an interesting linguistics find! so I'm reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing "hp" in the context of "not being at full hp" "applying your full hp to a task" etc
and I'm like....... okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don't mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean
and it's not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant explanation to the 1908 audience, so gotta look elsewhere
horsepower. turns out it's horsepower.
and I'm absolutely FASCINATED that a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader
I could hand this guy my nintendo switch and he'd be like, ah yes I understand, this ''''pokemon'''' loses horsepower throughout the fight
I think it's insane that even in the most leftist and "progressive" spaces the idea of equating morality with looks is alive and present and no one fucking bats an eye at it. like racists and mysoginysts are always portrayed as fat and hairy and generally unkept, as a contrast to the morally good and attractive leftists of course; people will have no problem being genuinely fucking awful about someone's appearance if they're deemed to be a "bad person". and the worst part is you point all of this out and people act like you're reading too much into things like no dude you gotta start using your brain more
and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.
^^^ PEOPLE ARE STILL THERE. There's a metro station across the street from the colosseum where i found a hair in my pizza slice. We drove by ruins of an amphitheater next to a motorway in greece once. It's literally just real places where real people live and have lived. It's not mythical perfect lands that once existed. I went to Itacha in 2023 and there was not enough parking space.
after a couple hours chopping dried sea urchins into tiny pieces with a razor blade you start referring to the razor blade as yourself in your thoughts. a little while afterwards you'll inevitably think something along the lines of "i'm getting a bit dull, i'm going to have to throw myself out & get myself a new self" at which point your internal monologue has pretty much returned to baseline
This happens with mobility aids too. I bump into shit with my forearm crutches and say "ow" before I realize those are not, in fact, More Legs. Then when I get up and try to walk without them for a second there's a moment of feeling like a dog walking upright
Lately I've been thinking a lot about how the topic adoption is addressed when it comes to the batfam in both cannon and in fandom. This isn't meant to be like a call out to any writers or fans, I just think this is part of a larger cultural discussion of adoption. I will be discussing things I dislike personally when it comes to how it's represented, but there's a lot of nuance here. This is also my personal feelings on this, as someone who was adopted and knows other people who were adopted. I think adoption in the US is pretty misunderstood and often glorified. I think that the cultural understanding of adoption, raising a kid that wasn't born to you, and the legal process of adoption get lumped together.
I think a lot of people don't really know how adoption in the US exactly works. Adoption is when your birth records are changed to being the legal child of the adoptive parent. You are issued a new birth certificate with the adoptive parent listed and your previous records are sealed and can only be accessed by petitioning the court, and they can say no. It also severs all legal ties to your biological parents. This does give you the legal rights of a biological child, like being automatically included in inheritance and being next of kin without additional paperwork.
A legal guardian is someone who is given temporary or permanent custody of a child, is fully responsible for the child, and has all the same rights as a parent other than legal recognition of parentage. Also inheritance and next of kin assignment is not automatic and needs to be handled separately.
A foster parent is in charge of caring for a child, but does not have legal custody. The child is considered a ward of the state but you are in charge of there daily care and housing. Also the goal of foster care is supposed to be reunification. There's also a lot to talk about regarding the foster system, but that'd be a whole other long post.
I clarify these things partially because I see them mixed up in discussions often, but also to get into the matter of adoption records. So as I stated previously when you are legally adopted your original birth certificate, medical records, and many of the documents from the adoption process are sealed and cannot be accessed without petitioning the court and proving "reasonable cause" for unsealing them. Apparently them being your personal records is not reasonable cause enough. All of your legal ties to your biological parents are severed, in some cases they are given visitation if it's an open adoption but they don't have custody or even legal ties to the kid, they're just allowed to see them sometimes. Many adopted people, including myself, disagree with this process and want the legal process to change so that we are not deprived of legal documentation of our own history.
A lot of us feel that the right to these records is a human right, and sealing them is another instance of the system treating us like property.
(There is also a lot to be said about infant adoption, and how adoption agencies prioritize them, and neglect older kids because more people want babies and are willing to spend more money to get a baby. This leads to struggling mothers of new borns to be pressured to give up their kids rather than being given help, as well as instances of human trafficking because there are several adoption agencies that have been caught buying babies from traffickers overseas. Also the amount of money people pay for babies kind of makes it feel like human trafficking anyway. This is a huge issue in the US right now, not really related to this topic, but as someone adopted as an infant I just wanted to get this tangent out, and also I think it's something more people should learn about.
I'm not calling all the parents who have adopted infants human traffickers by the way, this a critique of US adoption agencies and the system they built.)
Now onto actually talking about bat media, one thing I always see talked about is how Bruce didn't adopt Dick until he was an adult. This is usually explained in comics as either the courts wouldn't allow him to adopt Dick as a single man, which was the case in the 40's comics as that usually wouldn't be allowed in real life, or Dick didn't want to be adopted because he was still grieving his parents. The latter is actually very common, especially nowadays, most grieving kids don't necessarily want a new birth certificate that says their dead parents never existed.
I think that the treatment of this in both fannon and cannon as a mistake Bruce made that needs to be rectified is weird because it is a very real and valid decision, and treating it as something bad implies that adoption is inherently better than legal guardianship. The only difference between a legal guardian and an adoptive parent is the process of sealing records and cutting legal ties with the birth parents, as well as automatic inheritance. A legal guardian has all the parental rights of an adoptive parent, and the legal status doesn't say anything about the relationship with the child. Also Bruce did in fact change his will to include Dick.
Batman #20 1940
Bruce adopting Dick later us usually seen as formality, often because he adopted Jason as a child, but I think we should start considering legal guardianship as a completely valid route to go, without putting adoption on a pedestal as a better option. This isn't to shame anyone who writes this plot point in comics or fan fiction, most people don't know the nuances in adoption and the struggle for adopted people's rights, but I think glorifying adoption often just silences these conversations about the downsides of adoption in the US.
(Here's some panels of Bruce talking about not adopting Dick as a child and adopting him as an adult)
Tales of the Teen Titans #50 1984
Gotham Knights #17 2001
I was gonna talk about instances like Cass and also Clark who's in the same boat with not really having previous records, Clark coming from a planet that blew up and Cass being raised in isolation (considering she had to threaten David Cain into telling her when she was born, I'm gonna assume she wasn't legally documeted.) and not having a legal identity for a good part of her life. That being said I don't have a lot of experience with kids who don't have legal records before being adopted. So if anyone has anything to add on that topic feel free to. I think this is a very case by case thing.
I think media as a whole conflates the actual act of raising a kid as your own with the legal process of adoption. There has been a lot of push to change how the legal process of adoption works and to regulate the adoption industry, but it's still an ongoing fight. Most media doesn't portray the ugly side of adoption which skews people's view of it. I hope to see more media in the future begin to explore the nuances as the cultural perception of adoption is very limited. I also highly encourage anyone to do further research into this topic, so I'm leaving some sources here at the end of the post. After all there's a lot I didn't talk about, and I am just one adopted person sharing my experience not the all knowing adoption god. I hope that this post inspires some people to do more research into adopted people's rights, and begin thinking more critically about how it's portrayed in media.
(Resources in the Reblogs because tumblr hates links)
(Also this is the third version of the post, the first one I decided I didn't like so I deleted and re-wrote it, and then tumblr ate my next draft)
All of this and also, it frustrates me deeply when people call "the adoption angst" unnecessary to Dick's story, because the fact is that these issues are inherent to how he came to be in Bruce's care in the first place. The state could always have placed him in the care of any of his fictive kin in the circus, in the interest of both his own wishes and the fact that this was the environment and people he was most familiar with. This was not done and he was instead going to be placed in the care of the state or with a complete stranger explicitly because the environment he had been raised in his entire life was judged to be unfit just on the basis of being migratory. This echoes a lot of real experiences of children whose families travel, especially so once Dick was established as being Romani. If Bruce had NOT done what he could to try to keep Dick with his existing kin, and further HAD legally adopted him, it would very much instead echo the rampant dislocation and trafficking of kids from these groups. Trying to maintain connections and not legally adopting Dick while ensuring that he'd be protected and supported was a much more ethical choice imo.
Relatedly it also frustrates me the way that legal adoption is seen as paramount and as the overriding factor over how the people themselves feel about their relationship. I've personally known people who were legally adopted by friends or partners for the purposes of gaining documentation or protection or rights - it's just a legal process, it can be used in a variety of different ways for different reasons, it has no inherent meaning to the nature of a relationship in and of itself.
“autism wouldn’t have been difficult before capitalism” “nothing that caused me burnout existed before industrialization” well what if your boots feel weird against your skin. and your cape is itchy and too heavy. and your brooch keeps making an annoying sound everytime you move and this party is too loud and you’re hungry and there’s pigeon stew but you can’t stand the texture of pigeon so you ate some olives and now your hands feel oily and gross and you drank a little bit too much wine (bc there’s no clear water. also it was too bitter) so now your head hurts and you feel a little hot but not hot enough to take your cape off and you promised this time we leave when I asked, Aurelius! you promised! and don’t forget we still have a three hour ride back home you promised it’s not going to be like last time! or something of the sort.
the ‘Life only started sucking in the 19th century’ attitude as anti-capitalist praxis is truly hilarious like. personally, if the sun was even a tiny little bit too hot on the back of my neck while i was being kidnapped and taken as a war captive after *insert empire here* conquered my home i wouldve been pissed. praefectus if the shackles feel weird on my skin im killing us both
i completely understand & agree with the backlash against students using chatgpt to get degrees but some of you are out here saying "getting a degree in xyz means pulling multiple consecutive all-nighters and writing essays through debilitating migraines and having severe back pain from constantly studying at your desk and chugging energy drinks until you get a kidney stone and waking up wishing you were dead every day, and that's just part of the natural process of learning!!!" and like. umm. i don't think that any of us should have had to endure that either. like maybe the solution for stopping students from using anti-learning software depends on college institutions making the process of learning actually sustainable on the human body & mind rather than a grueling health-destroying soul-crushing endeavor
it's a long way to erid, and sometimes grace gets a bit dramatic and in his head about things. rocky, as always, is more of a practical kinda guy 🪨
—
a silly comic drawn at the behest of my good friend @letruinendhere, who came up with both the concept (inspired by this post) and the paneling/dialogue after i dragged them along to my third viewing of phm. i simply provided my dubious artistic skill to their vision ✨
+
bonus panel bc i thought the idea of rocky being able to take the (human, christian) lord's name in vain was conceptually hilarious
you jump and say "jesus christ!" once and suddenly you have to explain catholicism to an alien, happened to my good friend ryland grace—
idk man i just think i can’t trust your ability to be part of any sort of political discussion if you can’t seem to understand the very simple idea that both sides of a conflict can be bad and a country opposing the united states doesn’t automatically make it perfect and amazing snd “the good guys”
“hi! i was born and raised in the United States and therefore was taught a lot of propaganda about our country’s enemies. now that i’ve grown up and wish to oppose the united states i’ve decided to just wholesale believe that everything i’ve ever learned about that country is a lie and propaganda and therefore they must be super duper innocent good guys! what? no, why would i actually bother to learn what is or isn’t true about that country? fuck you i’m gonna go deify a bunch of authoritarian dictators now! 😤”
^ a disturbing amount of people who call themselves leftists
These outtakes where the flash didn't go off are also AI generated.
I like this spooky dutch angle one.
I was just starting to learn flash and I didn't have all the equipment I needed. Since corgis are quite short, I had to put the lighting on the ground. The off camera flash was on a tipped over lightstand with a shoot-through umbrella to diffuse the light.
But I had no wireless triggers. And the only other way to trigger a flash, is with another flash. So I used the on-camera pop up flash to trigger the main flash.
But I had two issues.
First, I did not want that dinky on camera flash affecting my picture.
Second, triggering a flash with a flash is best done indoors. The flash will bounce all around the room and eventually hit the sensor so the main flash triggers. When you are outdoors, there is no bouncing.
SO... I took a little handheld makeup mirror and angled it toward my main flash. This blocked the dinky pop up flash and sent the beam of light towards the main flash to trigger it.
I was lying on the wet morning grass, holding a camera in one hand, a mirror in the other, trying to aim the mirror exactly toward the main flash, making crazy noises to get Otis's attention, and trying to get the focus point on his face so I didn't get a blurry photo. Also, Otis was much more interested in sniffing things than posing for a photo.
Here is an overhead view that might help explain.
I await all of your comments saying my amazing drawring is clearly AI generated.
Only 30% of the time did the flash actually go off. Aiming the mirror was tricky and I was doing like 8 things at once. I wasn't even sure I got the photo I wanted. But when I came back to the computer there was one that stood out and it is one of my favorites I've ever taken.
It was the best combination of monumental effort, great discomfort, perfect foggy sunrise light, and just pure luck.
Unfortunately, people like me who use advanced sculpting light techniques are getting accused of using AI more and more. Not really sure what to do about it—other than show the 30 awful photos it took to get the good one.
My 80s sunglasses photo and spoon photo get called out the most.
But it's just good old fashioned gradient lighting which has been used in product photography since the days of film.
Most of my photos with artificial light added would be considered "unmotivated lighting." I think that is the term you were looking for.
The short explanation is that motivated lighting always has a logical source. Like the sun or a window or a lamp off to the side.
That doesn't mean there are no lighting shenanigans used.
The overhead office-style fluorescent lights depicted in this scene were actually powerful diffused light bars that were much closer to the actors. They replaced the ceiling in post with more traiditioinal looking lights. So the lighting was still very crafted—but it has a logic and realism that doesn't set off alarm bells in your brain saying, "Where is the light coming from?"
Unmotivated lighting is the opposite. It's crafted, artificial light that doesn't need to make sense. It just has to achieve the aesthetic goal of the artist.
All studio lighting is unmotivated. I just re-edited this old photo of my dad.
There is no room in the world where he could have sat down and had perfectly sculpted light hitting his face. I intentionally directed the light to accentuate his features and capture the best, most idealized version of what he looked like.
Coincidentally I just wrote a post about motivated lighting in films.
💬 20 🔁 208 ❤️ 349 · First, thank you to everyone who is nerding out with me about motivated lighting. I love that I can have these convers
Weirdly, I expressed a preference for motivated lighting in movies with a realism-based aesthetic and a lot of people disagreed. They said that the lighting comes from the same place as the music and that you just have to suspend your disbelief.
(Personally I think that is a bad analogy because music is *very* motivated by the emotional vibe. I would say unmotivated lighting in movies comes from the same place as women's apocalypse makeup.)
But I *love* unmotivated lighting in still photography. I love crafting an image and creating it in a fantasy realm where perfect, beautiful, sculpting light can come from anywhere. I want the most idyllic lighting possible.
It's the only way I could make fingernail clippers look beautiful.
And now people are saying unmotivated lighting looks like AI or CGI and isn't authentic. Even though this aesthetic was created before computers were invented and the tools of post-capture manipulation were done in a darkroom.
I'm fairly certain this is because AI does not have a great understanding of motivated lighting. It never thinks about where the light is coming from so it almost always creates images where the lighting comes from a fantasy realm. And now people are heavily associating unmotivated lighting with AI, even if it is a subconscious observation.
I think at this point in time, people are yearning for authenticity. We know so much of our imagery is heavily manipulated for nefarious purposes. Beauty advertising with retouched skin like porcelain dolls and liquified torsos that don't leave space for vital organs. Every fast food ad shows the perfect juicy hamburger because they paid a food stylist $500/hour to perfectly cook and arrange things.
But fast food workers are not food stylists and your burger isn't going to have perfect lettuce and a non-smooshed bun.
(Before you reply with urban legends about food styling, they don't use fake materials. They are required to use the actual ingredients. Those myths came from movie prop masters who needed to maintain the look of food during hours of shooting.)
I think AI just turned our uncomfortable relationship with unrealistic imagery up to 11.
It's a little depressing for me because I love to use light as my artistic medium. I say I am a photographer, but my passion is more focused on lighting.
And I often incorporate my other passion, which is image manipulation. I sometimes add another layer of unreality to my images by artistically editing them.
This is days of work.
I worked very hard for the in-camera image. Dragging a heavy chair and lighting equipment into a field on a hot summer day was not easy for me.
But I also worked very hard on the edit. The RAW file is overexposed, but once I corrected that, the lighting on him and the grass is actually what I captured. I hid a flash in the lampshade and lit him with my big 7 foot umbrella off to the right.
I could have shot this at night, but my area has so much light pollution, I would never have achieved the sky I wanted in my head. So I took the photo knowing I'd replace the sky later.
I like crafting images. I like picturing something in my head and then trying to manifest it in a photo.
I get why people are starting to prefer more natural looking images. I understand why they are currently preferring everything to be captured as it was in the moment. I know why they disparage the amazing work of CG artists and demand that every movie use only practical effects.
When everything is fake, a small dose of reality feels special.
But I see my photography more like a drawing or a painting. Light is my paintbrush and I am just trying to manifest my imagination into an image. I don't claim I don't use artificial light. I never say anything is "straight out of camera." I am very open about my use of Photoshop. If I were able to leave my house and go to more beautiful places, perhaps I would take a more motivated approach.
I mean, I love when the world is just beautiful all on its own and all I have to do is competently pick settings on my camera.
But I enjoy my artistic process and while some of my images may not be realistic, I think my artistry is always authentic.
I don't need every person to like every one of my photos. But when I work hard on a photo and there is clear talent and skill involved, I'm hoping people will still acknowledge that. I hope they will respect the effort and artistry involved.
I didn't enjoy the show Breaking Bad. I disliked all of the characters and the story just depressed me more and more as I watched it. But I still think it is an amazing show created by talented artists. I can acknowledge the monumental artistic achievement even if it wasn't my cup of tea.
Today is the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin. Before that, Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence.
For perspective, I’ve been diabetic for about 25% of this discovery’s history. When my grandparents were born, this treatment did not exist. If you ask me, “what time period would be fun to go back to?” I can’t even speculate more than one hundred years back, because I know I couldn’t live in that world.
Today, I’m going to pick up four boxes of insulin from my local drug store. My endocrinologist is renewing my prescription, so I’m set for several months to come. I lead a more difficult life than someone without Type 1 diabetes, but I do live, and so do my relatives and friends with the condition. Thank you, Banting, Best, Macleod, and Collip (and all those dogs), for letting me do that.
One hundred years later, after insulin’s discoverer gave his patent away for $1 so as never to profit from the discovery, pharmaceutical companies are forcing people to ration insulin or go without entirely due to unchecked price increases. This is particularly true in the US, and is a major reason why I did not stay there after graduate school. There, and in much of the world where insulin is expensive and scarce, people are dying. Things are starting to change, but not soon enough. It’s been one hundred years, and we need to do better when the alternative is death.
Insulin is worth being grateful about, and its exploitation is worth being angry about. One thing to be aware of is that it is a treatment only, not a cure. Diabetes is still high-maintenance, and I still have a very complicated relationship to it.
Today, though, I’m choosing to focus on my gratitude, and being alive, and being able to go for a walk with my friend in the rain-scented air, do some trivia, see a show.
They say the change in the first child to receive a dose of insulin, 100 years ago, looked like magic.
Today (January 11, 2022) is the 100th anniversary of the first insulin injection being given to a human patient, 14-year old Leonard Thompson.
It wasn’t a perfect solution - Thompson actually had an allergic reaction to the first shot, probably due to an impurity - but, twelve days later, they had refined the dosage enough for a successful, magic-like change. I cannot emphasize how much Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence before this moment, and what an incredible gift, an incredible second chance, insulin was, despite its imperfections.
It’s important to note that Thompson successfully took insulin for 13 years, but still died at the age of 26. This was not directly because of diabetes. Insulin gave him the chance to live. Pneumonia killed him. Diabetic bodies are still more vulnerable to illness and anything else that compromises homeostasis.
It would have been my friend’s 40th birthday yesterday. He also had diabetes, and was in the hospital for related complications, but COVID (which he caught there) is what killed him.
My (out, proud, and brilliant) friend’s motto was from Tony Kushner’s masterwork Angels in America: “More Life.” It’s a play in large part about the AIDS epidemic, which was overlooked or even celebrated by many because the people who died from it were considered undesirable, expendable, broken.
Insulin gives me more life. Its costs still shorten the lives others. We, along with other marginalized groups, are still in many respects considered expendable.
I’m still grateful for so many things, and I’m still angry about so many others.
It’s the 101st anniversary of the first insulin shot today.
Jon should have turned 41 yesterday.
This week, my diabetes tech failed me twice; first, my continuous glucose monitor went defective and rogue, giving completely incorrect readings which determined my basal insulin dose and thus made me ill, a roller coaster of highs and lows as insulin was cut off and delivered at random, until I stopped the sensor. Why didn’t I cut it off immediately? Because a ten-day sensor costs at least $100, and once you shut it down, it’s done. I was hoping it would fix itself, as sometimes happens.
On Monday, my pump site failed just before I started teaching. I was so busy for the three hours that I didn’t notice, until the alarm sounded that I was out of insulin. My pump had delivered everything it had left, none of which wound up in my body, in a desperate attempt to lower my blood sugar. After only three hours without insulin, my blood sugar, which had been resting comfortably between the “diabetic normal” of 4-8, had risen to 20. All I had consumed that day was water. I was sick for the rest of the day.
For a Type 1 diabetic, and for many Type 2s, a lack of insulin is a death sentence. At the same time, in our current reality, each new advancement, each little bit of magic, comes at a cost.
Despite its imperfections, it’s still an incredible gift.
I just wish the gift were freely available to everyone.
It’s the 104th anniversary (January 11, 1922) of the first insulin injection given to a human. Jon’s 44th birthday would have been yesterday. He was born only 60 years after this medical advance, so close in living memory that it’s a little frightening to think about where I and many others would be without it.
I started the Dexcom G7 continuous glucose monitor two weeks ago, after being on the G6 for a few years. Startlingly, my blood sugar has been in range more than 90% of the time for an entire week. Talk about magic.
If the system can be trusted, that is–another company’s CGM has recently been implicated in at least 7 deaths (none in North America, though, chirp the articles–only 57 injuries in the US). When you pair the monitor with an insulin pump, letting it control your baseline insulin delivery, it is an incredible act of trust that you can’t think about too much lest you turn into an anxious mess. Check your sources with another meter if things seem too uncharacteristic. But a rogue sensor can kill in the night.
Gratitude, though. A few nights ago, I came home incredibly tired. I made myself a sandwich, took insulin before eating the sandwich (because you’re supposed to do so at least 15 minutes before you eat for optimum insulin efficiency–yet another consideration), then fell asleep before eating the sandwich. A potentially fatal error that I haven’t made in years and years. When my blood sugar crashes, I almost always wake up. Not this time. The Dexcom worked its magic, stopped my basal insulin, dragged me up from the depths. No medical attention required. Gratitude [it looked like magic].
On the other side of 40, I’ve noticed the first wisps of what might be aging, what might be diabetes complications. Anger: this disease has stolen so much. Gratitude: I’m still here to feel these things.
Getting on the new CGM was an insurance nightmare. Dexcom stopped its delivery service and discount program, cutting us off in its rush to get us all on the most updated version. It is a business, after all! Prescriptions wouldn’t transfer. Discount codes expired. Three different insurance programs had to be notified, begged, at the most hectic time of year. There was a gap and I had to buy emergency supplies out of pocket (hundreds of dollars that I can thankfully currently afford).
I apologized to the trainee pharmacy student behind the counter for all the stress. “No, no,” he said. “This is good, I’m learning a lot.”
Leonard Thompson would have died a skeleton in 1922 at 14 years of age. I just had to call my insurance company a few times. It’s not the same, yet the underlying fear is.
The advances are great; so are the costs. Advances don’t mean anything if they don’t come with access.
Today is the 105th anniversary of the discovery of insulin.
About five weeks ago, I started on a concentrated version of insulin that’s essentially “double strength,” so that I could take fewer units of that miracle hormone and therefore put less daily stress on the cannula insert area. I had a great care team lead for once who has really tried to work with my “no trends” numbers, so I was feeling excited.
A week and a half before the switch, I found out he’d gotten a job elsewhere and left without a trace, and now my big switch was to be handled by people I had never met, one of whom had never presided over that specific medication change. It was, to say the least, disheartening. Worse, they had to push my appointment back.
Since I had already ordered the new insulin, my insurance wouldn’t let me order the old kind–and I was going to run out, now, a day before the switch, and I wasn’t allowed to switch by myself. Thankfully, you can order insulin over the counter and it was only $45 for a vial (most of which will go to waste, now), but what if I didn’t have it? Rationing or skipping insulin kills.
When I got to the hospital for the appointment, I had to explain to one of the nurses in charge of my health, a woman in her 60s, the basic functions of how my insulin pump worked. While I love teaching hospitals and I am an educator by profession, it did not inspire confidence. But the switch was made, and the dosages cut accordingly. Everything was done clearly, and correctly.
And at 2am, with my beautiful new supercharged insulin, I almost died anyway. It worked too well.
A non-diabetic in Canada should have a blood glucose level of 4-7 mmol/l, depending on time of day and what you’ve eaten. For diabetics, the ideal is 4-8 with up to 10 after meals (that is *ideal.* Reality is regularly extremely different). Anything lower than 4–even 3.9–is cause for concern. Anything lower than 3 is a bright red warning sign. It can lead to seizures or unconsciousness. You can not wake up. The lowest I’ve ever been is 1.7, but that was mercifully brief. (Most meters don’t even read that low.) When your blood sugar is below 3, it’s literally like you can feel your life force draining away, while professional soccer players kick the shit out of your muscles. Even when you come back up, the effects can last for a day.
I was between 2.1-2.3 for more than two hours. I could not bring myself up, no matter what I ate or drank. I have been diabetic for almost 30 years and I have never gone to the hospital. I did not want to wake anyone up. Ten more minutes and I would have had to.
In the weeks since, I’ve managed to get things much more balanced. I feel the switch was, on balance, a great choice. I’m no longer burning through expensive supplies at a furious pace.
It’s a constant reminder that insulin is a 105-year-old treatment, not a cure, and that too much can quickly become even worse than too little. (Remember: there are at least 42 factors that influence blood sugar, so it’s not as simple as carbs to insulin.) The whole thing has me thinking about the precariousness of care, and the notion that we can be one postponed appointment or one miscalculated dose away from disaster.
It makes me want to fight more for access for everyone, and to feel grateful for what I do have.
Happy anniversary.
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