Jenn and I did dinner and drinks with James & Ysa last night. It was the first social outing (Wiscon doesn’t count) I’ve done since I got sick, and if I didn’t like James and Ysa so much, I probably would have bailed. I’ve still got a lot of strange fear bundled up inside of me.
I’ve been passing again and again on the multitude of Mary Anne’s functions (brunches, buffets, writing get-togethers, dinners, teas, discussion groups, readings, etc), and was just too tired to get to Jennifer Stevenson’s this weekend for a backyard pig roast (yea, yea, I know. I totally would have had fun, I’m sure).
But it was time to get myself out of the house. I had no excuses. James & Ysa live within walking distance, for fuck’s sake.
Also, they have good cheese, good sausage, and good beer. I have discovered the greatness that is cheese curds (I like cheese, yes. Also: it’s a low glucose food, which makes me happy).
I think the best part about finally being halfway normal for the first time in a year is that I get to drink beer without worry. Sure, I can only have *one* beer, but that’s a huge improvement over the last six months.
So, slowly but surely, things get better. I get less fearful. The idea of shooting up insulin in someone else’s bathroom doesn’t weird me out anymore, cause it’s a done deal. Now I can stop chewing over all this shit and just… well, live.
It’s funny, the little things you worry about.
“Will it look weird if I only have one beer?”
“What if I get blood all over the bathroom?”
“What if they serve stuff I can’t eat?” (which is dumb. I can eat anything, just not much of it)
Perhaps the weirdest thing of all was this morning. I insisted that Jenn and I leave James and Ysa’s by 10pm so I could get to bed and be up by 5:20am. I was dreading the whole thing, because I knew how exhausted I get if I’m not in bed by 9pm. 10pm on a weeknight really pushes it…
Well.
When you’ve got super high blood sugar, you *do* need to sleep a lot more. Toward the end, I had to get 9 to 10 hours. The last week in Indy, I was going to bed at 8pm and getting up at 7am. Barely getting up, because I was still so groggy.
Last night, I went to bed closer to 11pm, and woke up at 3:30am and tossed and turned for awhile before finally getting back to sleep and jumping up again with my alarm.
No problem.
All of a sudden, all of these restrictions I’ve had for the last year – in bed on weekdays by 9, making sure my water bottle is full before my commute, making sure I go to the bathroom before said commute, carrying three different drinks and a full water bottle on plane rides as short as 36 minutes, making sure I got a drink for the ride home after every shopping trip, stocking up on bottled water, getting up three or four times a night to go to the bathroom, avoiding all liquor for fear that it exacerbated yeast infections, $30 a month in heavy medications for yeast infections, nightly baking soda bathes to soothe said yeast infections, an inability to wear my contact lenses because of poor blood circulation in my eyes – are gone.
All gone.
God, I was so sick.
You know, I could sit around and complain about the insulin, but it’s the insulin that’s helped make me stronger and healthier than I’ve been for an entire year.
You know what the best part is, though (after the beer)? I accomplished a lot of shit last year. Not nearly as much as I wanted to, but quite a bit just the same, and I did it while my body crashed and my health deteriorated.
Imagine how much ass I’m going to kick now that I’m a functional human being again.
heh heh heh
