medical update
neck surgery
Finally found the right leverage to get the appointment setter to call me. Surgery in late August. It’s looking iffy about getting the second/final surgery done1 by the time my lease is up in mid-December.
the sugah
My A1C has been high-normal for years. This month it went above the diagnostic criteria for diabetes. Yay. Started the traditional first-line med (metformin) a few days ago. Started diabetic self-management classes at the VA.
I asked my GP for an Rx for a continuous glucose monitor but apparently you have to be bad enough that you need insulin to get a CGM. So I started looking for options. Turns out there are some consumer-grade units available without a script. I picked up an Abbot Lingo and affixed it today. After about an hour of warm-up it start delivering useful data. It’s enlightening to see what kind of eating drives blood glucose up and how exercise drives it down.
It’s early on but a couple things are working together:
- the metformin is reducing between-meal hunger
- watching the monitor is reminding me to eat less and eat more slowly
I haven’t eaten much meat in recent years because of both cost and difficulty of storing it in the camper. But I will probably need to ramp up lean meat consumption to displace some of the carbs I’ve been eating.
My first attempt was some pan-seared chicken thigh “fillets”. Normally I like bone-in but it was too hot to bake. The butterflied thighs cooked evenly and had actual flavor and juice unlike chicken breast.
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and recovered enough to move everything back into the camper, or to a different apartment. ↩