Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Glum Day Thoughts

I was advised, in a comment to a different post, to come up with a different way to astonish my wife in bed than the one I had mentioned in the post, and last night, I did. I think I should go back to the other way.

What happened was this: I took a dose of a new type of insulin that I’d been advised to slowly ramp up over time. It hadn’t had much of an effect, first two nights, so on the third night, I ramped it up again. And it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. At one thirty in the morning, I shoved my wife awake -- my coordination having gone to hell -- and muttered that I wanted her to ‘check me in ten minutes’. I was shivering and shaky. My blood sugar reading had dropped to half of what a normal reading would be, and I was in sad shape. I recall lying there, feeling my blood pounding, thinking ‘I’m not gonna die....but I’d sure like to, right about now’.

Took about half an hour for it all to calm down, and for all the sugary stuff I'd gulped down to have an effect (I'm talking mass quantities of food, here; and while I'm half asleep, too), and then another half hour for me to get back to sleep, to awaken hours later feeling as if I’d been pounded. Groggy, lethargic -- all the great getting up in the morning feelings. I like to say that I wouldn't mind getting up early if I could do it late in the day. Today, even that didn't hack it, because I did get up late -- or, at least, an hour later. So, I think I’ll go back to the other way of astonishing my wife. This way wasn’t any fun at all.

On a different note, I was thinking about cancer today. I do, every so often, and it is always because I’ve been thinking of a good friend of mine who died last year from it. I suppose an oncologist would say that you can no more say ‘it’, referring to cancer, than you can say ‘vehicle’ without specifying whether you mean a Lamborghini or a Mack Truck. But to me it’s the thing that killed my friend. What I was thinking about, in a very non-biologically-accurate way, is how cancer works its nasty approach, and how it might eventually be stopped and eliminated. I don’t know this, of course; though I enjoy reading about medicine, and I like knowing a little bit of anatomy, I know there are people who know tons more than I who would not dare to offer any but the most general statements about how cancer might be defeated. And in a sense I don’t care any more, because it already killed my friend. I take that personally. Yet I also want to believe that it will be stopped, because evil -- sorry, that’s how I think of it -- must be stopped.

Of course, seeing how good we are stopping all the other versions of evil, perhaps I ought not to hold my breath?

2 comments:

K-Squared said...

That does'nt sound fun at all. hope you are feeling better. found your blog, blogsurfing, had a nice visit and found the bulk of what I read entertaining. Happy Thanksgiving if you observe it, or not have a nice day.

Cerulean Bill said...

Thank you. I'll make a wild guess that this particular post wasn't one of the entertaining ones! (g) It really was a strange experience. I've had things like that happen before, but never so intense. My wife and I have agreed that I won't do it again.

I hope you enjoy Thanksgiving as well. Thanks for your comments.