Murphy & the Endangered Species in the Rear View Mirror

Who or what is the most endangered species in your experience?  If you or someone you love has insulin dependent diabetes then perhaps you & I will have a bit of an usual answer to that question.  Let’s answer the endangered species in a few minutes & for now focus on the Murphy part of being in the rear view mirror.

Remember, last week I shared my thoughts about Murphy’s Law.  This week I will say without hesitation that putting Murphy into my rear view mirror is taking more perseverance, patience, fighting the good fight, feisty attitude & more.  Murphy keeps popping up in my life more often than usual lately.  There is likely a reason for this although at this point it remains a mystery to me.  Whether we have diabetes or another “365” challenge or enjoy perfect health (what does that look like again) Murphy is someone best viewed I think in the rear view mirror.  You know how it feels to do something simple…something that you have literally done hundreds or more times seamlessly.  It is like a non event until Murphy steps in.  Murphy decided last week that it was time for me to have that rare yet irritating experience of putting in a brand new infusion site & have immediate  pain.  That is the telltale sign for me that I have most likely hit a blood vessel.  I toyed with the idea of just taking a stiff upper lip response to the pain & seeing if it would go away because no one likes to figuratively flush $15 down the water closet (cost of each infusion site).  Still though, my gut feeling which is usually bang on was screaming at me that this infusion site had to come out.  The risk of leaving it in aside from the pain is that insulin delivery would be severely compromised & I would land up in quick order with skyrocketing hyperglycemia.  I listened to my gut within 5 minutes of insertion of the infusion set & removed it.  Sure enough it was one heck of a bleeder & I had by Murphy’s Law hit a blood vessel.  Out with the old & in with the new though & the day went on with the second infusion site without further pain or anything else.  Thankfully, I can count on 2 hands the number of times in 7 years that I have had the misfortune to hit a blood vessel with either an infusion set for my insulin pump or a needle when I was doing multi-injections. 

Do you have that infinite list of tiny things to do that are non urgent that don’t quite make it to the top of the list due to other pressing things in your life?  I am sure that you do.  I have one too.  One of the silly little non urgent things that I had on my secondary to do list was to glue a Mickey Mouse Christmas globe decoration back together.  The decoration had sat on our kitchen corner countertop since last November waiting to be glued back together.  Last week I saw it for the umpteenth time & decided that this would take me only a minute or two to repair so I would finally do it.  Out came the hot glue gun & on went the glue to the globe & then I began to attach the pieces together.  This should be a non event.  Instead the glass ornament shattered in a zillion pieces…some into my hand & others onto the floor & all over the countertop in the kitchen.  No one I am sure likes the sight of blood.  Although I do 10-12 glucose tests a day without a second thought, the sight of blood in greater quantity immediately sends me into a mini panic.  My husband was on dinner break at work so he came home thankfully & mercifully cleaned up the glass & assured me that my cuts were not as bad as they looked.  As a light aside, if you have type 1 diabetes you will nod your head as I share that I thought about doing a glucose test & you will get why.  Thank goodness for “captain cool” aka my husband.  He is the calmest person that I know & I am grateful for his quiet, strong presence.  I made captain cool a quick, early hot dinner with extra love stirred in & off he went back to work looking as calm as ever.  I admire that calmness.

The next appearance by Murphy is really something that can & does happen to lots of other people & is completely unrelated to diabetes.  While my husband was on his way back to work I finished making dinner for the rest of our family.  I had to in my mind go faster because I felt the need to make up the time I lost with the non repair of the ornament.  In my rush clumsy Murphy lead to me dumping bacon grease down my white kitchen cupboards in one corner of my kitchen.  Bacon is a guilty pleasure that our sons & I enjoy about every other month in the form of a breakfast for dinner.  I never have to call any of our sons twice on the breakfast for dinner times.  The breakfast for dinner idea that night was more out of necessity I will admit than anything else because I had been so sick for 2 weeks & had not made it to the grocery store for over a week.  The way these 3 sons can eat, I find that I usually have to go grocery shopping at least once a week especially for perishables.  Our sons are cute eating machines.  I cleaned up the mess I had created & remembered something that my husband says from time to time.  He says, “You have to slow down to speed up sometimes.”  My husband is very plan full & he is the type of person that thoroughly reads instruction manuals cover to cover & then does the work with mindful pace with attention to excellence.  He has patience to spare.  I married my opposite personality in many ways & this is something that I appreciate.  I am a kinesthetic type who really does not have the patience for instruction manuals.  Instead, I just look at whatever job needs to be done & I just dig in right away.  This has lead to many things that I have attempted to put together being completed yet many extra parts being leftover & frankly my husband quietly taking some of my work apart & doing it “to code.”  My approach to life left to my own devices is hurry up & get started & do several things at the same time when it comes to tasks.  Some things in life work out okay with this approach & other things really make more sense being handled in a more by the book fashion.  The point is in this instance had I just not been hurrying in an effort to make up for lost time which is absurd in the first place dinner would have been a non event & likely I would not have had a messy spill that time.  The spill though in the end is & was just a minor inconvenience so I will stop making a mountain out of mole hill.  Often I am reminded that I gravitate towards people versus tasks or things.  People make me smile.  The winning combination of people & tasks happens in those instances where I get to cook and or bake for Dear Hearts.  That is how the love is stirred in.

On the Thursday right before Easter I finally began to feel well again.  The migraines & nausea & flu like or bad cold like stuff began to lift & I got an energy burst.  I got caught up on restocking the refrigerator & planning out last Sunday night’s Easter feast.  I cleaned our house up & did some activities with energy with our sons.  It felt great to feel better again finally.  Murphy made an appearance that very night at 2am.  This brings us to the endangered species that I mentioned earlier on.  This species is sleep.  At 2am I got hit with a wakeup call in the form of marathon running sweatiness, dizziness, a numb tongue & more.  As I reached for my glucose tester I knew 100% that I was having a low blood sugar.  Sure enough my tester acted as Captain Obvious & more irritating still was the beep & message that appeared on my meter telling me to take 12 grams of fast acting sugars.  I kind of felt like throwing the tester out the window.  I already knew that I had to have the fast acting sugars & it bugged me that my meter was telling me what to do.  I am a stubborn rascal that way.  If you have type 1 you may have that tendency towards being irritated in general when you are experiencing a low blood sugar.  We are all beautiful originals so each one of us will experience high & low blood sugars differently.  I gobbled down the necessary sugar & my blood sugars came back into range however I never did get back to sleep.  The next morning I felt like something that the cat had dragged in however I had a morning commitment with our sons so I took the stiff upper lip approach & carried on.  I find that I can kind of go on adrenaline for a day & so a sleepless night does not fully hit me until the next day.  Saturday was a sleepy day yet I had convinced myself that I would put Murphy in my rearview mirror & that the endangered species of sleep would be back & that I would appreciate it all the more.  The endangered species made 2 glorious appearances so that I could get 2 uninterrupted nights sleeps which had been rare over the past few weeks.  The species was short lived however since on Monday night I could not sleep all night between painful abdominal pains that I get in differing levels of intensity every 2 or 3 months for the past 5 years.  Also our youngest son had a bad dream & ended up in our room flopping around like a trout in our bed for the night.  He is one of those sleepers who moves all over the place.  Still it was a blessing that he got back to sleep.  There is something very dear about watching your children sleep.  My hope is that I see more of the endangered species soon.  I refuse to give up on trying to see more of the endangered species & less of Murphy.  And more than this, even on days when I feel exhausted physically, I feel grateful for the countless blessings in my life.  I appreciate them more & more every day.

My heart’s hope for you is that you have continuous sightings of the endangered species & as few as possible of Murphy.

Smiles, Saundie

May your week ahead be filled with countless spottings of the endangered species.  Next Monday’s story is percolating already although not yet written however does have a title of “Cheering for the Underdog.”   :)