Dancing with the Universe

I need a cheat sheet for exposures.

As often as I go through them, I forget certain parts. Yet a manual would be useless; I have trouble retaining written info when I'm doing poorly. So I have to keep it dead. simple.

So here goes.

( Exposure Self Care List )

I've been doing much better health-wise; avoiding exposures and minimizing my contact with ozone and air pollution has helped my energy levels and stamina a lot. I have, however, been struggling with low blood sugar as the weather gets cooler; I thought it might be interesting to list all the symptoms I've associated with low calorie intake, but not clinical hypoglycemia (my blood sugar never dips below 90).

Anxiety
Restlessness
Insecurity
Craving drama/suspense (not interpersonal conflict)
Poetic inspiration
The feeling of needing to speak a word or concept too large to fit in my mouth
Emotional volatility (not just "hangry")
Feeling chilled/inability to get warm
Staring into space
Brain fog
Loss of balance/coordination
Loss of peripheral vision
Insomnia (difficulty falling asleep, or waking up in the middle of the night, unable to stop thinking)
Hot flashes (especially in bed)
Acute sleepiness during the day
Slow healing rate

Not on the list: obsession over food, feeling faint or dizzy, depression, general fatigue, and (most of the time) actual hunger. Hunger often shows up after I've started eating; sometimes it hangs around just to tell me I haven't managed to eat enough yet. But I usually don't get hunger pangs when I'm on the way down.

I find it telling that literally half of these symptoms were constants of my youth, from when I was a pre-teen through my first stint of college. I am still having occasional "Eureka" moments where I realize that I'm feeling out of order, and the fastest way to fix it is to eat. I'm still fighting the mentality of "but I just ate a full meal, how can I possibly need more?"

I suspect all this is not helped by what looks like a G6P disorder; that would make it harder for me to use blood glucose, and that's probably why my blood sugar stays in the "reasonable" range -- a 90 on the glucometer translates to more like a 60 in terms of what I can use. So my glucagon, which responds to absolute units, is in "everything is green" mode even while my brain is gasping for food. Welcome to chronic low-grade hypoglycemia.

Let's see... Hunger is triggered by dropping blood sugar, I think. Hypothesis: while physically active, my blood sugar gradually drops to a level just above that trigger point, which *should* be enough to maintain my systems but has an effective blood sugar concentration low enough to create a deficit. As hours pass, my hunger is never triggered, I just get more and more depleted -- until I actually have a little food, triggering an insulin response that drops my blood sugar below the plateau. My body cannot compensate for that insulin surge by releasing more glycogen because (surprise!) it's all been exhausted by my activity. BANG suddenly I'm starving, and my blood sugar is truly critical.

I guess the way to get around that would be to nudge my system every hour or so, while doing active stuff, to basically say "Hey, you hungry yet?" A hard candy or bit of dried fruit would do it. It would still mean I have to eat more frequently -- no way around that, no matter how unproductive it makes me feel -- but it might help me learn how often I need to eat, by the clock, under various conditions. And it would at least prevent that plateau condition where I don't feel hungry, I don't even feel like eating, and I end up almost too queasy to eat and too brainfogged to figure out a solution.

The med I was trying out week before last (Arava) gave me a bunch of mild side effects, and a general creeping sensation of something wrong. The fatigue and dizziness finally got to the point where I stopped taking it, but it was a gradual-build-up drug that takes a while to ramp down. I knew that when I started it: two weeks to 100%, two weeks to come off. I only took it for a week, so one week after stopping, I'm getting back to normal.

It had killed my appetite, which was hard to miss. Normally, when I barely eat, my metabolism crashes and I get a really bad inflammatory flare, but that didn't happen. Since it also didn't happen while I was doing well last summer (and lost a bunch of weight), I wasn't too worried... but it didn't feel right.

I just found out why. All day I have been ravenously hungry, and I'm getting some unusual cravings. Apparently the reason my metabolism didn't crash (like this) earlier was that my body had deferred necessary maintenance, and now it's recovered to the point where it's looking at the backlog and saying "HEY!" It needs a variety of building materials to fix everything. Thus my cravings for feta cheese, for raisins, for orange marmalade, for bread.

I know that I live in a state of perpetual convalescence, which is why anything that messes with my calorie intake makes me wary. I guess this is just another case in point.

I'm going through a rough patch. I know that, but that doesn't make it any less rough.

( Taking some weight off )

I haven't posted for quite some time, mostly because I'm not really sure where to start.

( The abbreviated rundown )

This is probably going to get reposted to Tumblr, because it's personal-political.

( A Chronic Fatigue/ME rally as a watershed moment )

Okay, a general health update.

( Mostly good )

On a related note, I have a few thoughts on how all my health stuff seems to tie together.

( Tracing things through the black box that is cytochrome P450 )

I'm living in the wrong era, clearly.

We know just enough about the health issues I have to know that we don't know enough. At least the providers I see don't think I'm delusional, but they don't even have any way to quantify what's wrong, let alone solve it.

( Groping in the dark )