As is my usual procedure, I have not posted in ages (has it really been over four months?? Where does the time go in college???). My diabetes has fallen into the background of my life… I’ve sort of been coasting… my most recent A1c (taken…. three or four months ago??) was an 8.1 I believe. Not so good there. BUT. I have recently begun seeing an endocrinologist in the Villanova area. Which is good. She seemed to understand how I roll and gave me a stern, but understanding and respectful, talking to about my behavior and talked to me about getting on a 3-day CGMS setup to get a good baseline for treatment. She handed me the necessary prescriptions, including one for a full blood workup to ensure up-to-date information on her part. She also wants me to attend a class on carb counting (….I used to be good at that…. it’s been a while, and now it’s just a W.A.G. [or simply forgetting to bolus]). So I feel like with her guidance, I should be able to actually hop back on the horse and take care of myself this time. Hopefully.
College life has been somewhat interesting. Women confuse me (go figure), classes are hard (again, I’m at Villanova. Go figure). There just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day, nor do there seem to be enough days in the week to accomplish everything I feel like I need to get accomplished. But I generally manage to squeeze by and still remain somewhat respectable.
Technology never ceases to amaze me. The speed at which we live in today’s 21st Century world simply astounds me. Technology is everywhere, making things “more efficient” (I beg to differ on that point; I got my hands on an iPod nano and played that cool little maze game for hours while I should have been writing a paper). Our various modes of transportation get us from point A to point B faster than our ancestors could have ever dreamt possible, one can go from Washington state to Pennsylvania in a matter of hours, not months. You can wake up in Hong Kong and lay your head down to sleep in New York City. More close to home for all of us, you can hook up to a little plastic box that is, in essence, a spring, timer, and memory bank with that re-assuring *click*, and live the life of a normal person without a worry beyond “This has X amount of carbs, so I need to tell my blackbox to give me Y units of insulin.” There is, generally speaking, no more sleepless nights worrying about why your feet are that strange color blue and have no sensation of touch. Not so many days (if any) where you see that obnoxious blob floating through your field of vision. Technology is a crazy little thing, and it’s not going anywhere any time soon. Which brings me to the topic of “The Future”.
I’m not sure if I’ve written about this in the past (most likely have), but the future is one of the things about life that scares me the most. Where am I going to be in ten years? Hell, where am I going to be in ten minutes?? With the help of technology, as I said above, we live our lives at breakneck speed and, I at least, rarely seem to be able to find time to slow down and enjoy ourselves, even though with all this technology we do things so much quicker and more efficiently. We simply seem to have an unidentified need to do more things at quicker paces. It truly seems paradoxical to me. We invent something to make a certain task take less time in order to have more time for other things… then we take that newly freed up time and cram some other task that has recently become quicker to accomplish, rinse, and repeat.
Well that was a ramble if I’ve ever seen one… But yes. The future. I am a junior in college now. It feels like yesterday I was stepping onto campus as a student for the first time, scared out of my pants that I was going to make no friends and be alone for the four years I attended the University. Three and a half quick years later, I’m surrounded by the best friends of my life, and have no idea where any of the time has gone. I don’t really know what I want to do when I get out of here, though I do have an inkling of an idea… though that is GPA-dependent. But that brings me to the thought of “getting out of here”. I’ll be ‘free’, sure. Living on my own or with a few friends, working a steady job (hopefully), raking in the cash (even more hopefully), and living my life.
In the next five or six years I’ll be thinking about marriage. I’ll be buying my first car. I might be buying a house. I might (read: should) be attending graduate school. (That’s all out of order, I feel.) The thought of doing all of that, on my own, scares me more than the thought of taking diabetes by the horns, also on my own. I’ve dealt with things that it is generally not recommended to try to conquer alone, and have succeeded and not felt even a slight twinge of fear, but mention the thought of growing up and I need to change my boxers. My best guess? I’m going to take it one step at a time, just like everybody else. I’m going to lean on people that I know won’t let me fall, and I’m going to let people lean on me just the same as we all go through the same realizations. We are growing up, and it is scary to some, exciting to others, and no big thing to the rest.
Rants, 3. Tom’s focus, 0. I feel this post is haphazard enough to make up for the four months of not writing, so I will finish it up, do a short workout, and hit the hay. Hopefully I will have the drive to write consistantly and follow you all daily like in the good ol’ days. =P
My dad’s coming to visit and take me to breakfast tomorrow, AND I get a motherly care package. Score.
Hope you all are safe and well,
Tom.
unbalancediabetic 