The only problem I’ve encountered since the weight issues was rather odd. I was working in a factory in Langhorne at the time. The work was great: An eight-hour shift of pure physicality requires little sleep, something I’ve never received much of on a consistent basis. One day I was working on an extraordinarily small amount of rest, chugging coffee like it was going out of style, when I noticed an odd disassociative sensation. It came on suddenly, and the next thing I knew, I was coming to in my car with my fiancée on the phone.

I had grabbed my jacket, clocked out for lunch, and went to my car. Once inside, I attempted to set my alarm on my cell phone. Sleeping in your car for lunch was pretty commonplace at the factory, so no one would’ve questioned any of these actions. But in my stupor, I had somehow dialed the soon-to-be Mrs. Phlaux instead. What followed was about ten minutes of incoherent babbling. As I had to explain to her later, I had just spent the last 20 minutes riding in the backseat of my own mind. I took the rest of the day off but didn’t seem to have any further complications.

Jump to a few months later. I’m at a different job, an office this time. I started coming home and going through similar episodes as during the factory lunch. They came to a climax when I fell asleep on the sofa one evening, only to wake to…Well, my perspective was that it was an alien invasion and no one in my house could speak English anymore. My fiancée says I was speaking fluent Spanish. Regardless, I’m not sure what caused me to go into the closet and piss on the floor. I came to when my partner threw my shoes by my feet and said she was taking me to the hospital. “Why?” was the first coherent word I’d said since before I lay down. Apparently, my love had given me a Red Bull, and 15 minutes later, I’m getting back control of the reins.

Ah, so now we have enough data to form a hypothesis. These episodes are occurring during my usual periods of glucose drops. I’ve had those all my life, though, so what’s the x-factor? The answer: caffiene. The warehouse incident happened when I was chugging countless cups. At the office job, I was doing the same, what with it being free and me being pretty poor. I replaced some of my cups with black tea and haven’t felt even a tremor of those episodes again. I still don’t know what the connection between elevated caffiene levels and disassociation, but I know to avoid it.

So we’re up to the current state of affairs. I feel healthy and haven’t had any issues in years. I don’t have health insurance despite it being available at work. I had it the first few months I was employed at my current job, but the numbers don’t add up for my condition. Most plans only cover insulin over $50, so I’d pay roughly $150 a month to save about $40? No thanks. It would help with visits to specialists, but what will they tell me? “You’re perfectly healthy, so here are a number of tests and a new daily regimen to make sure you stay that way.” Again, it just doesn’t add up.

But, of course, that’s the trick: I’m pretty healthy, but I still have my ticks like everyone else. I get tension headaches more days than not. My eyes are bad, but this was genetic. There wasn’t any diabetes-related scar tissue in my eyes until my last exam. With any other issue that comes up, I can never be sure if it’s related to the condition unless I was somehow able to turn it off. And how do I know if the genes (or whatever made my white blood cells hate my islets) didn’t leave some other surprises? I rarely get sick. Does the fact that diabetes is considered an autoimmune disorder mean my immune system is amped up and otherwise on my side? If given the choice between diabetes and allergies/chickenpox/the flu, I’m not sure which I’d go for.

I think I’ve covered everything, with some specifics left out because either a) you can find it yourself on Wikipedia or b) I want to break it down in a later post. But I’m always up to questions or discussion, so let me know your thoughts or if I missed something.

I’m pushing back the conclusion of the diabetes posts for something a little more timely:  There’s currently a story on Slashdot called “The eBook Backlash” (http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/03/05/154207/the-ebook-backlash) that riled me up for two reasons.

The first being that one of the links in the story goes to a New York Times article about the distractions found on e-book readers.  With ads, popups about new emails, tweeting, etc.; it’s all too easy to get pulled from the story.  But as some of the Slashdot comments stated, this isn’t an e-book problem.  This is ayouproblem.  Our brains are wired to filter through most of the sensory input we receive, but it can only do so much.

As someone with a Kindle Fire, I have a time and place for its various uses.  Sitting in the living room while Mrs. Phlaux watches television and plays with the cats?  Perfect time to play on Tweetcaster or read the bite-sized stories fed through my streams in Pulse.  But once she’s gone to bed or once I go outside for a cigarette, the e-reader becomes just that.  At midnight, when the house and news streams are quiet, it becomes the perfect setting for Paradise Lost, The Prince, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or whatever other classic I’ve downloaded.  Some prose can only be read in particular seasons, but I find nearly all prose can be read in the late evening.  This is regardless of whether it’s in print or digital form.  Which leads me to the other reason the story bothered me.

If you’re familiar with the structure of Slashdot or similar news aggregators, then you know of the framing some of these sites use.  It’s not just a link to a news article, but rather an opinion wrapped in breaking news.  Usually, I don’t find anything wrong with that, especially on Slashdot, because that opinion is rarely more than “Hey, isn’t this cool?”  This time, however, the poster decided to bring up the incendiary print vs. e-book debate (as evidenced by the page’s title).  Now, the links used by this particular troll included the New York Times article I previously mentioned, which basically came down to “e-Books can be distracting.”  Simple enough to fix: Put your device in airplane mode or, I don’t know,ignorethe New Email popup until you’re ready to move on to another task.

The only other link used was an article about Jonathan Franzen, an author who was first published in 1987, going off about how much he loathes e-books.  This…this is surprising?  This is news?  An author who’s been publishing print novels for 25 years doesn’t like digital publishing?!  I’m glad I’m sitting down.

But that’s alright.  I’m not really on either side of the debate, to be honest.  I don’t find fault with Jonathan Franzen; it’s his opinion.  But the original journalist that wrote the article and the poster of the Slashdot article need to remember the context.  Don’t ask authors or publishers about their opinions or even their numbers.  God, as someone who has worked in or created projects in a variety of media, I can tell you how easy it is to fudge metrics.  How ‘bout asking someone with an e-reader?  Or asking someone in a bookstore why they’re choosing to buy a print book over its digital copy?

As someone who has a self-published digital novel and has an enormous bookcase filled with novels, I’ll give you my two cents.  It all comes down to classics for me.  Will I buy King’s eighth installment of the Dark Tower if/when it’s released?  Of course.  But it’ll be in print.  And I’ll curl into a ball on the sofa, wrapped in blankets and under the lamplight, as I have done for just about every Dark Tower release.  I want to hold it in my hands, I want to see with my own eyes how far I’m along, I want to relish in the creases I’ve left in the spine.  And I want to see the look on my friend Tom’s face when I bring it in to work for him to borrow and he realizes that each DT release seems to double in size.

BUT…I remember when I wanted a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.  I found it at Atlantic for $9.  A used copy of a 2000+ year old book for $9.  Translated into French in the late 18th century, into English over a hundred years later.  $9.  And where’s that money going to?  Is there a descendant of Sun Tzu I haven’t heard of?  Is the marketing of the product causing the price to be that high?  I know it’s only $9, but it’s a 2000 year old book.  It was out of copyright before the concept of copyright was invented.

However, I see a free copy of the book available on Amazon’s Kindle store.  I spend 99 cents, and I can get illustrations, historical context, a bundle including the audiobook, etc.  That’s the change I want to see.  As a member of the new digital self-publishing plague, I don’t want the print book to die.  I just want fair prices.  And it’s far easier (for now) to get that through the digital stores.

Around the age of eleven or twelve, I put myself in the hospital with ketoacidosis by experimenting with my insulin doses to induce certain dream states. Leading up to this point, I only had a vague sense of how I felt at different glucose levels. I was always told that I should get a juice box if I felt “funny,” which was usually used to get out of mass. So when the physical and mental sluggishness began and the fluids started to spew, it didn’t dawn on me to grab a syringe.

During this hospital visit, two particularities stood out: First, I had found a copy of Don Robertson’s “The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread” shortly before being hospitalized. When asked if I wanted anything, I mentioned the novel. I finished the story during my short stay, but it would be another decade before I received the two other entries of the Morris Bird III trilogy as a birthday gift from a friend. Second, I lost a significant amount of weight, something that would become a signature until my early twenties, when its significance became apparent.

My teens were a roller coaster of emotion. I can’t compare it to others’, I suppose, but I’ve always described it as bouncing on a roller coaster. There were the normal teenage hormones with all the stereotypical emo moments, but there were also the glucose-influenced times. Combined, the highs were amazing. The lows, though, seemed devastating. An English teacher familiar with the disease told me about “black” days, which seemed a little overly dramatic. I woke up in bad moods, sure, but I didn’t have moments of crippling depression. Really, it probably wasn’t any worse than the typical teen.

The darker moments were helped by the thought that I knew the “right” way to kill myself, so I knew it’d be final. None of that crying for attention BS for me. If I went for it, there’d be no second chance. Well…not so much. I won’t go into the details, but a set of circumstances made me think it was time to end it all. So one evening, I injected a few hundred units of insulin and went to bed, presumably for the last time.

Now, here’s the problem with overdosing on insulin and sleeping: The body chooses to use the insulin as it needs it. So if you’re in an inactive state, your body doesn’t need much energy, and therefore doesn’t use the insulin. You’ll wake up with a craving for cookies, but the point is you’ll still wake up. I later met a man who had the opposite issue: He took nightshade and went for his “final” walk around his town. Hours later, he’s still walking. Turns out nightshade attacks inactive muscles. He had inadvertently walked out all of the poison.

When I graduated from college and made my triumphant return to Levittown, I picked up a rather sedentary routine and found myself sleeping or wanting to sleep constantly. I checked my weight and found I was only 119lbs. Increasing my dosage would’ve only exaggerated the peaks and valleys of my glucose levels, so I tried something I’d never done before: I added an injection to my daily routine. Roughly eight hours apart, the newest dose was also the smallest, more of a midday booster shot. It seemed to work though. I quickly gained 30 pounds and returned to a relatively normal sleep schedule (normal for me, that is).

So the thin frame I had carried since I was 12? The comments from friends’ family members about how I should enjoy my metabolism? “I had that when I was your age too. Wait ‘til you reach 35. It’ll drop on you before you know it.” (At this point, they always make it a habit of touching their pudgy guts.) All a sign that my glucose levels were out of control. It was like I was rocking the Atkins diet before it was cool. Get a better grasp on my levels and suddenly I’m within healthy parameters.

(…to be concluded…)

Write what you know, the adage goes. So that leaves diabetes and how to discuss sheep-lovin’ in a couple languages. Since I opened the door to the diabetes in the last post (and since making love to farm animals can only be discussed over so many blog posts before repeating yourself), I’ll start there. This may be for myself more for anyone else, but at the same time, I don’t meet many other type 1 diabetics and am always interested by our differences/shared experiences. Maybe another one of my kind will find this and find a sense of empathy. So here goes a little personal history lesson.

When I was 21 months old, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, but at the time, they still called it juvenile diabetes. The hospitals in the area not being well-versed in the condition (or not as knowledgeable as my mother would’ve liked), we took a trip to Joslin Hospital in Boston, the leading facility for the disease in the northeast. There, they taught my family how to mix and inject the doses of insulin, test my glucose levels, etc. At the time, my body didn’t react to the human synthetic insulin but received the “pure pork” variety well. I was scheduled for two doses a day of the Lente, a type that worked for 6-8 hours with a peak of somewhere between 2-4 hours after injection. These were administered by my mother or grandmother into my butt or arms. I’ve never had one in my stomach, and frankly, the idea creeps me the hell out.

As a side note, I was teased in my very early school days for having a big ass. I’m not sure how a first grader determines the normality of ass sizes, but mine apparently grew beyond that range. As I wasn’t a particularly chubby child (until a short period in roughly my sixth year of grade school), I can only guess that the injections affected the cheeks. This is one side effect I’m in no rush to test out.

Jump to when I’m eight and curled into a ball on the sofa of my living room. After expunging bodily fluids from every orifice I had, I was taken to my pediatrician, who claimed it was a stomach bug that was going around. I’m told these events happened, and they’re vaguely etched into memory. What I clearly remember is hallucinating tiny airplanes flying around the room for most of the day. My mother, for whatever reason, didn’t believe the doctor and suggested taking me to the hospital. He told her he worked exclusively with what was then named Delaware Valley Hospital in Langhorne. Having nearly killed my mother during her ordeal with cancer only four years prior, that particular hospital seemed like a poor choice. The doctor refused to treat me anywhere else; we went to Lower Bucks Hospital in Levittown; and that was the last I saw of that doctor.

A number of years later, I worked with a woman at Lennox who still took her preteen to him. She found him quite pleasant to deal with, she said, especially once she uncovered his affair with one of the office’s nurses.

It turned out that I was going through what’s called ketoacidosis. I’ll let you look that up yourself on Wikipedia. An endocrinologist, the first and last I’ve ever seen, explained that it probably occurred because of a growth spurt. I was a year beyond the average age, but so it goes. A second type of insulin was to be included in my shots from this point forward: Regular, which lasts for 2-4 hours and has a peak of roughly 15 minutes after injection.

Within the next couple years, I was injecting myself, mostly in the arms. This was eventually moved to the legs, as I could maintain the pain better in my thighs. The learning curve included discovering pain management, which led to the insight that pain is subjective and mostly in the mind. The next logical leap was that all sensation was manageable, which blended with an infant sense of spirituality/philosophy and resulted in a kind of proto-Buddhist viewpoint of reality. It also later blended with teen angst, lending itself to some experimentation with cutting. I still blame my hatred of summer on the fact that I can’t comfortably wear long sleeves, which would otherwise cover my sliced up arms. But I’m jumping ahead.

(…to be continued…)

I had a coworker ask me yesterday what my book’s about, so I whipped out the ol’ elevator pitch.  When I was done, she said, “Makes me think of Cain and Abel.”  This made me dumbstruck for a little while since a) it made sense and b) I hadn’t thought of it before.  After thirteen years of Catholic school, actually reading the entire Bible, having numerous conversations about Christianity with my non-Christian fiancée, how could I overlook the connection to a Bible story just about anyone in the world can reference?  Coincidence is filled with religious symbolism, but I missed that one?

Well, maybe because the connection’s not there.  Both tales are about brothers (of sorts, in Coincidence’s case) and….nothing.  The more I think about Cain and his victim, the less sense the reference makes.  The story requires three elements, for one thing: Person A and Person B are sacrificing to Person C, and one’s gift is praised more than the other.  A kills B.  Now, up to this point, you only really need the two elements.  A has jealousy and rage issues.  But it’s when C comes along and asks, “Hey, where’d the other go?” that things get interesting.  Now A says, “I dunno.  How is that my responsibility?” and bam!  You get the layers.

Now A is jealous, violently passionate, and callous to his own actions.  But at the same time, there’s the undercurrent of perception, assumptions, whatever you want to call it. Person C isn’t just asking “Where’s B?” but really “My perception is that you two are close and you should know where B is.  I also trust that you’ll answer my question.  You were sacrificing your work to me anyway, so there must be a level of trust there.  So where’s B?”  Add to the equation the Bible factors (namely God) and you have an omniscient being asking this question.  So it’s not even a desire to know the factual answer, just to see Person B’s response.

Daniel Quinn believes (and I partially agree) the whole story’s an allegory anyhow, a tale of farmers versus herders and a kind of warning of things to come from the herders’ point of view.  Person C in this instance would probably be life and/or culture itself since the other two are working on designing / improving life-sustaining methods.  But that seems like a bit of a stretch.  “Life” as I’m using it here doesn’t have a POV, and it’s really the third POV that makes the whole setup work.

Regardless, take this as an example of an elevator pitch and how it can go horribly awry.  The question is whether it’s the pitch that caused the problem or the receiver of said pitch.  Oh, existentialism, you old dog.