Two years on...

At 7:05 EDT exactly two years ago today, I began a completely new phase in my life. After having my last sugared coffee and black-bottom cupcake at Starbucks and some of my last regular soda and whatever else I used to eat before, I started down a path that I've been traveling now for two years.

I don't have a whole lot to congratulate myself for. Not that I haven't rallied to the cause - to the contrary. I simply managed to do what I should have been doing all along, and what everyone should do and is well within everyone's ability to do, which is simply take a moment and think about what they're eating or doing, and start taking the long view.

I'm now aware - painfully aware, perhaps at times even too aware - that what I do, the personal choices I make, are going to have an impact now and twenty or thirty years from now. I have lived with a very intimate knowledge, an intense realization that I am temporary, at least from this physical world's perspective (I'm still working on the rest of it). And I have good days and bad coming to an acceptance of that cold, hard fact.

I feel that in the past two years, I have a much clearer perspective on certain things, and a much lower tolerance for others. I no longer suffer fools very well (a group that has an ever-growing population in my eyes), but I am much more careful to automatically assume the worst in people. Well, at least I try much harder not to make that assumption.

Two years ago I was granted a different perspective. Not an entirely new one, but certainly one I did not have on June 27, 2005. Along with that, I acquired many new demons. I fight them on an almost daily basis these days. I feel the need to constantly and almost without abandon throw myself into whatever it is I'm doing. I feel like I've lost my ability to appreciate the moment, the Now, and perhaps am overcompensating. It's what I do in lieu of letting my mind wander to the scarier realms where I profoundly feel just how small and temporary I am.

Materially, my life is much better than it has been in a long time. Jenn and I are in as good a place as we have been since we've been dating. That's not to say we're in a great place in the grand scheme of things, but at least they're better. Two years ago today, I was a failed freelance lighting designer. Now I run the box office for one of the most energetic theater companies in the country. I have a position in my chosen profession, the one I spent all of my time in higher ed preparing for, earning recognition and respect for my ability within an industry I love. The last two years have been about rebuilding, and rebuilding correctly.

There's really no point to this except to check in, thank the scant few who check in here, and maybe relay some sense of where my scattered thoughts are at right now, in the midst of preparing for a new season, selling out the final show of the current season, and just living life in the midst of another summer in Washington (now my 8th).

Oh, and to let y'all know that I'm seeing the Transformers movie tonight. Yep, 5 days before everyone else gets a crack at it.

Dare You to Move

I don't know if this is an interesting thing to write about, or even if it's worth writing about, but it's been something I've been thinking about this weekend, and it's a bit on the self-congratulatory side, and I'm really not looking for any pats on the back. I've just been thinking about this particular thing a bit over the past few days, and I figured I ought to a) get it down in writing before I forgot about it, and b) throw you loyal readers a bone with a little meat on it.

I went to work.

It's not much, and it's utterly unremarkable in the Grand Scheme of things, or even the Small-To-Medium schemes of the block of this street.

But this week just passed was a really important one for me. For the first time since I had the stroke, I had as intense a work week as I had at any given point in the first four years of my life here in DC. About 55 hours, all told, between two wildly different jobs, managing very different things.

And I feel better right now, at the end of that week and just hours away from the start of another one, than I have in the past year. Part of it is spring's fault (favorite season and all), but this exhaustion I feel is absolutely genuine, and I relish every bit of it.

See, for the past ten months, I've been giving in to my hypochondriac side. The slightest eye twitch, the slightest head rush, the slightest anything, and I'd start worrying, "My God, is this another stroke?" I knew rationally that it wasn't. I distinctly remember what the stroke felt like, and nothing that I've experienced since last summer has felt even remotely like that. But when you're worried that you might be having a stroke (you being me, with my recent medical history), reason kind of flies out the window.

On a few choice occasions, especially since January, these little bouts of hypochondria have exploded into full-blown panic attacks. As in, have the digits 9-1-1 plugged into my phone and hovering my thumb menacingly over the Call button, waiting for just one little twinge. It was like High Noon at the O.K. Corral facing off against my brain.

But never another twinge. Never another trip to the ER. Never another stroke. So far [knocks on wooden desk].

But these twinges, real or not, have kept me from operating at 100%. As I've been slowly reintroducing myself to regular work, I've forced myself go slowly, because I thought I needed it. Six months ago, I didn't have a 30-hour week in me, let alone a 60-hour one.

This week, I had the chance to do one. So, no time being like the present indeed, I jumped in.

And so, here I am, at the other end of it, not only surviving but thriving.

I was made to live like this. I haven't had a week like this since Cherry Red closed, and I realize only now how much I miss it. (And don't get me wrong, Woolly isn't Cherry Red, but it's at least still theater, and I at least still like it.)

It's fucking awesome to be back. Thanks for letting me bend your ear eyeball.

Health Matters: a followup visit

So I just realized that I left you all on pins and syringes with my update last time and the ongoing saga of Sasquatch (see here if you've forgotten already, it's in Part 2).

Well, truth to tell, it wasn't much of a cliffhanger. In the world of cliffhangers, it was unfulfilling. It would be like if we'd just seen Best of Both Worlds, Part 1, with Cmdr. Riker having just ordered the Enterprise to fire on a Borged-out Locutus-of-RSC, then we had to wait four months for the second part.

Then, finally, we get to see Part 2, and just after Riker says "Fire!", Picard takes off his Borg headgear and goes, "Ha ha! Just kidding Number One, gotcha! Happy Birthday!" and then the rest of the episode is about Worf's son Alexander's witless quest to befriend one of the animals in the ship zoo. Or whatever.

This latest incarnation of the Sasquatch phenomenon was exactly like that. Exactly.

Health Matters

Some have called January 23 the "saddest day of the year," what with the psychological effects of shortened days and all that. Indeed, last year on this date we lost Johnny Carson. However, the 1/23's of my life over the past five years have been anywhere from neutral to excellent days (it was 1/23/01 when Ian first asked me to be the SM for Poona). This year's 1/23 falls nearer to the latter category. In short:

6.1

That number, my friends, is my current A1c level. A1c will mean nothing to most of you. It is, however, one of the most important numbers in my life. Basically, the A1c is a measurement of blood glucose levels over a roughly three-month period. The goal that type 2 diabetics are told to strive toward is getting that number under 7.

To give you some perspective, my A1c level the day I was admitted to the hospital last year was over 15, more than twice what non-diabetic levels are. A1c tests don't even work above values of 18. The A1c of 15 means that for the three months leading up to my stroke, I had an average blood glucose (BG) level of between 270 and 300. Non-diabetics seldomly get above 130, and are normally between 80 and 105. (Some more perspective: when I was admitted, my very first BG reading was 460.) My current A1c level corresponds to a 90-day BG average of about 120.

My doctor, who was somewhat astounded to hear of my experience at Veselka back in November (chronicled here) was thrilled with the A1c result. I was ecstatic, to the point of pumping my fist in the air in celebration.

This is not the end of the story. It's just the beginning. I can't write the rest. The rest of the story comes in the next decades, as I continue to find that balance of loving food (which I do) and enjoying the right kinds of food (which I'm doing).

Part 2 of this entry comes as yet another confirmation of several things I've come to accept as true over the past six months:
1) My family doctor, who I valued so much for 20 years, has fallen into incompetency or, at the very least, a dangerous complacency.
2) My old GP actually was a quack.
3) I continue to receive the best health care of my life in my socialized-medicine environment.

The reason I went to see the doc today was because the problem I've had with my left arm four times over the past two years (two of which are chronicled here and here) started recurring last Thursday. The lifespan of this thing has become predictable: Three days of increasing amounts of pain, followed by four to six days of unbearable pain, sleeplessness, inability to move and a humongous dose of crankiness. So, when I realized that the cycle was starting up again, I made the doctor's appointment.

When I went in to see her last December, I let her know that we were in the Season of Sasquatch (what I've come to call this affliction, for lack of a better term), and she indicated that should it reoccur to get to her quickly and we'd set up surgery consults and get the core of the infection removed.

It was progressing over the weekend more or less as expected. However, last night I was somewhat surprised that I still had some mobility in my arm (usually by Day 4, that's not the case). This morning when I woke up (Sleeping through the night on Day 5? How odd.) it didn't feel any worse than it did the night before.

Goldie gave me a prescription of antibiotics, which she told me not to fill unless and until it got worse. She gave me a referral to the surgeon, whom she said not to see if it didn't get worse. She is of the very firm opinion that this Sasquatch thing has been a complication relating to my DM (physician shorthand for type 2 diabetes), and now that it is under control for the moment, the severity of this complication is likely to become lower or possibly disappear entirely.

For the moment, I still have some pain, especially when I try to move my arm too much. The next 48 hours are going to be very telling, and are something of a cliffhanger for me: Will Sasquatch Return?
More later....

The fact that I'm not in excruciating pain when I fully expected to be, and the 6.1 thing both have made this particular 1/23 one of the better ones. Hey, you take the good news when you can, right?