Week 7
FRIDAY, April 25th
Day 43
Today is our new maid's first day. So, naturally, we have to run around and clean like mad (George is there, it is his work-at-home day) to get ready for her to come. Yeah, ok, she's there to clean, but can I really let someone else see that I have been living in this disarray? I have an excuse, we just moved, and we have hardly any furniture to put our things in/on, but, sorry, I just can't. Plus I have to get a diaper-changing station ready for her.
It goes ok. There are some minor tensions as we get used to each other's modes of operation. I'll tell you about it some other time. But overall, I still like her, just like when I first met her.
I convince George to stay at the apartment with her for a bit while I walk to the mall. He's been working at the mall on his work-from-home days because the free wifi there is so much better and more consistent than what we have. But I want to go, just for an hour, and meet up with Carmen and her crew, even though it's a while since their lunch started.
It's hot, my walk is brisk, I probably make it there in 10 minutes without too much sweat dripping off my forehead. They're still there, yay! I sit opposite Carmen and order my only option on the menu: Perrier with lemon. It's all right, I already had lunch, and I have a little jar of nuts with me, in case. They bring me a glass of water (which is not an automatic thing here like it is in the States). I wonder if they got my order wrong, but Carmen sees my confused look and nods her head to assure me that the Perrier will come.
Then she asks how I'm doing. I try to be honest without being a total whiner. She laughs with me about all of my misadventures. I like her. We both laugh a lot while we're telling our stories. Her friend, Ofelia, sitting next to her is a bit more experienced with Penang. She's lived here for many years now, and she has all sorts of advice to share (even on marriage and motherhood).
Carmen tells me this great story about a swarm of a thousand flying ants in her house. "Yeah," I say, "I have had a few too." Ofelia nods knowingly, "It's that time of year."
Ofelia tells me that I need to stop comparing places when I move somewhere new. She thought the States was the best place, then Singapore, and now that she's moved onto the mainland, Penang is where it's at. She's right. I have been comparing the States to Europe forever, and now I can't stop wondering why Penang/Malaysia doesn't have more of the American order/efficiency that I'm used to. She also suggests I make local friends. I'm a step ahead there. I have my artist girl (did I mention that she also works at Agilent? Though not in George's group). We've exchanged lots of emails. I feel like we're great buddies, and she's giving me lots of great tips about things to do and stores to go to, but we still haven't even met! I need to fix that.
It's a really nice time with the ladies at lunch, and I feel like I've had a therapy session when I'm done. Can't wait for the next one!
SATURDAY
No way we're going to IKEA. We have other stuff to do, and local stores to check out. Man, we need to get on this! We arranged to only use the supplied furniture for a month. If we don't get this furniture thing straightened out soon, we'll be in our HUGE apartment, tons of space, with nothing in it but us and a TV, all on the floor. Maybe we can use our suitcases for couches, but they're kind of squishy.
We see a terribly disappointing place for furniture and then head to a different place that we have a flyer for. They have really stylish, unbelievably priced stuff. It's not until you sit on it that you truly understand why it's so inexpensive. It's home made. I mean that to sound kind of bad. Custom made sounds too good. I mean it's home made like our slapped together cube shelves and our glued together benches in Colorado are home made. But those are better, we made those, so it's no big deal, and more a source of pride than embarrassment, even though they are representations of shoddy work. Here, we're paying for something professional, and they're anything but; you can hear the sound of foam and fabric rubbing together as you sit on the couches. It's really a piece of foam wrapped in fabric. You can also feel the seams of the foam in the fabric, and as I lean down on an upholstered arm, there's no cushion to it, so the wood underneath jabs me. Ouch! But man! The price! We find a set that seems a little nicer, and it's plenty deep for snuggling. If we get this, instead of the IKEA couch we want, which is almost 3x as expensive, we can do more with our limited budget. Plus, we're only here for a short time, so spending a lot on quality seems like a huge waste.
I have a gut feeling that this is not a buy-it-and-take-it kind of place. I ask. Nope. TWO WEEKS! Yikes, we'll be sans furniture by then. Hmmm...
We head to Mekio after that. A tip from my artist friend. It's a sort of local IKEA wannabe and it's pretty great. Lots of little bits and pieces for around the house. The furniture itself is modern, but none of it looks quite right. What to do, what to do... IKEA? Cheapo couch? IKEA? Cheapo couch? Sale ends tomorrow. Better decide soon.
We try to get back to the mall to see the furniture stores there. We have one in mind. It's moderately inexpensive and it's modern. We get side-tracked at a pricier store, and our intended store is closed when we get there. Aw man! (By the way, Regin loves to copy me when I say that.)
SUNDAY
Oh my gosh. Bad day. Big sugar crash. I'm worried I may have to be taken to the hospital, but if I'm unconscious, will they just inject me with glucose and then possibly seriously harm me? Even kill me? We try and do research to find out what hypoglycemics do in serious emergency situations. We don't find much. The whole day is bad. I try to explain to George just how bad it's been. When I'm in a crash, there is physical pain, but it's sometimes coupled with with either overwhelming rage or frantic, suicidal despair. Yes, I know, depression, anxiety, new move, homesick, blah blah. No, this is 100% hypoglycemia. If I catch it at the right time, and my head is clear enough to find the right thing to eat, I come out of it, completely out of it, I'm not even in a bad mood anymore. Sadly, much of the time I can't come out of it for hours, because I'm just too far gone in the crash. George talks about sending me home to the States immediately. I think we should try to find medical care for me here first, then think about the States.
MONDAY, April 29th
George is staying home with me this week. We're worried about me being alone with Regin while I am crashing this bad. He tries to work, but it's difficult with the internet. At lunch time he goes out to grab a bite. He comes back excitedly showing me cell phone pictures of a large monkey on the roof of the restaurant (right in front of our apartment!)
A little later on, I'm eating a snack at the table and looking out at the view of the tree in front of us. "You mean that monkey?" The same monkey (or kind of monkey) is hanging out in a tree not more than 50-75 feet away from us! My best shots aren't that great. Not much of a zoom on the lens I've got. This is a totally different kind of monkey than the ones we've seen so often. Wow! There's really some wildlife even at our apartment! (We've also seen this or a similar monkey while we were walking about recently. This time we were probably less that 10 feet away, but George's iPhone couldn't really capture it in the dark foliage. On that same little street next to ours, we've also been buzzed by good-sized bats in the evening!)
He was playing a game of chase with the birds in the tree.
He has white rings around his eyes and Don-King-like white, tufty hair.
There is a restaurant between us and that tree, so he wasn't super close.By the way, the lower half of this image is the part of our view I don't normally show you.
The day is fine as far as hypoglycemia goes. I start my food journal again and now I'm extra anal about recording & balancing the number of grams of protein/fat/carbs I have today. I'm learning that I have actually been depriving myself of carbs a little too much on my days when I'm stricter with the diet. I'm happy to have to eat a couple more pieces of fruit than usual. For breakfast I had this huge protein-heavy meal and I'm thinking that's helped me through the rest of the day.
In the afternoon we head into George Town to pick up some of the necessities that might help me more with my food prep, as well as some other household items we've needed. We look for these little hardware shops in these tiny holes in the wall in town, and ask several of these guys and they all tell us to go to the big daddy of the hardware stores. No, don't think Lowes or Home Depot, it's not even your strip-mall ACE or something smaller. It's pretty small, but to us it's magnificent. They have so many things we've been looking for that we have to prioritize on what we get for now.
Now we have this big fancy transformer in the kitchen so I can finally start using all the small, kitchen appliances we brought with us. You may think it was pretty ridiculous for us to have brought them with us, but multiple sources, including people living here and Malaysia travel guides, said you only needed adapters to use your regular appliances here. Not so. Many higher-tech electronics (computers/cameras/phones) can be used on multiple currents, so they only need adapters, but everything else requires transformers. Wish I'd known that before I gave up that precious space in our shipment to kitchen gadgets galore. Not to mention my straightening iron. I haven't straightened my hair since we got here for lack of transformers! Some days I'm a big ole frizzball and you just have to accept me as such!
7 comments:
Hey kiddo!
I know hypoglcemia is not the same as diabetes, but in terms of what to do about severe low blood sugar I think it is a similar response. We give Pierce cake gel if he gets low (and trust me - he has been lower than you can imagine). You squirt it right onto his tongue and he comes up. We also have M&Ms and that kind of thing for when he is "crashing". We do have a glucagon shot - a hypodermic needle to inject into the muscle with glucose - but have not had to use it. We have always gotten him up with cake gel, etc.
Most people with diabetes use cake gel for emergencies - it's better than pretty much anything else (as long as you are conscious). Get it in the tube...it's not frosting but gel. (I have heard also that honey can help.)
Did you get a glucometer so you could check your blood sugar? It would help a huge amount if you could actually see how certain foods affect your blood sugar. Without one, you are trying to go by what you feel and while that is reliable, it is not as exact as the meter.
Hope this helps a bit - didn't mean to hijack the comments with health info!
Love, Colleen
Thanks cuz!
Actually, that's a common misconception about hypoglycemia. While it seems totally logical to treat a sugar crash the same whether it's a diabetic or hypoglycemic crash, the truth is, you have to treat them very differently. While it will make me feel oodles better right away if I have something sugary, I will crash harder in .5-4 hours after eating the thing that brought me out of the crash. I've found that what will pull me out but not make me crash again (too hard) is a small piece of fruit followed by a protein. Almonds are also good because they have protein & carbs in them. I have had to discover this on my own as the literature out there doesn't want to deal with pulling hypoglycemics out of crashes. Maybe they don't think it's entirely possible? They deal only with prevention. I even saw an FAQ online that asked "What do I do to get out of a crash" and the answer was "prevent the crash in the first place."
Thankfully, I have figured out how to handle those kinds of situations, for the most part. And also thankfully we haven't had any of the kinds of major crashes where I can't eat things on my own. I don't think those are quite as common with hypoglycemia as with diabetes anyway. But the situation I was wondering about in this particular post is what happens if I am hospitalized for this or anything else? Surely the doctors will want to feed me intravenously with glucose! Not to sound too alarmist, but I think that could be life threatening or at the very least make my illness much worse.
The reason I crash in the first place is my pancreas overreacts to sugar and overproduces insulin. So the more sugary the thing I consume, the more insulin, the bigger the crash. White flour will give me the same effect. Anyway, if the doctors inject me with glucose (assuming I am incapacitated and can't stop them) it will have the same effect on my pancreas. Not good! I haven't found out yet what other hypoglycemics do when they are hospitalized, but until I do, I'm hyper afraid of having to go to the hospital for any reason.
You'd think that the doctors would know enough to handle it, but they don't. I know that there are specialists who know better, but the rest really don't know anything about it. That's why hypoglycemic kids are often told by doctors (who should be punished by law) to eat candy bars to keep their sugar up.
I don't have the glucometer. I meant to get one before coming here, but I didn't. Now I don't know how to go about getting one here. I plan to find an endocrinologist, but haven't done that yet either.
No problems on comment hijacks! I don't know about the people reading, but I will take any comments I will get! :) And it's so nice to have people help and come up with solutions when possible too!
Something else I forgot to write, in case there are any hypoglycemics reading, is another remedy for those crashes that I have come up with.
Very diluted apple juice (1:4 water, or less) and protein powder. Sometimes I use this as a snack, when I have nothing else. And I have successfully pulled myself out of bad crashes this way. Sometimes I also sip it on and off all day to avoid crashes from food that may or may not have contained things I can't eat. I call it "managing the crash."
The only thing I don't know is if I am simply putting away symptoms but still hurting my body, or if I am actually doing something that's positive for my body. Im also not 100% sure that I don't get some crashes from this later. I get mild to strong crashes so often it's hard to tell what any of them are really from. But I have had really good days that included this drink concoction.
what about those protein shakes that body builders take? they probably contain quite a bit of sugar though...
Well, I think that's pretty similar to what I am doing with the protein powder, water and apple juice. The protein shakes have other things that I can't have, but it's still protein powder mixed with other things. I could also add plain yogurt which is pretty good for me. I can't puree any fruits, but I could come up with some shakes that wouldn't taste too bad (to me now -- it's all relative).
I think what I'm thinking though is how low are you? Pierce will also crash to a certain degree if we get him way up (although not like you would as he does not produce insulin). This comes back to the glucometer deal - if you have one then you can give yourself a poke and see how low you are and how severe you need to be about getting up right away.
To give an example - the lowest Pierce has been is 21. So we have to give him gel immediately to get him out of danger, and then a slow release (like the protein you are talking about) to keep him in his "zone". It just helps to know how severe the situation is.
I have no clue what they would do in the hospital for you but for Pierce he went in crazy high (677) but they didn't just put him on an insulin IV - he was on combined insulin IV one arm and glucose IV in the other...so he could come down in "steps" - that way he wouldn't go into a seizure for coming down too fast. But this was Children's Hospital in SEA with their top endocrinologist in charge...so they really knew what they were doing. That's always the big worry though - getting doctors who don't know what to do.
I wish I could be more helpful; I keep hoping that maybe some of what we have learned will help you somehow but it looks like it doesn't. I really feel for you so much because I know - I KNOW - how crazy blood sugars can be.
Love you much..............
PS. An excellent protein for us has been peanut butter (non sugary kind). It works really well for Pierce for keeping him in the zone...and it tastes good!
I agree. I really need to find a glucometer. I don't know how low I go. The lowest that has been recorded for me was, I believe, in the upper 30s. But I have felt worse than that at other times, so I don't know if I was crashing lower or not.
Doing my reading online, it doesn't seem like hypoglycemics supposedly get those emergency crashes like diabetics do. If a hypoglycemic faints, our blood sugar will self correct by the time we come to, but if a diabetic faints, take them to the emergency room.
I don't know how true that is since hypoglycemics CAN go into a coma or die from their illness.
The biggest issue is just not enough resources for hypoglycemics. A lot is known about diabetes, and it's well known around the world, and people make accommodations for diabetics and are aware of its legitimacy and the importance of taking care of it (for the most part). Doctors also take it seriously. Most doctors don't take hypoglycemia seriously, don't believe it can be a chronic condition, don't know how to properly test for it, don't know how to properly diagnose it, don't know how to properly treat it. It got a bad wrap in the 70s as a fad diagnosis, so many doctors to this day think it's BS. It's a bit of a controversial illness for some ODD reason. And sadly, kids who are discovered to have it are still being advised to eat candy bars and drink soda pop.
It's the precursor to type 2 diabetes, and with that being so prevalent, you know that makes hypoglycemia very prevalent. Some people believe that all humans have it to different degrees, but that's where the illness loses credibility for others.
I've had at least two doctors who respond to my statement "I have hypoglycemia" with "how often?" They don't know or don't believe it can be a chronic illness.
The doctor who diagnosed me didn't write it on my chart. I don't know why. So when I went to get documentation of my illness for air travel so I could certain kinds of meals, and be permitted to bring my own meals on board, (and just to be able to refer to it as needed), and my doctor wasn't there, the best another doctor was willing to write was that I sometimes had hypoglycemic episodes. Guess what? Everyone does!
It really should be called something else, because the word simply means "low blood sugar" and anyone who has fasted, or skipped a couple of meals, or is a diabetic crashing, etc., is experiencing a hypoglycemic episode. Ever seen a grumpy or sleepy kid, or a kid who is acting up, suddenly come to life and calm down after eating? They were having a hypoglycemic episode.
The name of the illness should have something to do with overproduction of insulin in the pancreas.
And as for peanut butter. It makes me so sad. I was trying for some time to manage my diet with a significant help from (no sugar added) peanut butter. But I found it was making me crash too. Peanuts are beans, and like other beans, they are starchy and therefore questionable for hypoglycemics. I ate it anyway, believing the protein would override. It didn't. During periods when I was eating more peanut butter, I would feel much worse. I tried combining it with different things, but that didn't work. So... I'm off beans, peanuts, cashews. I'm on almonds and seeds. I haven't found an almond butter I like. I haven't found almond butter at all here. So I'm planning to make my own, but it's a big hassle to rearrange the electronics to get the right transformer back into the kitchen, pull out our food processor, and make some.
I have also been meaning to make my own mayo since most mayos (and indeed all of them here) have sugar in them.
I'm finding that I can eat Indian food, or at least some Indian food. Or at least the guys here SWEAR that there is no sugar in their food. It's hard to know for sure, since I doubt if they know how many things contain sugar. Plus if natural sugars from onions, garlic, fruit, corn, dairy, and such is overused in a dish, I still can't have it.
This comment is far too long now... I'm ending it! :)
Thanks for the support cuz. Love ya!
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