Oinking One's Way To A Middle Way.

Hello. So. Where have I been? Not here, for sure. Why? Got no excuse, but I'll tell you what's been going on:

One morning about a week after my little hootchy-cootchy on the Metro Red Line Hollywood station platform, I was completely unable to get up out of bed. Everything hurt. I called in sick to work. I figured it was just a flareup of fibromyalgia or some such until I started feeling really feverish. I took my temperature and it was 100.9. The fever got higher as the day progressed, and that's when I started thinking that this wasn't fibro.

By the late afternoon, I felt as if an entire mountain range had grown wheels and had run me over. I'm not exaggerating: when you lie in bed and you have to pee, and you feel so shitty that you actually start thinking you'd much rather piss the bed than even try to move so you can get to the can, that's the kind of feeling it was. At least with fibro, I've been able to crawl to the bathroom if I needed to. Anyway, I did go pee, but only when my husband got home from work and basically almost carried me to the can.

Two days later, my husband took me to Urgent Care. I'm not much for emergency rooms for stuff like this, and my own doc is always full up because he's a great guy, so it's hard to get a same-day appointment with him, much less a same-week appointment. So the Urgent Care doc takes a look at me, takes my temp, and said, "H1N1...go see your own doc."

Okay!

So I went to see my own doc. He was kind, and decided to let me in to see him on that same day. He met me and my husband at the back entrance to his office, where he and two of his staff were positively swathed in masks, and who can blame 'em? They gave us masks to put on, too. And by this time, everything hurt---hair, teeth, internal organs, lymph nodes, muscles, bones: everything. I couldn't breathe deeply at all because doing so triggered an epic cough, and I'd keep coughing until I started retching. By this time my husband was also feeling ill, but he didn't have the same crushing exhaustion I had, or the fever, or the coughing.

The doctor did swabs of my nose, and of my husband's as well. We were sent home with scripts for inhalable antivirals and narcotic cough syrups and were told to come back in a week.

What I noticed about being this sick is that my fever also did lovely, spectacular leaps into the first five triple digits...and stayed there...until it crashed down to about 101. The bed was sweat-soaked constantly. The delirium was fun, too. At one point, I woke up to my rapidly-moving hands; I was back in my chef days, making trays of ziti!

We went back to the doctor's a week later, and he confirmed that I had swine flu. But wait! Not only did I have swine flu...I also somehow got Type A flu at the same time. My husband tested negative for everything. This blew me away, of course, because of the communicability of H1N1.

My doc was concerned about how the illness would affect my diabetes. When it comes to communicable diseases, diabetics are always in the "high risk for complications" group. I had been testing my blood as I usually did, but now I saw numbers I never thought I'd ever see: 450, 510, etc. It seemed impossible that my blood glucose could ever get that high. I was unable to really do much except keep taking my diabetes medications at the same dosages I had been taking them before I got sick. But the levels never seemed to go down. What was also worrisome is that I wasn't physically able to cook the foods I'd been making to help me maintain good blood glucose levels. I was very weak, and my doctor decided to put me on disability until further notice.

People very kindly pitched in to help. My in-laws brought good, home-cooked meals for me and my husband, and friends did some shopping for simple foods I could eat. And I just lay in bed...which, after a week, starts to suck a kind of suck that's almost intolerable.

Two and a half months later I was pretty much recovered, if still weak...but I went back to work. Two weeks after that, I had bloodwork done and got the results. My white count was way high, and my A1c was at...14.

I almost fell over. Who the fuck has an A1c of 14?! I had worked hard last year to get that number down to a good level, and I'd been glad that it had been as low as 7.0 at one point before I got sick. A 14 is for someone who eats a double cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke every day. A 14 is a pint of premium ice cream five times a week after eating a double cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke every day. It was unfair! I didn't even get a chance to enjoy the road to a 14. I hadn't had entire pizzas or bags of peanut butter cups. And I realized that at that time, I could have made any of three choices.

I'm a natural rebel who doesn't like to be told what to do. It would have been so stupidly easy for me to say "Fuck this. I'm going to eat what I like now. I've been sick and I want to enjoy myself, and my A1c is high as it is, and I just don't want to give a damn for a while."

But I can also get very gung-ho when something is very important. This is partly due to my own anxiety issues as well as the human urge to "make things right". I could just as easily have said, "Oh, my GOD! I'm never eating bread again! I will never, ever allow a piece of chocolate to pass my lips for the rest of my life! I will exercise for four hours every day!", etc.

As far as what happened, look: I am honestly not trying to put myself on some sort of pedestal here. I'm a real pain in the ass most times. So I truly believe that it was not out of some sort of intelligence, but out of total disgust and resignation, that I told myself, "Shut up." So I just went back to eating what I'd been eating before I got sick. I walked a little bit each day, and let myself have a few fun "cheat days", during which I happily rooted in some chocolate or pizza or some such.

On January 2, 2010, almost two months after those results, I had more bloodwork done, and my A1c measured 6.7.

It's probably good that I just stopped bitching and just shut up. I should do that more often.