This is my morning.

This about what I do in the morning. The self-care to get myself running when I wake up.

So of course, the first thing I do is actually wake up. I stretch my legs carefully, hearing my ankles and knees and toes pop, and sometimes a hip. I get up out of bed, and let the rest of it go popping as gravity and the demands of being upright clash.

I’m usually awake before my wife, so I lean over and kiss her cheek, then slip out of the room we’re using. I go to the bathroom, wash my hands and brush my teeth, then make my way out to the living room.

I check my email, looking for jobs, and if there’s some I haven’t applied to yet, I send my resume in. I delete the inevitable “would you like to sell insurance” messages (if I wanted to, I’d have applied for them; I have no interest in insurance sales), then put on headphones, fire up some music, and turn to doing something creative. I’ll write, or if I’ve found some line art I’ll color, and sometimes in a great while and no one will be awake for a bit I may try to draw, but that’s a rarity.

Once I’ve put something together, even if it’s just a little bit, just to get my brain in motion, I turn to the next piece. I open the black case next to me, and take some things out of it. For this next bit, there’s a visual aid.

I take a test strip from the container, the first thing on the right. I put it into the meter (the black thing next to the container). Then once it’s registered in the meter, I use the third – my finger-sticker – to poke a hole in the skin of my finger, let some blood out, and bleed on the test strip.

It gives me a readout, and tells me if I’ve been eating well, or if I’ve managed to screw things up. It tells me if I died a little more in the night than I do as a human living normally does.

Then I go to the refrigerator with the fourth thing. That’s a syringe. I pull a little vial out, fill the syringe with 13 units of R type Insulin, then find a place in my belly fat that it doesn’t hurt, stick it in, and inject it.

(I will repeat this two more times today, once in the early afternoon, and once in the evening. I will also inject myself with N type insulin before I sleep, to try to keep things level for the night, before the cycle begins again when I wake up tomorrow morning.)

Then I’ll get up and set the table for breakfast – bowls, utensils, put the cereal out. About 9:45, I’ll put out the milk for cereal and the half-and-half for coffee, and then prepare for the day to start.

One day this will all change – not the diabetes work, but everything surrounding that. But for now, the comfort of ritual lets me wake up and have something to do in the morning.

 


One thought on “This is my morning.”

  1. I seem to remember Aunt Vi was twice a day, in the thigh. She survived… goodness, must have been at least 50 years with this thing, until she was hospitalised for something age-related and was neglected to death. [/justalittlebitter] She did develop neuropathy in her feet and started to have problems walking, but she was a great example for living with diabetes.

    BTW, you got your left and right switched up there in your text. 🙂

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