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Sunday, April 10, 2005

bye-bye, Snickers (and Special Dark and big bowls of Rocky Road and...)

T has hypoglycemia, specifically reactive hypoglycemia, or if you want to get really technical, he has "nonhypoglycemic hypoglycemia", since when he goes in for a 3-hour glucose screen, even though he's very nearly comatose about fifteen minutes after the glucose hits his system and he stays that way for the entire three hours, nothing shows up in his bloodwork. For quite some time, maybe two or three years, he's noticed that if he eats sweets, especially on an empty stomach, he gets a) very tired, sometimes to the point of literally HAVING to go to sleep b) a thudding headache in his temples and c) extremely irritable. Nowadays if he even eats, say, not-sugared but not-whole-grain breakfast cereal, he is in bad shape. Yesterday he had cake with lunch and spent the afternoon unconscious on the couch, and the rest of the weekend was not a whole heck of a lot better for him. When all this mess surrounding my medical issues is all cleared up, he's going to see a new doctor; meanwhile, since his symptoms match reactive hypoglycemia exactly, we're going to assume this is what he has and act accordingly, and see if all symptoms clear up.

Which, frankly, is not going to be a whole lot of fun.

Well, there is that aspect that's kind of fun, wherein I get to be all methodical and make lists of possible foods to eat and create SIX MEALS A DAY from them. But let's face it, a man who can ordinarily eat nearly an entire single batch of waffles in one sitting is not going to like having one-inch cubes of cheese become a regular part of his diet. My favorite teenaged-boys-eating-horror-story is: when T was in high school and then in the Navy, he would frequently buy a pound of sharp cheddar cheese and a quart of chocolate milk, and that was a meal. Or he and a friend would go buy a dozen donuts. Each. For breakfast. He doesn't do that anymore, of course, but still, it's a big step from where he is to where he'll be from now on: looking at a dinner plate with, for example, two six-inch whole-wheat tortillas holding a total of two ounces of meat and some vegetables. But hey, lettuce is a free food! As is celery! So he should be really happy about those, at least. I mean, come on. Lettuce and celery! Who needs cheesecake when you have those?

I'll sign off with two pictures. This evening at almost exactly five o'clock the whole family started in at the same time with the "I'm HUNGRY" thing, looking at me as if they expected me to pull a roast turkey and all the trimmings out of thin air or some such thing. I told them I'd make dinner but first I asked them if, just to humor me, they could do an actual baby-birds-in-the-nest imitation, to send me into a kitchen with a smile. And they did.

And then here's a picture of me, coloring with C. Did you know that Crayola manufactures a crayon called "purple mountain's majesty"? Anyone who can tell me why that made me send a tersely-worded email to Crayola gets a free signed first edition of my first book: The Essential Guide to Grammar Snobbery.

That's just the working title, of course.