So before anything I will say, yes I do hear you people. I should have been paying more attention.

OK, that is now out of the way. Today was not a good day health-wise. The heat was really bad and normally I'm in an air conditioned apartment or at work, but today I was taking the wonderful transit system. The other bad thing that piled on the day was I could feel Mr. Diabetes crawling up on me. The third bad thing was I left work to go straight to the comic shop, which was bad because I worked all night and hadn't slept. I'm not at my thinking best at that point. After I left the comic shop and walked to the bus stop, the heat sapped out any energy I had. By the time the bus came my mouth was cottony, a sure sign I wasn't balanced right. Unfortunately this leg of the bus trip was an hour and being it was the Sunday schedule, if I did the supposed responsible thing and went to a grocery store or somewhere to get water to hydrate myself it would be about an hour before the next bus came.

Despite what some may say the medical records show, when I get this way with the hydration and cotton mouth, the best thing for me is to get some fruit like watermelon to hydrate me. The next best thing is water. I have learned from trial and error, unless I'm home, other fruit and fruit juices are not good for me to use. I won't get gross but it gets messy.

So when I got to the light rail station I was dragging. I made it across the street and got bottled water from a gas station. It was a pint, the largest they had for a reasonable price, and I had that polished off in a few seconds. On the bus I was shaky and thankfully I was able to get a few cat naps in. With the water inside me by the time I got on the light rail I was barely functional, but the internal meter was going up. When I got off the light rail thankfully the next bus I needed was right there and the bus driver was nice enough to let us poop overheated souls in before she left. Even though I was in the bus I could feel the energy leaving me again. By the time I got to the last bus I needed to get home, I was back to the shaky stage. This time there was another gas station convenience store (yeah) but they had a 50 oz of water for a dollar. I grabbed it drank about half of it in a minute. I had more waiting for the bus because I had to wait a few minutes for it to come and the heat was crazy wicked. When I got on the cool air helped and by the time I got to my stop I had enough energy and water to make it home.

When I got home I had enough energy to fill 1.75 liter jug of water and put it in the freezer then turned on the air conditioner and fan and crashed. Two hours later I still have slight cotton mouth but none of the shakes. I drank half of the water from the freezer and typed up this journal. I'm not going to be melodramatic and say I was close to a bad situation. Trust me, I've had bad situations with my health and this was a 5 on a scale of 10, but because I know how my system works I could recognize the signs and knew what to do. I know for certain if I had gone with a fruit juice, which I kind of wanted, I would have been in a world of hurt by the time I got off the light rail. Doing something that simple in my condition could have put me in the hospital at worse.

This is the thing that is so stupid with me and diabetes. You have the 'there's barely anything wrong with you' diabetes and you have the 'we have to hack off body parts' diabetes and to people who don't have it, they sometimes will put us in either extreme. It's kind of like saying you have cancer but without knowing what specific type you could have melanoma or prostate cancer. Both can be deadly, both can be treated, it just matters on a number of factors what the outcome can be.

I have up and down days. A few weeks ago I was feeling OK, had some fruit, not a lot just some variety of fruit, and the next thing I knew I had the slight shakes for the rest of the day (and yes, it was the messy kind). Like I knew it would be, when I checked my glucose levels they weren't bad, in the 120 range. A few days later, after eating the right stuff and feeling great, I checked it and it was in the 210 range. It's a crazy beast to try and get a handle on. I know what I should do is get a physician who can help me understand the wild fluctuations and help me get a handle on it, but that means money and it's like the person who has something wrong with the car until you take it to the mechanic and nothing can be found. As long as I can read my body and know what can help me, even if it's touch and go, it's better than waiting for the shake bouts to hit.