Neeeeed to Lighten Up.

Blog has been super serious lately. I need to lighten the mood. So here.

This is a cat in a sweater.

I'm Okay. Almost.

It's finally time for an update.

Monday morning around 3 am I woke up feeling nauseous and crampy. It was hard to move. I tested myself and my blood sugar was 567. I gave myself correction and went to bed. About 45 minutes later I woke up feeling exactly the same way, with exactly the same blood sugar. Pulled my pump site out and there was blood in the cannula.

A failed site.

I changed my site and tried more correction. I forced myself to throw up. Feeling a little better.

By this time Erik is awake.

I'm starting to get freaked out, honestly. I remember a story about a counselor from before my time at Camp Carefree. She was at college and caught a cold, and decided to take a nap. She never woke up, the ketones put her into a coma. This story was terrifying me, I was too afraid to go to sleep. I was literally afraid that I was on the verge of death. I'd never had ketones at this level before, and I'd never had such difficulty getting my blood sugar back down.

Though the second correction had done a tiny bit of good, I decided to take a shot of insulin instead. Erik and I stayed up watching some TV shows and waiting for my blood sugar to go down. By 5:30, I was around 300, and feeling much, much better. We decided to go to sleep.

We woke up around 9:00, and I tested at around 230. Figuring everything was over, I called my endocrinologist to let her know what happened and check in. She wanted me to test my ketones and get a definitive reading, so she sent a prescription for ketone strips to walmart. At 11:00, I retested back in the 300's, and my ketones were large.

I was headed to the ER.

I've never been hospitalized as a diabetic, save my diagnosis. I've had some pretty rough goes of it, but never anything I couldn't handle. And honestly, I was shocked, and a little relieved, that this came about from something that was out of my control. The site was barely 24 hours old, and had been working up until I went to bed. I was spared hours and hours of lecturing, everyone involved assuming that I was a good diabetic and that these things just happen. It almost seemed wrong.

The good news was that, despite my fears, I had never gone in to DKA. The ketone levels were bad, but not so bad that I was ever in any real danger. I was given two liters of fluids, and a shot of insulin to get my levels back down.

Erik and I left the hospital around 6:00pm. We headed back to the residence hall so I could register for classes and get some stuff together, then booked it over to Moe's Burritos to eat for the first time that day. I stayed at his place the next two nights. Sleeping alone was a little too scary, yet.

It's been a week, and I'm honestly still shaken by this.

Hug A Diabetic Day

Today is Hug A Diabetic day.

I've long been a supporter of this day because, well, who doesn't like hugs? But I've been thinking about it. Thinking about people like Erik and my parents who, on a frequent and regular basis, actively support my diabetes and do what they can to make my diabetic life easier. Out of those three people, Erik was able to give me a hug today. And he would have anyways, because he doesn't need a day to do that.

It made me think this day is a lot like those stupid statuses people post that sound scandalous but are really something to do with being feminine and are therefore somehow supposed to raise awareness for breast cancer. We know about breast cancer. Everybody knows breast cancer exists. This is not the kind of awareness that we need. You have not accomplished anything except maybe gotten a few people to think you were talking about sex. Congratulations. Now you can go about your life thinking you did something good for breast cancer when really you didn't do ANYTHING.

I think Hug A Diabetic day just enables people to feel like they support diabetics when they've never done anything for them. And it's completely okay if they've never helped me with my diabetes. It's probably not because they didn't want to, it's because I would never let them. I let very few people in to my diabetic life, and for good reason. It's a hard life, full of me pushing you away and telling you I've got control when I've no such thing. I'm going to be angry at you. I'm going to tell you I did something when I didn't. I'm like an addict. It's messy, it's not fun, and I only let people in that I know care enough about me to not run away as soon as I treat them awful for trying to help me.

Please don't be mistaken, I appreciate those friends who acknowledge how difficult my diabetes is and like the opportunity for a public display of affection. This is not an attack on you, but rather a redefining of how I view this day. I know your intentions are good.

So today, I would like to thank those three people who really, truly, support me as a diabetic. Erik, Mom, and Dad: you are immeasurably helpful, and I'm glad you ignore me when I get moody, get the juice when I'm low, and get the tester when I'm being a brat. If it wasn't for you three, I would be so much worse off. I owe you my life.

Hug A Diabetic Day

Today is Hug A Diabetic day.

I've long been a supporter of this day because, well, who doesn't like hugs? But I've been thinking about it. Thinking about people like Erik and my parents who, on a frequent and regular basis, actively support my diabetes and do what they can to make my diabetic life easier. Out of those three people, Erik was able to give me a hug today. And he would have anyways, because he doesn't need a day to do that.

It made me think this day is a lot like those stupid statuses people post that sound scandalous but are really something to do with being feminine and are therefore somehow supposed to raise awareness for breast cancer. We know about breast cancer. Everybody knows breast cancer exists. This is not the kind of awareness that we need. You have not accomplished anything except maybe gotten a few people to think you were talking about sex. Congratulations. Now you can go about your life thinking you did something good for breast cancer when really you didn't do ANYTHING.

I think Hug A Diabetic day just enables people to feel like they support diabetics when they've never done anything for them. And it's completely okay if they've never helped me with my diabetes. It's probably not because they didn't want to, it's because I would never let them. I let very few people in to my diabetic life, and for good reason. It's a hard life, full of me pushing you away and telling you I've got control when I've no such thing. I'm going to be angry at you. I'm going to tell you I did something when I didn't. I'm like an addict. It's messy, it's not fun, and I only let people in that I know care enough about me to not run away as soon as I treat them awful for trying to help me.

Please don't be mistaken, I appreciate those friends who acknowledge how difficult my diabetes is and like the opportunity for a public display of affection. This is not an attack on you, but rather a redefining of how I view this day. I know your intentions are good.

So today, I would like to thank those three people who really, truly, support me as a diabetic. Erik, Mom, and Dad: you are immeasurably helpful, and I'm glad you ignore me when I get moody, get the juice when I'm low, and get the tester when I'm being a brat. If it wasn't for you three, I would be so much worse off. I owe you my life.

For The Love of Money

I've always been really opposed to bribing kids with money to get good grades. I was never bribed monetarily, though in junior high and the very beginning of high school, my mother enticed me with getting my ear cartilige pierced in return for getting nothing but A's (no A-'s) for two semesters straight. Took me awhile, but I got there. There was no compensation for getting what my parents still considered to be "good" grades, it was only the perfect grades they were going to reward. Besides, most of the kids I knew who were bribed were the kids whose parents were eager to see C's. The students getting straight A's are self-motivated.

Or, well, so I thought.

Since getting on this whole Princess kick lately, reading about it and re-watching the movies, and spending a LOT of time thinking about it, the law of unintended consequences reared its ulgy head. Feminism (to me, I suppose I should clarify) is about empowering women to do what they want to do and be who they want to be, to not feel the need to fit in to a mold or any "gender role." However, when telling girls that they could be anything, it's almost as if we've told them they have to be...everything. A study from Girls Inc. published in 2006 details what they call the "Supergirl Dilemma." Girls still have to be thin and pretty, but now they have to be smart and successful too. Instead of releasing them from the old chains of gender roles, we've expanded those roles to be more demanding.

Anecdotally, I completely relate to this. My friends and I did not simply "want" to go to college and be successful, we were going to. And we spent a lot of time talking about our physical flaws and dieting. And, well, me to a lesser extent (at least from what I remember) but most of my friends talked about partying to be social, and getting along well with everybody, and a few even still clung to the idea of "popularity." You had to be smart, pretty, fun to be around, well-liked by all, the president of every club you joined.

So when I think about girls aiming to get the best grades and be perfect, and not necessarily doing it for themselves, but doing it because of external pressures, it made me mad. What good is that? Teaching our children to be the best they can be for others? Don't we want them to be happy with themselves, to be truly self-motivated, to be what they want to be, and not what they think others want them to be and expect of them?

That's when it hit me: pay them.

Sure, it seems cheap (ethically speaking, of course) for kids to do well in school for money and not "for the joy of learning," but I'd want my kids to do well in school for their own personal reasons and no one else's. I don't want my daughter to go to school and get good grades and think that her reward is one small step on the road to perfection. I don't want her to do it to please me, to please her teachers, or to compete with her friends, I want her to do it to please herself. And perhaps that lesson will be learned in getting good grades for completely selfish and tangible reasons. She won't kid herself into being happy because she made me happy, she'll be happy because she can go out and buy another k'nex set. Or Legos. Or makeup or whatever my daughter will be in to.

I don't want my daughter's happiness to hinge on the happiness of others. She shouldn't have to please other people before herself, it should be the other way around.

Disney: Actually Empowering Girls?

I've been on a Disney kick lately, ever since ABCFamily showed Snow White and Aladdin back to back. It's been a really long time since I've watched any of the Princess Franchise movies, and watching Snow White (1937) and Aladdin (1992) together was incredibly....eye-opening. Ever since declaring myself a feminist a few years back, Disney has been sort of the enemy, the culmination of a society that thinks women should do nothing but find love, get married, and stay in the kitchen. Also be well-behaved and serve her husband. And certainly at one point in time that's exactly how women were portrayed to young girls in these movies.

But not anymore.

In Aladdin, Jasmine is a very aggressive, out-spoken young woman. She has dreams of seeing far off places beyond the palace and declares that "IF she gets married, it will be for love." She rejects her father's commands and tells men off for treating her like a "prize to be won." A far cry from Snow White, a bland, pretty woman with a sing-songy voice who doesn't seem to actually have any intelligent thoughts. Of course, the evil, cunning witch is a woman, but I suppose that's the price you pay for intelligence when you have a vagina: sin.

The difference was so striking, I went back to some other movies to see what they were like.

Pocahontas follows the beats of her own drum. Her father suggests she marry a warrior, but that doesn't seem right to her. She doesn't know what her path should be, and she's still searching. When she meets John Smith and he seems ignorant to her ways, she teaches him, unafraid of having an opposing view. She stands her ground against her village and the Englishman and opposes their violence, speaking up against literally everybody.

Mulan seems to not be able to do anything right. She'll never make a good bride, she speaks to men when not spoken to, and is overall exactly the opposite of what anyone expects of a well-behaved woman. To protect her father, she goes to war in his place even though she will be killed if they find out she's a woman. She stands up for what's right and stands up for all of China. At the end, the Emperor praises her courage and heroism. Despite having initially hidden her gender, she stood before all of China a woman, and a hero.

Of course, in all of these movies, the woman finds love, but it's secondary, an afterthought to the real goal. Mulan doesn't go to war to find a husband, she goes to protect her father and prove herself. Pocahontas finds love in John Smith, but in this love she finds the power to protect and save her people, and ultimately decides to stay with them, when she could have skipped off merrily with her new boyfriend. Sound a little different from the cliche' waiting for a man to sweep her off her feet kind of story?

I was actually planning on watching these movies and counting the number of times a sexist or anti-feminist ideal was spouted, testing the idea that perhaps these movies aren't as bad as I thought. Halfway through Pocahontas I realized I had nothing bad to say about the movie, and about 20 minutes in to Mulan I was convinced she might be one ofthe strongest female characters written. These are actually good movies, with wonderful female characters for young girls to look up to.

It was a pleasant surprise, and I'm glad I returned to these movies. I'm really starting to think all the amazing animation and story-telling are wasted on the youth, because I did NOT appreciate these movies before now.

Gettin' the A

I love how college really isn't about getting the A. Well, for some people it is. But those people will always exist. I mean for the professors, most of the students, and most importantly, employers. I get the impression that everybody wants you to do well, and obviously it would be great if you got an A, but it's not necessarily what they're looking for. They're looking to see what classes you've taken, to see if you've challenged yourself, to see if you have skills they're looking for and skills maybe others don't have.

I can't help but feel like I'm winning college.

I was reflecting on the electives I took this year. Medicinal Chemistry for my advanced chemistry elective, and Business Issues for Engineers for my engineering elective. Medicinal Chemistry really educated me about the pharmaceutical industry in ways I could have never predicted. I got a really great understanding of what goes in to discovering a drug, improving a drug, getting it patented, and how things like intellectual property and health care affects the industry. I am so uber prepared for my internship this summer and I feel like I lucked in to it.

And then of course Business Issues for Engineers (from here on out referred to as BIES). I didn't even know there was such a thing as an "income statement" before this class, and now I can read it and understand what my impact as an engineer is on every line. I understand things like how companies choose customers, how they decide how much money to spend on advertising, how to analyze how they're doing financially, how to analyze the industry.

I got a pretty weak B- in Medicinal Chemistry, and I'm looking at something similar for BIES, but I really don't care. I struggled through the classes because the information was so new to me, but I think it's going to be invaluable to the rest of my career. I'm more prepared than other people who took easy classes and got A's, that's for sure.

I can't help but feel like employers get that, too. Here's hopin' anyways!