doctor tell me I need to.  So I’ve started running again, and I’ll be getting to the gym even more regularly.

So there are my New Year’s resolutions in a  nutshell (healthy, see?). I’ll be updating this blog with how my condition is going, among other things, this year.

Best wishes to you all this year!

Addendum: the Aggie game last night was amazing – Johnny Manziel showed why he is the best college football player in the country.  I hold out hope he’ll stay one more year, but deep down know he won’t.  Good luck to him!

This entry was posted on January 1, 2014 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.