Take diabetes, for instance. In many ways, raising a dog is a lot like controlling blood sugars, minus of course the extreme health risk. You study the science. You learn the technique. You get up every day determined to do your best and when things go the way you had planned you celebrate. You applaud [...]
Of course you’re not going to fold it all up. What drove you to even suggest that? As if writing or not writing were even a choice. It is in the breath that you live by, who you are. Separating one from the other is impossible, like asking a heart to stop pumping blood. Haven’t [...]
Franca and I are not fanatics about health — well, our children might say we are and maybe it’s true, though we also believe that everything is better in moderation, including wellness dogmas — but we do eat well, exercise regularly and generally follow the kind of active, wholesome lifestyle that promotes youth, not aging. [...]
roughly 2,000 finger sticks roughly 500 middle of the night blood sugar checks roughly 700 shots roughly 60 infusion set changes roughly 200 episodes of hypoglycemia roughly 1000 episodes of hyperglycemia roughly feeling like a perfectly fine nine year old 1.5 days out of every 3 roughly counting 45,000 carbohydrates roughly dosing 5,000 units of [...]
It was a common yet unproductive habit in the days, weeks and months following Lia’s diagnosis to do as any worried parent might do and question every external encounter or genetic mutation in our family history in pursuit of where had this come from. Often it wasn’t a very long thought, really more of a [...]
Part Two I was introduced to Jimmy Buffett’s music on prom night of my senior year, twenty-seven years ago. The song was: Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw, and while the song may have been appropriate for the season (or not), it left an impression on me beyond the obvious lascivious attraction. I think [...]
This journal has been my place over these past eight months to reflect, vent, discover and in some cases even procrastinate, all in the worthwhile interest of coming to terms with Lia’s juvenile diabetes. I like to think we are all better because of it, and we are, all of us, better for just keeping [...]
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand … Simplify, simplify – Henry David Thoreau But where do you begin? What does more, not less, community look like? Who do you turn to in shaping alliances that will make for a simpler, more [...]
From the day I had launched Without Envy I had read and written enough of my own to find appealing the degree of anonymity other authors had chosen to pursue in terms of their privacy. They were writers of great masterpieces — To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, The Road — and [...]
When it was through multiple daily injections instead of a pump that we delivered insulin to Lia, minus the early emotional strain, it was a fairly straightforward method of managing her diabetes. Or as straightforward as any such nearly impossible task can be. Three times a day she ate a meal, normally of food prepared [...]