Cinderella: the day after

I guess I've been trying to pretend I'm living that dream of my previous post, the last one from Diabetes Blog Week - you know, the one where I'm no longer diabetic (along with the rest of the dreamin' world). A girl can dream. Just like in those Cinderella movies I'm trying to avoid letting my daughter watch. After all that time scrubbing floors, do you think she could just stop and let someone else do them while she and her prince make doe eyes at each other? I bet she'd feel pretty uncomfortable. Not that she'd be dying to scrub the palace, but she might not want to just sit around all day.

Yes, I'd feel something like that if ever the cure arrived. Don't get me wrong, though, I'd take it in a heartbeat. But I'd have all that mental energy my brain now puts toward being a pancreas, and I'd have to use it some other way. Believe me, that's a lot of energy - I'd probably be rewriting the Constitution, or perhaps Gray's Anatomy, given my line of work.

Meanwhile, I plod along. On Friday, my mental energy was, in fact, nearly gone. I pulled into the driveway and checked for my meter (that blood-sucking -- uh, checking - device), to find it was missing. I immediately called a colleague I knew would still be at the office.

"I have a strange request," I told her. "Can you check the wastebasket in my office? I think my meter is in there. Yeah, the little black bag made of fanny-pack material. No, it's probably not on my desk."

Sure enough, it was in the trash. I knew this because I'd put it there the day before, too. She laughed. "Maybe you're trying to tell yourself something," she said. Yeah - trying to take that vacation from diabetes that never happens, right? More likely, though, I was just in my usual rush to test and, instead of throwing the used test strip in the trash and the meter in my purse right nearby, I got it mixed up. Maybe the test strip is sitting in the middle of my desk right now.

Oddly, I didn't have many such moments even when H was first born, despite the severe sleep deprivation (and my usual need for lots and lots of sleep). No shoes in the fridge and chicken in the high chair. (I tried to find that Far Side cartoon on the web - the one where the man is on the phone saying something like, 'I have it all in hand - the kid's in the high chair and the chicken's in the oven.' But apparently Gary Larson keeps his images carefully offline. His ideas have had enough exposure - you think?) The closest I came was almost putting the milk in the dishwasher - but I stopped myself before actually hitting the "run" button.

I don't even get mixed up that way when I run low. My BG can be 35, and I'll be thinking, "huh, that's funny. Guess I'll go get something to eat." In fact, I've never passed out from a low - and I've run as low as about 20. No one's ever noticed I've been low unless I told them. (Or maybe I'm goofy so often, they can't tell the difference. Hmmm...) It's part of this weird aura that makes people think I'm taking great care of myself. But really, I'm just lucky (as far as the lows and passing out goes), and I know this. I can keep going even when there's no rational explanation for it. So mental slips like the meter in the trash tell me I'm really, truly tired and overdoing things. It only took me both weekend days to get the full 8 hours in one night that I knew I needed - but I finally got it, so now I'm ready to go again for one more week. Or maybe I'll try for one more day, at least.