When the student is ready

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready, the teacher disappears." 

I just found out that my A1C is 5.7, so you would think for the last few months I would have been bright-eyed and full of life. More like on death's door. As I discussed in my previous posts, the last few months were in fact incredibly challenging. All of a sudden, the insulin I had been using for years was way too strong. This ride over the last 5-1/2 years has never been more turbulent. I couldn't go anywhere or do anything, even sleep for very long, because it was impossible to achieve stability. I wasn't used to correcting such drastic drops; I reacted out of instinct. People talk about a time their life flashed before their eyes - that was multiple times a day for me. It was a strange, dark time. I’m actually realizing - now that I know my A1C - that the CGM I was wearing was likely much more accurate than the manual meter. Far more accurate, in fact. 5.7 was nearly the exact A1C it predicted for me on the app. During this recent difficult time, I would let my blood sugar go higher than I wanted because I was scared to take insulin, but then it would camp there, it would never go down, and so I would be forced to take insulin. Then the rapid plunge into near-death, and nothing - glucose shots with 16 grams of sugar- seemed to stop it until the very last minute. I actually chugged a whole can of root beer that had probably been sitting in the fridge for six months and it barely did anything. Then the climb back into being high again began. I likened this to being thrown off Matterhorn, a net being procured at the bottom at the last minute, and then getting a chopper lift back up to the top to do it all over again. I felt a little frazzled to say the least. I also hated having to take all the glucose shots and tablets and sugar; I felt gross inside. Everything changed after this. It had to. I knew that right that minute the chaos must end. I flew back to Florida and asked for a Humalog Jr. prescription immediately. It took my body about a week to adjust to it. I found the half unit alone on the pen does pretty much nothing for me, but one unit will lower my blood sugar a little. Perfect. If I can lower my blood sugar just a little, then I can eat only how I like to eat- whole foods, plant based. Foods that I used to have before the gym, "Keto" cereal, etc. I found spiked my blood sugar too much unless I took more insulin from the pen. Then it would drop too fast again and I'm stuck at home. Never again. Anything processed at all is a no from now on. I've been cooking for nearly every meal, reading my cookbooks daily. I'm looking at food processors for homemade cauliflower rice. My blood sugar has barely been out of the range of 80-150. I don’t fall far from one unit of insulin, and low carb foods straight out of the ground don’t spike me far, either. So now I’m only doing minor adjustments here and there throughout the day. “It was a very good system,” as they said in Goodfellas. For a light dusting of carbs to keep me stable I've been having berries, particularly Heaven Mountain goji berries by Dragon Herbs. Very good for your eyes, a natural source of taurine. I've tried other brands and they're dried out and hard, these are soft and super good.

I was on a forum and there was someone on there discussing numerous issues they were having health-wise and giving updates to new medications they were on. I clicked on the person's profile and there you can see what other posts they made. Scrolling down only a little, I saw they made a comment on (multiple) threads about ice cream (how great the new limited edition cheesecake flavor was) and critiques on how Crumbl cookies could improve the customer experience for both adults and kids. Well, I'm not looking to criticize anyone, or engage in any form of public shaming, which I am wholly against, but I do encourage personal accountability to avoid my predicament and other health issues due to metabolic dysfunction. At the crux of a multitude of mental and physical health ailments lies sugar addiction and poor diet. There are so many undiagnosed pre-diabetics and diabetics out there. My erroneous thinking in the past was that if you didn’t need to lose weight and exercised daily, there was no need to have a particularly strict diet. When I would look up the health issues I was having, I’d see diabetes and insulin resistance come up as causative factors and immediately deem that irrelevant to my situation. 

I find the fact that I "get away" with absolutely nothing as far as eating anything but healthy foods an incredible blessing now. My reality is hitting a blood sugar of 175 with 2 units of fast acting insulin and another 16 units of long acting insulin in my system from the night before because I ate a bowl of boxed "keto" cereal with unsweetened almond milk. I was at 78 I believe before having that bowl of cereal, too. Eckhart Tolle might call it an "opportunity for surrender." I've taken this opportunity to evolve into who I'm meant to be. Reluctantly, at times. Kicking and screaming, at times. Presently, I'd like to start eating more foods in season, grown locally. I was at an event at a beautiful cabin in upstate NY when I was in my 20's and one of the speakers was an intelligent man who was discussing biodynamic farming and I found it extremely interesting. I believe he was from Hawthorne Valley Farm in NY. I'd love to go there when I'm up north again and regularly support farms that implement sustainability a great deal more in the future.

There's a line from the book Fight Club that comes to mind. Tyler says I'm nowhere near hitting the bottom, yet. And if I don't fall all the way, I can't be saved...."Where you're at now," Tyler says, "you can't even imagine what the bottom will be like." The book is a telling of an ascension process. A very masculine telling of that process, for sure. I prefer to look at the violent, destructive undertones in the book as metaphors and not literal. Ascension is internally a violent process, a very destructive one. When the student is truly ready, the teacher disappears. The narrator eventually rids himself of Tyler. I see my process since my diabetes diagnosis as a colossal re-connection to what is right for me in my life. My phone was off the hook as Bjork said in All is Full of Love. There's a lyric from a song by a French band called Telepopmusik that rings true for me: "When love comes calling, don't look back. When love comes calling, don't look away." And I won't.