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rikibethToday's installment is best introduced not by a blow-by-blow, but by a few observations:
While the china cycle on my dishwasher works beautifully, the delay cycle does NOT. Or maybe I pressed the wrong combination of buttons. But it didn't run.
Six straight hours of uninterrupted knitting with only a half-hour lunch break is enough to aggravate tendonitis (tendinitis?) in my wrist.
Swiffer WetJets only clean so much and no more. Some floors are beyond their help.
Those remarks past, a more detailed explanation.
Tuesdays are my normal day off from work. This was fortunate, because it meant I was able to accompany Christy to her first installment of diabetic teaching, a thing that the nurses had encouraged, since I am the household's main cook. It went from 8 AM to 3 PM today. I brought my knitting; I figured that anything I might want to take notes on would be covered in a handout. I was right.
I didn't bring my wrist support glove. That was dumb.
But I got a stripe and a half done. Go me!
Most of the stuff that they covered in today's sessions was old news to me, since I've been dealing with the hypoglycemia that's a side effect of PCOS since I was nine or ten. I did learn some useful things about portion size, and how to use the portion sizes to count carbs in 15-gram increments, because that's what Christy uses to determine her fast insulin dose. The session was more useful for her, naturally, not so much for any information I had that she didn't; if anything Christy was even better informed than I was, because she's an insurance claims benefit person, and one of the web sites they ALLOW her to surf at work is a health-information one, and she'd had enough free time since she started working there to read, well, pretty much the whole site, even on things that didn't much relate to her. No, the really useful part for her was that they checked her blood sugar multiple times along with her, and double-checked her on figuring her insulin dose, and used the sugar readings to figure out how to tweak her doses for best control, which was not something she could have done all by herself. Not only that, they were able to switch her fast insulin from a vial-and-syringe to a pen delivery, and pens are THE way to go.
The nurse was delighted that we brought back the nutrition-facts panels from the cafeteria after meals so Christy could calculate her dose more effectively. That was my idea initally -- I figured actual labels would be better than lookup-chart averages. I also caught a tricky one at lunch -- the dietician had mentioned that tomato juice was a freebie, but I'd remembered that the serving size on her chart said a half-cup, and single-serve V8 bottles are 12 ounces, so I thought it might have enough at one time to count for something. Christy took out her trusty little Swiss Army Card (it's even cooler than a knife, because all the tools slot into a credit-card-sized plastic case no thicker than two credit cards) and sliced off the panel, and sure enough, one bottle was a single carb exchange. However, this was not a bad deal, since a 12-ounce bottle of fruit juice is THREE exchanges, and the V8 has more vitamins, *and* Christy already liked it. (So do I.) The nurse was delighted again.
One of the patients in the class was a man named Roy -- who turned out to be a very humorous old codger sort. On one of the breaks, he asked about my knitting, and mentioned that he did perfect-punch embroidery, which sort of broke the ice in the group, and then afterwards he was more inclined to enliven the discussion with wry asides. By the time they got around to talking about the methods for countering hypoglycemic attacks, it was near the end of the day, and everyone was a little punchy. The nurse was explaining how hard candies were kind of a last resort, because they took a relatively long time to dissolve and get absorbed. She was already starting to giggle over something, probably one of the patients' envisioning out loud what it would look like to stuff the six or seven she said were required into your mouth at once... then I said "what about Starburst? You chew those, they ought to work faster," and everyone around the table started speculating on whether their favorite sort of candy would be appropriate, and by the time I said "Skittles!" she'd lost it.
After class let out, we went to Target, because Christy needed to get some things -- a small purse-like cosmetic case to carry her monitor and injector pen and whatnot around with her, and a makeup tackle box to hold the extra supplies at home, and she decided to indulge herself and get the massaging footbath she'd wanted for a while already, because although she has absolutely no nerve damage to her feet as yet, they encourage a daily foot care routine anyway to head off future problems, and, well, a heated massaging footbath seemed like a perfectly reasonable response, since Ben & Jerry's therapy is going to have to be managed in smaller portions now. She very generously said I could use it too, since I'd also been coveting the gadget, because I work on my feet all day.
I cooked the pork chops tonight -- the Cook's Illustrated smothered pork chops recipe, only slightly altered. I used smaller chops than they say to, but that's kind of standard for me, because I usually buy the thin ones anyway, and I trimmed them more carefully. I didn't use the bacon to make the fat for thickening the gravy, but not so much because of health concerns (it doesn't use MUCH bacon) as because I didn't HAVE bacon on hand. It uses low-salt, fat-free chicken broth in the gravy to start with, so that's good, and the tablespoon of smoky-sweet steak sauce I put in to compensate for the lack of bacon only had three grams of carbs, spread over 4 servings, so that was negligible. I did roasted carrots instead of sweet potatoes because carrots are a free vegetable and sweet potatoes are a starch, and also because I was out of sweet potatoes; if I'd had sweet potatoes, I would have served free-unlimited green beans instead of starch-exchange peas. Didn't make biscuits, but that had more to do with time constraints -- Christy could have afforded a second starch exchange calorically, it just would have meant one more unit of insulin.
You'd think I could kick back and relax after dinner, but not really, because since the dishwasher hadn't run, the sink was loaded with today's dishes, and I had to wait for the cycle to finish before I could actually finish the dinner dishes. Normally I would have left them, despite Flylady's admonitions about the shiny sink, but a visiting nurse is coming tomorrow to help Christy (more like double-check), and she may come before I get home from work, and I do not want a visiting nurse to see a piled sink. Bad. I still have to do the pots and pans, but they are not heavily grimed. Laundry is going, bread is cooling on the rack, and I wet-jetted the floor down to "almost tolerable" instead of "really awful." It's not that I'm so very lax -- it's an aging vinyl tile floor with the finish scuffed off, and dirt gets into the scuffs and won't go away. I tried deep-cleaning and then applying a finish restorer this summer, but it didn't do much in the traffic areas, which is, um, just about all of the visible floor in the kitchen, since the table is smack in the middle. "Deck brush" is on the grocery list. Maybe that'll do something.
I am going to fold this last load of laundry, do the pots and pans, and THEN I can sleep.
Or try to.
When I get health insurance again, I may really have to ask for a screening for bipolar. This is a little excessive.
At least it's better than being depressed.
While the china cycle on my dishwasher works beautifully, the delay cycle does NOT. Or maybe I pressed the wrong combination of buttons. But it didn't run.
Six straight hours of uninterrupted knitting with only a half-hour lunch break is enough to aggravate tendonitis (tendinitis?) in my wrist.
Swiffer WetJets only clean so much and no more. Some floors are beyond their help.
Those remarks past, a more detailed explanation.
Tuesdays are my normal day off from work. This was fortunate, because it meant I was able to accompany Christy to her first installment of diabetic teaching, a thing that the nurses had encouraged, since I am the household's main cook. It went from 8 AM to 3 PM today. I brought my knitting; I figured that anything I might want to take notes on would be covered in a handout. I was right.
I didn't bring my wrist support glove. That was dumb.
But I got a stripe and a half done. Go me!
Most of the stuff that they covered in today's sessions was old news to me, since I've been dealing with the hypoglycemia that's a side effect of PCOS since I was nine or ten. I did learn some useful things about portion size, and how to use the portion sizes to count carbs in 15-gram increments, because that's what Christy uses to determine her fast insulin dose. The session was more useful for her, naturally, not so much for any information I had that she didn't; if anything Christy was even better informed than I was, because she's an insurance claims benefit person, and one of the web sites they ALLOW her to surf at work is a health-information one, and she'd had enough free time since she started working there to read, well, pretty much the whole site, even on things that didn't much relate to her. No, the really useful part for her was that they checked her blood sugar multiple times along with her, and double-checked her on figuring her insulin dose, and used the sugar readings to figure out how to tweak her doses for best control, which was not something she could have done all by herself. Not only that, they were able to switch her fast insulin from a vial-and-syringe to a pen delivery, and pens are THE way to go.
The nurse was delighted that we brought back the nutrition-facts panels from the cafeteria after meals so Christy could calculate her dose more effectively. That was my idea initally -- I figured actual labels would be better than lookup-chart averages. I also caught a tricky one at lunch -- the dietician had mentioned that tomato juice was a freebie, but I'd remembered that the serving size on her chart said a half-cup, and single-serve V8 bottles are 12 ounces, so I thought it might have enough at one time to count for something. Christy took out her trusty little Swiss Army Card (it's even cooler than a knife, because all the tools slot into a credit-card-sized plastic case no thicker than two credit cards) and sliced off the panel, and sure enough, one bottle was a single carb exchange. However, this was not a bad deal, since a 12-ounce bottle of fruit juice is THREE exchanges, and the V8 has more vitamins, *and* Christy already liked it. (So do I.) The nurse was delighted again.
One of the patients in the class was a man named Roy -- who turned out to be a very humorous old codger sort. On one of the breaks, he asked about my knitting, and mentioned that he did perfect-punch embroidery, which sort of broke the ice in the group, and then afterwards he was more inclined to enliven the discussion with wry asides. By the time they got around to talking about the methods for countering hypoglycemic attacks, it was near the end of the day, and everyone was a little punchy. The nurse was explaining how hard candies were kind of a last resort, because they took a relatively long time to dissolve and get absorbed. She was already starting to giggle over something, probably one of the patients' envisioning out loud what it would look like to stuff the six or seven she said were required into your mouth at once... then I said "what about Starburst? You chew those, they ought to work faster," and everyone around the table started speculating on whether their favorite sort of candy would be appropriate, and by the time I said "Skittles!" she'd lost it.
After class let out, we went to Target, because Christy needed to get some things -- a small purse-like cosmetic case to carry her monitor and injector pen and whatnot around with her, and a makeup tackle box to hold the extra supplies at home, and she decided to indulge herself and get the massaging footbath she'd wanted for a while already, because although she has absolutely no nerve damage to her feet as yet, they encourage a daily foot care routine anyway to head off future problems, and, well, a heated massaging footbath seemed like a perfectly reasonable response, since Ben & Jerry's therapy is going to have to be managed in smaller portions now. She very generously said I could use it too, since I'd also been coveting the gadget, because I work on my feet all day.
I cooked the pork chops tonight -- the Cook's Illustrated smothered pork chops recipe, only slightly altered. I used smaller chops than they say to, but that's kind of standard for me, because I usually buy the thin ones anyway, and I trimmed them more carefully. I didn't use the bacon to make the fat for thickening the gravy, but not so much because of health concerns (it doesn't use MUCH bacon) as because I didn't HAVE bacon on hand. It uses low-salt, fat-free chicken broth in the gravy to start with, so that's good, and the tablespoon of smoky-sweet steak sauce I put in to compensate for the lack of bacon only had three grams of carbs, spread over 4 servings, so that was negligible. I did roasted carrots instead of sweet potatoes because carrots are a free vegetable and sweet potatoes are a starch, and also because I was out of sweet potatoes; if I'd had sweet potatoes, I would have served free-unlimited green beans instead of starch-exchange peas. Didn't make biscuits, but that had more to do with time constraints -- Christy could have afforded a second starch exchange calorically, it just would have meant one more unit of insulin.
You'd think I could kick back and relax after dinner, but not really, because since the dishwasher hadn't run, the sink was loaded with today's dishes, and I had to wait for the cycle to finish before I could actually finish the dinner dishes. Normally I would have left them, despite Flylady's admonitions about the shiny sink, but a visiting nurse is coming tomorrow to help Christy (more like double-check), and she may come before I get home from work, and I do not want a visiting nurse to see a piled sink. Bad. I still have to do the pots and pans, but they are not heavily grimed. Laundry is going, bread is cooling on the rack, and I wet-jetted the floor down to "almost tolerable" instead of "really awful." It's not that I'm so very lax -- it's an aging vinyl tile floor with the finish scuffed off, and dirt gets into the scuffs and won't go away. I tried deep-cleaning and then applying a finish restorer this summer, but it didn't do much in the traffic areas, which is, um, just about all of the visible floor in the kitchen, since the table is smack in the middle. "Deck brush" is on the grocery list. Maybe that'll do something.
I am going to fold this last load of laundry, do the pots and pans, and THEN I can sleep.
Or try to.
When I get health insurance again, I may really have to ask for a screening for bipolar. This is a little excessive.
At least it's better than being depressed.
