The Unexpected

Hello, friends,

There's been a slight interruption of my rediscovered wellness "rhythm" -- an emergency with our sweet kitty. Her cat motor was running down alarmingly and it seemed, earlier this week, as though she might die. So far, she's been found to have had a blood-sugar level over 500 mg/dL. This beautiful, elegant-looking creature was stupified by her high blood sugar. She was treated with insulin injections and, last we heard, improved to not needing more insulin yesterday.

Our little kitty sweetheart would nuzzle my legs -- the most painful part of me, due to my own diabetes and possibly the aftereffects of Lyme disease -- with her nose several times a day. She seemed to know that my legs had a problem; and she was simultaneously asking me to help her with her problem -- but I didn't know what it was.

Despite the finding of cat diabetes, rabies must still be ruled out. Due to this variable, and due to kitty's dear nuzzling of me in my diabetic state with previously hot and itchy shins, I was ordered by the supervising veterinary neurologist to go the emergency room for immunoglobulin injections to generate an immediate immune response to rabies, and to get the rabies vaccine. While stressed by the fear of rabies and death and the three anti-rabies inoculations I received that night, I was exhausted, hungry, and thirsty. I wondered, once we got home, how on earth my blood sugar was doing. It was 180 mg/dL -- my lowest reading ever! Go figure.

I will be returning, on fixed, prescheduled days, to complete the full series of anti-rabies inoculations. Our cat also received her rabies vaccine, yesterday.

There is immunoglobulin help for humans to fight the early onset of rabies -- but no help, yet, for the animals who contract it.

Please pray for our little sweetheart kitty as we hope for her steady improvement with each passing day needed to rule out rabies.

Thank you ...

Hoping for the best,

~ Carolyn

The Crazy Thirst I Thought Would Never End

Hello, friends,

Where did my insatiable thirst go? Now, I have to remind and coax myself to drink even two bottles of water per day (four cups)! What an incredible change!

Since Thursday evening, February 7th, when I discovered my post-snack blood-sugar level to have been 500 mg/dL, I've got my waking blood-sugar readings down between 196 and 205 (and even a 180 before dinner, one night). Considering I don't sleep many hours per night and I need a small pre-bedtime meal to address actual hunger, this, to me, is real and steady progress! My improved metabolic state brings a feeling of lightness and reentry into the human race. My vision, also, is beginning to improve, as my lens prescription is becoming too strong once again.

My mainstays have become low-fat (2%) plain yogurt of varying brands and types (regular yogurt and Greek yogurt) combined with chia seeds, gluten-free oatmeal flakes, and/or fruit -- with or without stevia. There is no longer any gluten in my diet, as I believe it hiked up my blood sugar dangerously and sparked total-body inflammation (lab results of over a decade ago demonstrated that I should no longer ingest gluten, as my body had responded with antibodies to it). There are no fixed limits to my portions of this food and that: I let my natural appetite self-regulate and then test my blood sugar, later, to see how the sample meals/snack experiments fared, medically. It's been going great! My hunger has increased and is easily addressed with these choice foods. It's truly necessary, now that my metabolism is resetting itself, to feed my cells more of those food nutrients which, previously, they were simply unable to receive.

Walnuts and pecans are my nut staples. Raw cashews, whenever and wherever I can find them, will be another nut staple. Chicken is my new staple meat; and spiced, boneless sardines are my staple fish. Chick peas and onions mixed with olive oil, apple cider vinegar, oregano, turmeric, a dash of black pepper, Celtic sea salt, and cayenne pepper are another staple. Deep green spinach and/or fresh broccoli heads go well with dinner ... The menu is evolving. The real perk is that I'm not only not starving, but I'm also able to eat as much as I feel I need to without driving up my blood sugar, because these foods are truly good for my own diabetes management. Moreover, I don't feel deprived of tasty foods. I'm really happy with this developing menu.

I find "Stevia in the Raw" to be delicious -- something to look forward to with yogurt, hot or cold oatmeal, hot buckwheat cereal (gluten-free!), tea, and/or coffee.

There are sound rhymes and reasons behind these food choices, plus many new points I've learned in the past week and then even revised as I've learned more ...

I'll tie it all together, in more detail, in subsequent posts, as I go along.

Stay tuned!

Cheers!

~ Carolyn

Lucky To Be Alive

Hello, friends,

Life changed for me forever on Thursday evening, February 7th. For the first time since I was diagnosed with diabetes in October, 2015, I searched for my tester kit which I'd bought and never used. I couldn't find it. Two days earlier, my chiropractor had urged me to prick my finger and at least find out the ballpark of my blood-sugar level. I was scared to prick my own finger. I was scared I'd find the tester kit. Then, I was scared when I didn't find it.

I went to the supermarket pharmacy and bought a new kit. This time, I was serious. The chiropractor's story of his friend who'd had a totally unexpected blood-sugar level of 600 mg/dL had sunk into my thick head. Now, it was urgent.

I'd eaten popcorn and a corn muffin with coffee, and I'd begun to feel a sickly, feverish-like ringing in the ears, a spacey feeling -- not good. This was not the ideal time to practice learning to prick myself, but it was now or never. After pricking myself about 11 times at all different pressures in all different places, I finally drew a proper-sized sample of blood and applied it correctly to the side of the testing strip. "... 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ..." the machine counted down. There it was, my blood-sugar bombshell:

500 mg/dL.

This was at least one hour after my corn muffin. What had the reading been before that? And that was a snack -- not a full serving of any of my favorite culprit foods -- many of them much worse and/or far more sugary than popcorn and a corn muffin. How many days and nights had my blood sugar reached 500 -- or more? Combine that with the grueling thirst, the gallons of fluid so often expelled ...

That number explained most things. I was lucky to be alive. My chiropractor's advice, urging me to self-test, may have saved my life. Tonight, I checked for ketones. Thankfully, none.

I've gotten my blood-sugar level down into the 200s and 300s, alternating, since Thursday night. I've begun walking. I've learned that my blood sugar seems to have done best, Thursday night through today, with a bean-and-onion mix. I've learned that the caffeine in coffee spikes my blood sugar. I've learned that decaf coffee is not only not entirely worthless, but also that a chemical-free brand of decaf coffee can confer the same protective benefits as regular coffee.

I'd started to feel really bad after drinking my usual cups of regular coffee. The magic was gone. In its place, my body felt dirty and depleted after a few sips of it. Most brands started to taste bad to me. My body was giving me all of these clues -- these biologically valid pieces of information.

Today, I'm no longer thirsty. Now, whatever water I can pour back into this body can begin to restore a real metabolic fluid balance ... which, according to my own theory [The Water Principle ©], might assist the mending of the whole diabetic picture through the kidneys onward and upward.

As for my pancreas, I would prefer to coax it back into functioning at optimal level rather than patronizing and consoling it with diabetes drugs which will just enable me to eat poorly and burn it out.

If it turns out that I need insulin, of course I would take it. So far, however, I've not been producing ketones ... so I believe there is hope for my pancreas to recover whatever function it has lost through glucose receptors being blocked by excess fats. I'm not a good candidate for palliative blood sugar medication, as my chemical sensitivity and otherwise low blood pressure can predispose me to hypoglycemic episodes and cardiac arrhythmias.

My task is to get this blood-sugar level lower, lower, and lower. Given that it's been only one full day of my working at this, the progress made thus far gives me great hope.

The other good news is that you haven't missed a single thing of my "journey of managing diabetes" since my post of October 6, 2015, because I hadn't done a thing about it.

Whether or not I was ready for it, my "journey of managing diabetes" has now begun. I'll keep you posted.

Cheers!

~ Carolyn 

When I sat down to write my first novel, a "novel" view of diabetes emerged, instead:

The Water Principle ©

The teacher, diabetes, imparted lessons she could not have learnt any other way.

For decades, she had depended upon what she’d always considered to be the “cooling” property of chocolate after lunch and dinner. Although she could not have enunciated it at the time, she’d had a “thirst” for the refreshment of chocolate as though it were a badly needed glass of water after the exhausting, internally “sweaty” labor of chewing and digesting a meal.

Indeed, the chocolate and other sugars seemed to have usurped the place of water in her life for over five decades, until water, itself, protested the reversal. In the woman’s fifty-second year, water rose up to demand an immediate accounting of all the water not ingested which needed to be in order to match the glut of sugars left over from chocolate and company. Water made its voice heard via a thirst of such sudden and crippling intensity, the woman could barely speak until delivered bottle upon bottle of water.

This raging thirst would repeat itself upon the woman’s every ingestion of sugar and gluten. Some sugars and some gluten products induced more thirst than others, but the new pattern was set: The woman now needed to imbibe as much water as she’d once “needed” to ingest chocolate. The lessons of diabetes had begun. Through her pancreas and kidneys, the woman’s diabetes seized command of her body to speak to it.

Diabetes taught her body the difference between slightly sweet and far too sweet. Chocolate candy bars and chocolate ice cream became distasteful to her, the chocolate sensation now overwhelming, sometimes even sickening. There were many hours and days when the water she’d gulped down to relieve the insane thirst seemed to leave her body by a half-gallon or more at a time.

Was diabetes all about low water intake, in the first place? Did the bodies of some people mistake thirst for a chocolate-and-other-sugar craving? Was it the usurpation of water by chocolate and other sugars which eventually dehydrated and deregulated the kidneys, upsetting, in turn, the fine balance of sugars and insulin otherwise maintained by the pancreas? Did diabetes manifest itself, therefore, first through the kidneys and, secondarily, through the pancreas?

Should the primary treatment of diabetes be switched from the pancreas and blood sugar to the kidneys, perhaps with periods of fasting and reduced food ingestion, overall, accompanied by remedial water intake?


December 2, 2018. © 2018 Carolyn Cucinotta-Marra. All rights reserved.