(Note: This post contains spoilers. If you are like my girl Brittany and you believe happily in the story of Santa, skip down to where it says “Diabetes is like Santa Claus.”)
My husband and I share a philosophy on Santa Claus.
Santa gets too much credit. Why should Santa get all the glory for the gifts that show up underneath the Christmas tree on Christmas morning? Mom and Dad work their tails off to provide a fun and comfortable life for our child, and to have the fun thunder (funder?) stolen by Santa Claus is unfair. “Thank you, Santa, for the Barbie and the Rockers van!” I shouted as a kid, not realizing that Mom and Dad put in some extra hours (and spent half the night assembling the stupid thing) to get that Rocker Van under our Christmas tree.
So BSparl will be fed the Santa story, but she’ll also understand that her Christmas gifts come mostly from her parents, and not from a fictional cookie thief who shimmies down the chimney. Santa doesn’t work as hard as we do, so he shouldn’t get all the credit.
Diabetes is like Santa Claus. (Welcome back, Brittany!) Only in this case, it SHOULD be the one given most of the credit for certain things. And I shouldn’t give myself so much of the blame and guilt. I have a tendency to look at a blood sugar reading and instantly blame myself for it. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
The puppeteer skit features the interaction between a young man with a rash and his older physician. The patient is an informed kind of guy: He’s checked his own medical record on the doctor’s website, read up on rashes in the Boston Globe, checked pix on WebMD, seen an episode of “Gray’s Anatomy” about a rash and, most inventively, checked iDiagnose, a hypothetical app (I hope) that led him to the conclusion that he might have epidermal necrosis.
“Not to worry,” the patient informs Dr. Matthews, who meanwhile has been trying to examine him (“Say aaahhh” and more): He’s eligible for an experimental protocol. After some back-and-forth in which the doctor — who’s been quite courteous until this point, calling the patient “Mr. Horcher,” for example, and not admonishing the patient who’s got so many ideas of his own — the doctor says that the patient may be exacerbating the condition by scratching it, and questions the wisdom of taking an experimental treatment for a rash. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*
The worst part of flying is the takeoff and landing. Not that I am nervous about those parts of the trip, it is that I am all electronic. Once I have to turn off my electronic devices, all I am left with is my own thoughts or what is in the seat pocket in front of me.
Since there is nothing to be gained from quiet introspection, I am stuck with either the in-flight magazine or SkyMall. I usually choose the latter. SkyMall, for those of you who do not fly, is a collection of catalogs bound in one volume. I have occasionally purchased products found in SkyMall and thumb through it with mild interest.
This time one product caught my eye, the Aculife home acupuncture/acupressure device. I had never noticed the “health”-related products in SkyMall before, usually looking for electronic gadgets that I really do not need. I was curious. How many other products besides Aculife are in the catalogue? According to the interwebs, about 100,000,000 Americans fly every year and well over half a billion people world wide. A lot of people can potentially look at SkyMall, including the occasional skeptic.
I have written about the many styles of acupuncture in the past: Hand and foot and tongue and ear and head and Chinese and Japanese. So many meridians and acupuncture points, how does the body find room for it all? Aculife makes it all simple. It’s all gauche, er, I mean in the left hand.
According to makers of Aculife, you can now “help strengthen your health with the latest ancient technology.” Of course I can, and for $199.95 I had better be able to. Read more »
Since the beginning of November, I’ve been dealing with a random few weeks of feeling “real-people sick” (RPS). Like I wrote about last week, diabetes is something I’m used to and can deal with pretty well, but the common cold knocks me right on my end. I deal with colds like a guy. I hate being RPS:
Real People Sick: The differentiation between blood sugar issues and the common cold. Phrase slips out most often when the diabetic admits to not feeling well and must specify that it is not blood sugar related.
This month’s Animas “Life, Uninterrupted” vlog is about being “sick” on top of having diabetes, and about how cracked-out squirrels and I sometimes share the same vocal patterns. Unfortunately, there’s another cameo by Abby (the cat) because she’s usually lounging, all lazy, while I record these things. (That cat needs to get on the ellipmachine or something — chubby little chomper.)
Enjoy, and thanks for not judging me for the squeaky voice and the whining!
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
Via an article in The New York Times entitled “Narcissism No Longer a Psychiatric Disorder”:
Narcissistic personality disorder, characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance and the need for constant attention, has been eliminated from the upcoming manual of mental disorders, which psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness.
As Charles Zanor reports in today’s Science Times, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — due out in 2013 and known as D.S.M.-5 — has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition. The best known of these is narcissistic personality disorder.
So, blogging is normal then? Kinda takes the fun out of it…
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
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(Note: This post contains spoilers. If you are like my girl Brittany and you believe happily in the story of Santa, skip down to where it says “Diabetes is like Santa Claus.”) 
