Three Weeks Have Flown By

Wow three weeks have just flown by.  The last time I wrote on the blog was the day after the Los Conchas fire started.  That fire is the biggest in New Mexico history.  Last I heard it was something like 140,000 acres, which I actually have no idea how big that is but I'm sure it's pretty big.  Sounds big.

I didn't mention this last blog but when I left for work on June 27th I hadn't heard that the lab was closed.  I missed the train that morning, which turned out to be a blessing, and as I'm driving towards Santa Fe I see this hugh cloud and I'm hoping that it might rain, but when I get to it I see that it's all smoke, so I look up towards where Los Alamos is and it's dark up there and I think to myself that no one could possibly breath in that so I decide to call the hot line to see if maybe work was canceled.  What the heck it's worth a try.  The hot line says that the Lab is closed and I was passing an exit on the freeway and slammed on my breaks and took the exit and came home.

Apparently I was the only person in my family who hadn't heard on the news, or some other source that the Lab was closed.  So I decided that I would start to clean off the side yard.  I say side yard but it is actually the area out the outside of our fence next to the road that the city says that we're responsible for and every year they come and say that we need to weed it.  Karen has planted some wild flowers there and they look really nice for a couple of weeks, but pretty scruffy the rest of the year.  When we first moved in we tried putting down some crusher fines to keep the weeds down, but we didn't get enough delivered the first time, and perhaps we couldn't afford to cover it all at that time but I didn't finish.  Also, the red lava rocks that we'd laid down had a bunch of weeds grow up in it and it looked bad.  I'd been thinking of cleaning it up and decided to start while I had this unexpected time off.  I started on Monday and thought it would take a day or two to finish.  I actually finished with everything that Saturday so it took 6 days instead of a day or two.  I think it looks a lot better now.  Karen says she misses the wild flowers but I don't.

On July 4th we went to the ward breakfast in the morning with Goosy, then in the afternoon we went to a party with her that someone from her work was giving.  Goosy really is growing up when she get invited to "adult" parties from work that we get to go to.  (The Goosy growing up part gets way worse in this blog than this.)

The Los Conchas fire was gotten under control and we had to go back to work.  On the first day that I went back Karen asked me about my crappy lungs and how I would fare in smokey Los Alamos.  A few years ago I was tested for asthma and while I don't have asthma the doctor told me: "You have crappy lungs.  It's a good thing you don't live somewhere with pollution like LA."  I told Karen I'd be OK, but by 9 that morning I was starting to get very congested lungs and was losing my voice.  I looked at the Park and Ride schedule and found out that the last bus had left about 3 minutes before, so I called Karen and asked her to come pick me up, and she very kindly came up and picked me up.  I took the rest of that Wednesday off, and Thursday.  I also went and bought a hepa filter for my cubicle for when I got back to help keep the air around me cleaner.  It seems to have worked.  Right now the air up there is pretty clean and I think that I'll start trying to figure out how to bring the filter home.

That Thursday Cathy called and said that she was going to be taking Grandma Evans to Arizona to see Aunt LaVon at their Arizona family reunion.  She said that Beth (my cousin) would be there, Lisa would come as well from Mayer and did we want to go with her?  Cathy loves to plan things out in advance.  It was a lot of fun to be go and see everyone and get to spend time with my sisters, and to see my cousins.  We hadn't seen everyone since the last time we went there.  It was fun to spend time with Grandma as well, but she doesn't visit very well.  We stopped at Earls in Gallup and ended up getting Karen about $100 worth of jewelry.  Gooey went with us as well.  It was a fun weekend, even if it was thrown together at the last minute.

I went back to work and the HEPA filter worked pretty good, but I had to leave my cage quite a bit, and my lungs started to get a little congested.  It was especially bad when I walked to the bus stop because the fire was still burning down south and the smoke would get blown in and it was very smokey and that was bad.  However, I saw that a couple of people had gotten the face masks that Occ. Med. was handing out.  I asked if they worked and was told that they worked really well, so on Tuesday I went and got a mask and got made fun of, but it seemed to help a lot.

This last weekend we had the youth conference and had a very interesting service project.  We went to the Catholic cemetery and picked up trash and weeded.  We picked up a ton of trash.  They divided up the cemetery into six zones and I was working in the first zone and didn't realize how much was getting done until I took my first full bag on weeds to a trailer and saw how heaped it was.  By the time we were done it was a mountain of trash.  I was talking to the high councilor that was there and he said that the caretaker was pretty much overwhelmed with gratitude.  It was a hot day, and Karen got a touch of heat stroke, and I was pretty wrung out so we left in the afternoon when Karen stood up to sing a song and said that she nearly passed out.

So that's pretty much what has happened in the last few weeks.  Karen and I are in the 3rd week of the maintenance phase of the hCG diet.  Karen is following the rules pretty good but I'm not.  However, things seems to be going to way that I would like them to.  I've gained 8 lbs but 6.9 lbs of that is lean body mass (muscle) and 1.1 lbs of body fat.  I was worried about how much muscle that I lost during the dieting phase and I've gained about half of it back.  I have to admit that I was hoping I would be able to gain the muscle and lose more fat.  Actually I'm amazed that I'm able to gain weight at all with how few calories I'm eating.  I'm averaging around 2100 a day, as well as I'm still exercising pretty vigorously in the morning (now that I have some more muscle) so I would think that I'd be losing weight but I'm not.  The body is a pretty amazing thing.

I also went and had another HA1c test.  It was 5.5 which averages out to 111 which is pretty good but I was hoping that it would be a little closer to 100.  I don't know when I'll go back and get the next test I'll just have to wait and see.  However I've gone from 7.6 (171) to 6.4 (137) to 5.5.  That's pretty good and I'd have to say that I've got my BG better under control.  I'm taking 2 grams of metformin a day because I like eating fruit, and I'm pretty sure that it would be higher without the metformin.  In fact I've forgotten to take it a couple of time and I can see that my BG has gone up every time.  Hopefully after the next round of the diet I'll get my weight down even further and the control will be better.  I'll just wait and see, but right now I'm thinking that it's worth taking the the metformin to be able to eat fruit.  Fruit is the only thing that I've added to my diet that I didn't eat before.

Diet Update and more Colloidal Silver

I hate that diet sems to be the thing that I mostly seem to be writing about on here.  However, eating is something that we all have to do and when you have diabetes diet becomes even more critical.

I'm striving to get my blood sugare under control.  I seem to be doing pretty good but hopefully I can do better.  For a while there I was getting readings below 100 pretty regularly.  I then caught a cold, then, apparently have alergies and they kicked up.  That was weird because I started coughing on a Friday afternoon at 2:00.  I was talking to someone at work when it happened and I thought it was wierd because nothing seemed to cause it.  I didn't have a runny nose or anything else, I just started coughing.  By that night I could hardly talk and I wasn't able to sleep because when I layed down the coughing got worse.  Karen went with me to the doctor the next week and with Karen talking to him they decided that it was probably allergies.  That's OK, if that's what it is, because hopefully I'll be able to keep it from turing into an anual case of bronchitus.  However, with the possible cold and hay fever making it hard to exercise my BG started getting a little higher.

When I went to the he ran another HbA1c.  The first test on 1/25 was 7.6 (171 mg/dl) and this last one on 3/24 was 6.4 (137).  That's a pretty good improvement but I was hoping that it was better.

Also I've lost a little wieght, but even more importantly on the scale that Goose gave me that made me fat and stupid it says that I've reduced my body fat percentage by 3%.  That pretty good.  I've lost about 4 pounds as well.  Losing weight can also help me get my BG under control as well.  I guess that I'll just have to keep trying the slow and constant method.

I've thought that the HbA1c was an average of 3 months with the last month being a little more influential.  My doctor said it gives a reading for the last 2 weeks.  I hope that's not right, and since I usually follow what's in the Bernstien book I guess I'll just keep following that.  I'm just going to schedule the next test 3 months from now so there won't be any overlap.

I got a rash on my hand that was pretty painful.  Iwanlani and Karen said that it was probably exzema.  Someone or somewhere I've heard that it is caused by the chickenpox virus.  (I thought Nini told me this but she says that she didn't.)  I don't know if that true or not, but after a couple of weeks it got worse and was cracked and bleeding.  I showed it to Karen for some sypmathy and she asked if I'd poured the silver water accross it.  I said that I was going to wash it with the silver water to see if it'd get rid of it.  That's wat I did, and by that afternoon it was cracked an bleeding and didn't itch anywhere near as bad.  Karen was pretty impressed, and fankly so was I.  So fat the silver water seemed to clear up the congestion in my lungs, kept 3 canker sores from getting painful, pretty much a little hole starts in the mought that you know is going to be a canker sore, and the silver water just keeps it there and then it goes aways.  Doesn't become a hugh painful crater.  Then it seems to have cleard up the rash/exzema on my hand.  Not bad.  I think the stuff actually works.

Colloidal Silver and Atkins Cookies

This has been a fairly eventful week.  My sister Cathy had a friend that had told her that she used to get bronchitis and pneumonia quite a bit but that she'd started drinking something that kept her from getting it anymore.  She asked if I'd be interested in it.  I'm pretty much interested in anything that might help me keep from getting sick a couple months a year.  Turns out it's called Colloidal Silver.  She got a couple of bottles of the stuff and the lady gave her a printout of information about Colloidal Silver.  It was very interesting stuff.  The information that I got didn't say anything about how much I should be taking or what the concentration of the Colloidal Silver that I had.  Then I looked up some more information about Colloidal Silver on the internet, including Dr. Mercola's web site, an alternate medicine site that I look at.  Eventually I got hold of Cathy and she gave me the names of the people that she got the silver water from.  I gave them a call and was able to talk to the husband, Bill Norton.  He talked to me a while about it, but basically he told me that I should drink about an ounce a day prophylactically.  He also mentioned that he had a nebulizer and that he put the silver water in the nebulizer instead of the saline and albuteral.  He also reminded me about a web site called thesilversource.com, which was mentioned in the literature.  I went to the site and found that a lot of people there spayed the silver water in their noses to help keep from getting colds.


I have to admit that I was pretty surprised when I woke up the next morning and felt a lot better.  My nose was nowhere near as runny as it usually is in the morning when I exercise.  My chest didn't feel as heavy.  I was pretty impressed.  However, the next day Thursday I woke up and I felt wrung out completely.  I tried just riding the exercise bike but couldn't do it, so I went back to bed for 1/2 an hour.  Later that day it felt like a cold was coming on.  I decided that I'd try doing the salty nose thing and finish up with silver water, and try drinking some more of the water.  Friday I woke up feeling better.  I have to admit that I'm pretty impressed with the stuff.


The diabetes front is going pretty good.  I re-read the section of the Diabetes Solution about medication.  He mentioned that there was some stuff called R-ALA (Alpha Lipoic Acid) that acted like an insulin memetic.  I decided to try and get some and try it.  The book suggested that I get a brand called Insulow so I ordered it from Amazon.  I started taking it at night but that actually seemed to start raising my BG in the morning a little.  I then tried taking it before meals as the direction of the bottle says.  That started to work really well I was getting reading below 100 right around 90 and even had some below 90.  I was getting pretty excited, and then this week for some reason the readings started going back up above 100.  I don't know what's going on, but that's still not too bad I think.


I'm starting to build up some endurance in exercising.  Last week I was to tired to fully exercise a couple of day so I only did the exercise cycle a couple of days.  This week I've been able to work out every day except for Thursday and I think that that might have been caused by a cold that started coming on.


Today I decided to try and see if the Atkins Cookies would be as bad for my BG as I thought they would be.  They were bad.  I don't know if they were as bad as I thought they would be but they were pretty bad.  I guess that I'll not try those again for a while.  Perhaps when I lose some weight I might try the cookies again.


I've been watching my diet and cutting back on the calories.  It seems like my weight is going down some.  I guess about as much as I can expect them to.  The BF% is going down according to the scale that Goosie got me.  From what I understand about the scales they're not the most exact devices, but they do log trends, and the BF% trend is down and that's good.  According to what I've read everything says that the more weight that is lost the better your insulin sensitivity becomes.  That's what I'm hoping anyways.

Photos and Stuff and a Diabetes Update

On Friday I spent a lot of the day working on my iPhoto libraries.  iPhoto is cool, but the library can get huge.  In order to fight that I've found that I could use a program called iPhoto Library Manager that will let you launch different instances of iPhoto.  What I've started doing is keeping an iPhoto Library on an external TerraByte drive and a library on my laptop.  The library on the external drive has 16000 items and is 50 GB.  The one on my laptop has 1600 and is 5.6 GB.  See how that is a little better and easier to work with?  Well Friday I spent some time trying make sure that Karen, my and the Big Dog (that's the external drive) were all in sync somewhat.  AFter that I started working on trying to fix my blog the way that I would like it.  The faces really helped set up the slideshows that I used on my blog, and the photo of Karen.

The next day I was feeling virteous and decided that I would scan in the pictures that Karen had left for me on my desk.  It was a very big time consuming job.  It turns out that these were photos that Karen had gotten after her mother passed away, and they were some very cool pictures that I'd either never seen, don't remember seeing, or hadn't seen in a long time.  I finally just conked out working on the pictures Saturday night, and thought that I'd be able to finish up on Sunday.  I thought that I'd gotten all of the photos out of the envelope but I moved it on Sunday and realized that there were a lot more pictures in the envelope so there was still a long way to go.  I was to disappointed to finish, so I did a few other things, like balance our checkbook.

So today I finally finished scanning in all of the photos.  Turns out there were 265 pictures scanned in when I was done.  I thought that some of the family might like to see, or copy these photos so I put them up on the web.  I think that our daughter might especially like the photos of their Mom when she was in High School.  I assume that she was in high school, it look like that about her age.  There's also a few pictures of her on her mission.  So for whoever is interested here are the different slide shows that will link back to the albums.

I'll start with pictures of Grandma Norma and her family. Some of these you'll have to check with Mom to see who they are. This also includes a painting of the picture of Phillip, Mom's brother that passed away.


Next are photos of Karen from when she was a curly headed little girl, similar to Teda when she was young, to the beautiful lady she became.


Next are family pictures of our family as we got older, and in my case bigger. These also include pictures of Mom and I by ourselves or with family members.


Some of my favorite pictures are pictures that I call daughter pictures. They pictures of our daughters in different combinations.



The girls as the grow up starting with Kiki and working down to Gooey (Chantel).













Diabetes Good News
I have some good news on the diabetes front. I was excited when I was able to keep my BG under 120 for a whole day. Well on Saturday I was able to keep in under 100 for a whole day. This included the dawn effect. I exercised then ate breakfast and measured my BG two hours later and it was still under 100 BG. It stayed that way for all 4 readings. I was so excited that I didn't risk testing it at bedtime. I felt a little guilty about that but I didn't measure it anyway. I started feeling guilty and thought about getting up and measuring it but by that time I was just too tired and let it ride. Sunday the BG was still under 100, but I knew that since I wasn't going to be exercising. That was right it rose to 115 BG then started to fall by the time I went to Church around 1:00. When I got home it was again under 100, however I forgot to take my merformin. I don't know why it just slipped my mine. I slipped my mind until I measure by BG before bed and it was 127. I was a little depressed because I didn't think that I'd taken anything that would cause that spike. However that was when I realized that I had forgot to take the metformin. I guess that metformin stuff does work. Today it wasn't belier 100 when I got up, but it's been hovering around that all or a little below.

Tonight Mom and I tried one of the recipes from "The Diabetes Diet." It was parmesan crusted pork chops. Actually the recipe called for lamb chops, but we substituted pork chops. It was good but let me just say that next time we hope that the cooking will go a little smother. While we were shopping I read a suggestion on a package of feta cheese that suggested trying to put some feta cheese in mashed potatoes. I thought that sounded great and throughout that it would be good in mashed cauliflower. That's the substitution that is suggested in the diabetes book for potatoes and it's pretty good. So we tried that as well. Over all it was a pretty good dinner. I'll test my BG and let everyone know what it is right before I sign off tonight.

Well the final reading for the day is 116.  That means for the day it was 103, 103, 98 then 116.  That's not that bad but I've started getting used to the lower readings so it's a little disappointing.  It might be that I simply ate to big of a meal.  There is something called the "Chinese Dinner Effect".  I don't have the book with me (I lent it to someone) and don't remember exactly how it works, but I do remember that it does work.

Random Thoughts on Diabetes

First Though Gooey Made Me FAT – or Stupid

A while back we moved some stuff around the house and someone set my old scale on it's side and we left it there for a while. That is not the way to treat a measuring device, even a bathroom scale. It was fun to use though because you could easily lose 10 lbs. However, you could also gain the same amount. Well I stopped weighing everyday, so that meant I could eat whatever I wanted. Everyone knows that when a tree falls in a forest it makes no noise unless someone hears it; well that means that if you don't measure weight gain it doesn't happen right? Well that's how I see it. Then I caught my annual bought with bronchitis/walking pneumonia so then not only did I not weigh but I decided that I could eat as much comfort food as I wanted. Now an intelligent person could see that this is not a good situation.

Well Gooey is intelligent and knows how much I liked to weigh everyday, so for Christmas she bought me a new scale. It is a very good scale that measures body fat and water percentage. Gooey also programmed it for Mom and I to use. However, I did mention that you only gain weight when you measure it right? so I didn't start using it for a while.

Then I had an appointment with a Nephrologist. They had me do a 24 hour urine test and when I went back to talk to the Nephrologist the report said that my blood glucose was 170! Yikes! That was very bad.

I knew that I had to start weighing again and so I was going to use Gooey's gift that she gave me. The first time I used it it said that I weighed 260 lbs and 44% body fat. Oh my gosh that was terrible. Gooey made me fat, very fat. 44% body fat that was unbelievable but not really that much worse than 170 mg/dl blood glucose, so I decided that I'd just accept it and start trying to improve my diabetes control.

Teda called Mom and I started talking with her and was complaining to her about how fat Gooey had made me. Teda couldn't believe how fat Gooey made me. Well we both knew who to blame...Gooey.

Then I used the scale again and noticed that there were two readings, body fat and water percentage. I had missed the body fat reading and was looking at the water percentage. Oops. Well my body fat was still unacceptably high at 35%, but that's way better than 44%.

I hope everyone can see how Gooey has made me fat, by getting me a scale, and made me stupid by getting a scale I can't use.

Blood Sugar is Getting Better

I went to my doctor about the bronchitis and the blood sugar since it was after the nephrologist appointment. They gave me a blood sugar test and it was 196 mg/dl. That was terrible. Awful. They also did the first HA1c test I've ever had. When I first started controlling my diabetes the HA1c wasn't being used and since I had my blood sugar mostly under control I've never had one. The HA1c gives an average of your blood sugar over about a 3 month period but it is geared towards the last couple of weeks. Well my HA1c was 7.6. You can get a quick reading on what that means by multiplying by 21 that's a 159 mg/dl average. However, that 21 number really works best if you're blood sugars are close to average. If you're really interested you can see the real formula here. If you run through the equation my actual average was 171.42. That sucks even worse.

I needed to get things under control. However, I still had a lot of comfort food around so I decided to eat it before I started getting the blood sugar under control. That makes sense right!? Right. I also had a new glucose meter, but I decided to put off using it until I figured out which strips my new insurance company would cover. Eventually, after a couple of weeks, I started monitoring. The first reading was 196 mg/dl. OK that depressed me but what depressed me even worse was that I kept getting readings that high, one was 206 mg/dl. So I then started taking my Metformin as well. It is an insulin sensitizing agent, which means that it makes your body more sensitive to insulin and helps you get the blood glucose under control. That helped quite a bit.

Here's a funny story in an ironic kind of way. I bought a pound of shrimp from Wal-Mart. Breaded popcorn shrimp. I know that I shouldn't eat stuff like that but I really didn't know how bad it could be, because I'd never measured it before, thank goodness, because it was 282. That's the last time that I do that.

I started measuring my blood sugar and the first week the average was 156 according to my meter. After a while I realized that I should really start logging everything so that I can see what is happening and start really getting a grip on what is going on. I'm also trying to make sure that the stupid bronchitis thing doesn't kick back up. I started exercising again, very slowly. The first week that I started was also the week that it got bitterly cold. My BG (that stand for blood glucose) was 169 an hour after exercising, and then I measured it again after walking to work and it was 177. That's terrible. My BG used to shoot up immediately after exercising and would return to near normal after about an hour. However, that was very vigorous exercise and this exercise hardly broke a sweat. Then I got sick again, so sick that I had to take another day off even though I didn't want to. The next week I felt pretty good by Monday so I started exercising again, and was adding pushups. I got sick again, but didn't have to take off work but I did stop exercising the next week and stopped walking to work. Mean while my diet was greatly improving and my BG was going down. This week I started to exercise again and while I started to feel sick at the beginning of the week I kept it up and felt better towards the end, and today.

I kept thinking about the BG readings and I realized that I needed to start logging them so that I could correlate what was going on when I ate different things. When I first got diabetes and kept a log, I did it in a little note book. This time I realized that I could probably find an iPod app that would do it and I found a really cool app called LogFrog. The ratings on the app made it sound like it was an app for kids. They said that the way the entries are made made it fun for kids, but it looked easy and like it kept track of everything that I needed it to do so I got it. It has a really cool graphing feature that I like here's picture of it the graph. The app is very fun to use, and pretty ingenious. I like it.

The graph is pretty cool. You can expand it just by using the reverse pinch motion on the iPod. I've squeezed everything down so that all the reading show and you can see the trend. You can also see the shrimp meal spike.

You can see by the graph that the readings are trending down. It also highlights the target range which I have set at 80-120. Wednesday was the first day that I had readings all in the normal range. Thursday I almost had them all in, but I had the morning exercise increase so I had a couple readings above 120 but it wasn't too bad. I've been working to try and figure out how to keep the morning readings down. Strangely enough I do it by eating. On the last fast Sunday my first reading was 126, then it was 145 a couple of hours later, then right before church it was 122 and then 115 after church before dinner. I noticed that the metformin bottle said that it should be taken with food, so I decided that I would try taking the metformin with a snack at the same time before exercising, but I was going to experiment with it by not eating any food with the medication at the first of the week and then try it with food at the end of the week.

It doesn't seem to really change the morning readings that much, but I started eating a little snack and taking the medicine right before I'd walk to the bus stop in the afternoon and the first time I did that the reading was 83. That's the lowest reading I think I've had in ten years. The next day it was 92. Thursday someone gave me a ride to the bus stop and then the reading was 115. Seems like exercising in the afternoon works great.

Right now my weekly average is 115 so that's much better. My monthly average is 130, but it still has to deal with the 282 reading. Once that falls off it will probably improve greatly. I'm supposed to be going in for the next check up in another month or so where I'll get my next HA1c. My weight and body fat is down as well. Getting my weight down will help with the BG so I'm getting serious about losing the weight once again. I'll keep everyone updated.