I went for a hike up a mountain today. Ended up being another friend's exasperated, "Can't you just go up a mountain or something?" that caused me to think, yeah, I need to go up. Last weekend's camping trip was incredibly wonderful, learned a lot, but the hike wasn't up. For some reason, the up is what I find calming these days. Maybe I'm limited in the speed I can go, maybe the effort induces a meditative state, maybe going up alone instead of with Zeb and Brittany and Mike meant I could be alone with my thoughts. Maybe.

Though I can't say being alone with my thoughts these days is necessarily a good thing, it is a thing.

So I went up the easy hill, figuring I had the three choices of Mt Wire (3 hours), Red Butte (2 hours), and Living Room (1 hour), depending on how hot the sun became (hot), how tired I was (not very), or how loud my thoughts became (very).

I said hello to everyone coming down the mountain as I was going up. I hit my usual pace going uphill, even stopping to have entire very lovely conversations with a couple people. One woman had arrived from sea level this morning, was going up with her friends without much water, and wasn't really an uphill person. She kept dismissing her efforts, "I made it only half way," and I kept insisting what she had done was great! She smiled and eventually saw her accomplishments with the celebration I thought they were worthy of. Was great!

Eventually, my thoughts got the best of me in the sun, so I stopped for a while in the shade just before the Living Room Y, to figure out what I wanted to do. I hadn't seen very many people going up, everyone was coming down, which meant I would likely have Living Room to myself if I went that way. I have never had Living Room to myself, so I turned left at the Y and wandered up.

The view was lovely, hot, and, let's be real, with a siren call to go straight down instead of wandering back along George's Hollow. The ridge was right there, right in front of me, just right. there. I had been thinking about walking up (or down) that ridge for at least a year, more like 2, and there was no reason not to give it a go. I went forward instead of back, and went out to the ridge before me.

From Living Room down to the trailhead and my car via the normal route is about 30 minutes.

From Liviing Room out the ridge, down to the trailhead is about I don't know how many minutes. I didn't make it. I mean, I know which way I wanted to go (south and down), I knew I was in the correct location on the map (hello, GPS), but I could not find the trail. There wasn't a trail where I was. I sat down to figure it out. I wanted to go right, but I couldn't see the trail. I knew that left would take me along the switchbacks back down to George's Hollow (and was likely the side trail I had noted when I passed it an hour+ before). I didn't want to go that way. I wanted to go down the ridge.

At this point, I had been going down the ridge for an hour. According to the map, I was about ⅔ of the way down the trail. Much of the ridge trail was some form of scrambling, with poles tucked away in my bag and hands on rock for balance. Most of the terrain was live, but there were a couple maim locations (no obvious die sections, but a bad slip, and that whole live-maim-die categorization takes a morbid turn).

As I sat on the trail, trying to figure out where to go, John Malkovich walked up the trail to where I was sitting. Well, John Malkovich with hair anyway. I asked him if he knew where the trail was going along the ridge, and he let me know that, hey, this was his first time on this trail, he was trying to find Living Room. Oh, new friend, you have gone much the wrong way today. I explained I was over an hour heading this way down the ridge, and if he took the 15 minutes down the hill, he'd be at George's Hollow trail with a quick left leading him 30 minutes up to Living Room. He laughed and said that he had gone that way recently, but ended up at the top with a strange radio tower. I laughed back and explained that was Mt Wire, and he went the seriously long way up the mountain, Living Room was much closer, take a left at the Y, not a right. Though, now that I think about it, he might have gone straight up Mt Wire from the South, and okay, THAT is a great straight up climb.

I stood up as he turned around to go back down the hill. I followed him along the switchbacks, gathering up a woman and her child, letting them know they, too, were on the wrong path, that they were likely 2 hours from Living Room going up this way, 45 going around, maybe they should turn around. They had little water with them. I really hope the guy who passed us on the trailing going up was heading over to help them. He lacked water, too.

Back to George's Hollow I went, disappointed that I wasn't able to climb down the rim. I might head up the front face of the ridge just to see where the two trails connect. Maybe. I might just go play ultimate instead. The disc is calling me again.

Which is a shame, because apples are my favorite fruit. So much so, that my retirement plan for decades has included an apple orchard. Did I mention I work at my favorite fruit company? Associate that favorite with the fruit part, please. Apples have been a part of my life since I was 9 (wow, almost as long as Antarctica, go life!).

Buckle up, Future Kitt, we're going for a ride. You're going to want to remember this one.

This past May, I started having dizzy spells. I call them "dizzy spells," but they are more like a dizzy, drunk, exhausted, oh-gosh-I-need-to-sleep hit-by-a-tired-stick narcoleptic feeling. The urge to sleep when these spells occur is HUGE. I had some level of transient narcolepsy back in 2015, but that went away early 2016. That narcolepsy actually could have been location based, as I was working in an older building located near previous silicon chip manufacturing locations. These current dizzy / exhausted / need-to-sleep spells were not location based. They are different, more intense, and independent of location.

The sensation was similar to the feeling when you stay awake for 20 hours and you are exhausted tired. Your eyes do a rapid jiggle back and forth and every fiber in your being says SLEEEEEP. If I could when these spells happened, I would go sleep. I would lie down, instaneously fall asleep, and wake up 60 minutes later. That 60 minutes was unusual, because my naps are 90 minutes long. Sixty, and these dizzy / hit with a tired stick spells, were WEIRRRRRRRD.

Unsurprisingly, I did what any modern person does when seeking medical advice: I asked Dr. Google. Lots of things the dizzy-tired spells could be, but the timing of the dizzy spells could give me insights. They happened about thirty minutes after eating, almost, but not quite, consistently. Dizzy after eating narrowed down what could be triggering the spells, and I wanted to know so that I could adjust what I was doing (eat more protein? walk after food? jumping jacks after food? more caffeine? less caffeine? less sugar? something!). The dizzy spells were sudden onset, one day I didn't have them, the next day I had them every day. That also guided my thoughts towards lifestyle changes, but I couldn't remember what I had changed in May.

A mystery! Except, maybe not. Through all this, I was thinking of my family history, what my parents and brothers and grandparents had experienced. Was my age catching up with me? Did I have something old or something new? This had to be something simple, right?

If you hear hoofbeats, don't think zebras, think horses. The simplest, most common explanation is likely correct.

Except, when you grow up on a zebra farm, zebras ARE what you think of first. Your experiences don't match the common experience, and I figured my years of eating sugar had caught up to me.

Dizzy spells and feeling drunk 30 minutes after eating? How many times growing up did I watch Chris go weird or confused when his blood sugar was out of whack? Uncountable times. My brain narrowed in on diabetes quickly.

Diabetes isn't this big, scary thing in my family, it just is. We have taken a long time to get here. It sucks, but it is a well-known, well-defined problem. If I had this auto-immune disease ("I don't have Crohns!"), I had an expert to help me through it. If I had an insulin resistance, I have habits and a need to always be moving that would help keep my blood sugar in check. I would be okay.

But first, I had to figure out if I actually had diabetes.

I talked with Chris about the different continuous glucose monitors he used. He has tried them all. We talked about the pros and cons of the different ones on market. We talked about insurance, and prescriptions, and the words to say to get insurance to pay for the CGM. We talked about the pain of sensor insertion and removal for the top of the line sensors. We talked about which finger prick monitors were the best. I didn't do much beyond signing up for the Stelo over-the-counter "glucose biosensor," an over-the-counter, no prescription required continuous gluclose monitor the FDA had recently approved.

Time passed. The dizzy spells continued.

At some point in the last month, someone asked on a community Slack workspace I'm in, about what people do to measure their blood glucose. Several people had CGM, with a prescription. Some were Canadian and Just Had Them. One woman explicitly recommended a finger prick glucose monitor that was easy to use, and saved readings to one's phone. I bought one and had it delivered to Portland, having it arrive the Wednesday before XOXO began. During a dizzy spell in that evening, I figured out how to take a reading with my new glucose meter, and HFWTGDFBBQ it was 258. Was this accurate? Did I mess up? Did this sensor need calibrating? No Idea! I just knew this was high.

Let us say right now, the moment I am writing this, and for the record, in the moment I saw that reading, I felt that this was the third time that the XOXO community saved my life. Without exaggeration for effect.

I pinged Chris again.

We talked about what is high, and what is low blood sugar. Over the next couple days, when I didn't understand a reading, I asked him what to do about it. He gave me advice on controlling my glucose spikes, what to do when my blood sugar was 41 and when it was 258, and how I could adjust my food and movement. Chris became my counselor as I navigated the possibility of joining him in living with diabetes.

The dizzy spells continued.

The Stelo was also released this festival week. I jumped on the first day order train, and paid the $89 / month for the monthly subscription of two sensors, each lasting 15 days. I wasn't going to receive them for a week, but I was excited about them.

Fast forward to this past Sunday, when I was at Dena and Grue's at a large family birthday gathering. ("Who is that woman?" "That's Kitt, we adopted her as the fifth member of our family." #squee!). I didn't want to insert my first Stelo sensor by myself, as the placement was on the back of my arm and I was uncertain about the whole thing. Dena's sister-in-law, however, had no such qualms. She said, "oh, yeah, I can do that, we need alcohol wipes." I handed her one I had brought with me. She proceeded to pull the sensor and insertion device out of the box, and, thunk, 5 seconds later, it was on my arm. The adhesive patch went on, and 30 minutes later, I had my glucose readings in the Stelo app.

Nifty! What do I do with this?

The dizzy spells continued.

Because the Stelo devices are "biosensors" they do not send real time information to the Apple Health app. If they did, they would be CGMs, and would require more stringent FDA approval. Neat way around the letter of the law to get to helping people. In this case, I approve. I can see my glucose levels in the app, and they were fascinating and extremely informative.

Fast forward a couple days, and I have some data available to me. I absolutely love this data. I can see how my blood sugar goes down when I'm sleeping (interesting!), and I can see how it goes up after I have my usual breakfast of oatmeal, almonds, blueberries, wheatgerm, ground flax seed, nutritional yeast, turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, cocoa, chia seeds, and nut milk. I can see how taking three capsules of fiber as I start to make my breakfast blunts the glucose spike that eating my breakfast oatmeal brings. I can see how exercise pulls up my blood glucose, even if I haven't eaten recently. I can see how walking after eating will drop my blood sugar. All the things that various health providers say to do: don't eat sugars or straight carbs; eat fiber; eat vegetables first, then proteins, then carbs or sweets, always in that order, to slow down the absorption of the sugar. I was getting a handle on this. Doing great!

I had managed to keep my blood sugar in the 70mg/dL to 140mg/dL range for a good part of my days, with a couple going up to 160 as I was experimenting, but thought I was doing a pretty good job of dealing with my blood sugars.

After the first couple meals, however, I was still having the dizzy spells and they were not correlated to the glucose spikes. I would have higher blood sugar and not have a dizzy spell. I would have blood glucose of 82mg/dL and be ready to pass out in the middle of the day, with the same happening at 138mg/dL. The dizzy spells were not correlated to food intake, not even delayed intake, nor blood sugar levels, nor fiber, nor carbs, nor vegetables, nor cinnamon, nor turmeric.

MUCH relief. I am not diabetic.

But what the fuck were these dizzy spells from? They were sudden onset and terribly puzzling. Were they the result of a switch to a vegan diet 4 months before and I was going to need to go off the diet that was working well for other health benefits? What? The? Fuck?

And then I realized, I was taking some pretty powerful medicine to see how it would make me feel, could it help me recover from that hamstring injury from like 17 years ago? I had started taking it in May, adjusting the dose for a bit until I managed a level that helped physically and didn't trigger sleep apnea and dreams of drowning or being smothered by Jonathan. I enjoyed taking that medicine, I liked the effects I had noticed, but maybe, just maybe it was causing this dizziness?

I went off of it.

In two days, the dizzy spells and sudden onset I-NEED-TO-SLEEP-NOW narcolepsy-like exhaustion fits just stopped.

Hot damn! They were gone! Yay yay yay!

So, dizzy spells gone? Check!

Not diabetic? Check!

Glucose in check? Check!

I mean, a blip here, an issue there, I was figuring this stuff out. Fiber before, walk after, don't eat sugar (oh, sugar, I shall miss you, but fuck off). Check!

So, fast foward to yesterday, when mid-afternoon I was hungry. I hadn't had much for lunch. I knew that I was heading over to hang with Grue and Dena shortly, and that we were all planning on having dinner together. I didn't want to eat my usual lunch this late, because it would totally ruin dinner for me. I looked in my refrigerator and pull out an apple. I cut it in half, put the other half in the fridge, wandered over to my desk, and ate the apple as I skimmed a Slack workspace for a bit. Some interesting art and games coming from Portland, and I love celebrating others' achievements. I finished my apple and shifted back over to my work computer, working for a bit.

After about half an hour of working, I pulled out my phone and looked at my glucose level. I have no idea what prompted me to look at my phone, maybe some alert, but holy fucking hell what the Hod-damned fuck just happened?

Half of a large honeycrisp and my blood glucose goes from 90mg/dL to 220mg/dL? And I didn't f--king notice? Again with the What. The. Fuck?

Needless to say, I quickly rose and went for a walk to drop that glucose. I hustled without running to pull it down. I managed to pull it down as fast as it went up, that blood glucose drop is a real thing.

I felt like I started fishtailing my blood glucose. Which of course sent me back to the memories of fishtailing cars, so much fun.

All of these puzzlements were predicated on the accuracy of the Stelo glucose biosensor. I am assuming they are correct because they correlate well to my fingerprick glucose monitor. That "below 70" matched the 66mg/dL the fingerprick test showed, so yeah.

Fuck.

At this point, I don't know when I'll eat apples again. I mean, I'm all of five days into even knowing what my blood glucose was doing. I DO know that I don't want those 220mg/dL spikes (or even a gradual increase to that level, let's be real). Which is a shame. I love apples.

Update 9/9: Mentioned this whole thing to Kris who asked, "What happens when you eat apples with peanut butter? You used to do that." Which is true, that is my favorite apple consumption combination. I'll run that experiment soon, along with fiber 20 minutes before the apple to see if I can eat apples again.

John: "... Your soul is endlessly searching..."

Jonathan: "He nailed it with that one."

Me: "Yeah."

You didn't exist for all of eternity before you were conceived.

You won't exist for all of eternity after you die.

Why not stick around a bit more, hear how this story ends?

There's an excerpt on TikTok of an Anderson Cooper interview with Stephen Colbert from 2019 where they talked about grief. The whole interview is worth watching, and available on YT.

In the interview, Cooper asks Colbert, “You told an interviewer that you have learned to, in your words, love the thing that I most wish had not happened. You went on to say what punishments of God are not gifts. Do you really believe that?”

Colbert answers, "Yes. It's a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering."

Yes, and then explains what he means by this. Certainly the pain was terrible. Of course he would rather it not have happened. It had happened, just as terrible things happen to all of us. We endure, we keep going, we live with the pain, we are changed by it. Our existing means we suffer.

"What punishments of God are not really gifts."

The interview was from 2019. Anderson and Stephen talked about it again in 2022 on Cooper's podcast All There Is with Anderson Cooper, S1E2

I originally saw the tiktok excerpt a while ago, unsurprising as the interview and its sequel happened years ago, but had come across it again a few weeks ago. It happened in a moment of openness. The catch of Cooper's voice, the answer of yes, the recognition of suffering and grief, all of them hit me hard, goosebumps everywhere.

Over a decade ago, at Brooklyn Beta 2013, I heard John Maeda speak to the whole of us. He talked about his response when something goes wrong: "Oh, how fantastic!" He recognized, and preached, that every problem, every mishap, every setback is an opportunity to improve the process, the design, oneself.

I liked Maeda's sentiment, but not particularly his words.

Jonathan and I had grown into using, "Adventure!" as our shorthand when embracing the movie Up's "Adventure is out there!" The word morphed into the word I use upon exiting surprise, shock, or anger at some setback or injustice or problem or shitstorm, shorthand for "Yeah, this moment sucked, but, hey, we are still here, let's fix it, let's laugh about this in the future, and deal with this now."

Adventure!

Many of my friends have picked up on my response, and repeat it back to me, often with enthusiasm, even in difficult or dark moments. I love them for this.

For most people in this world, the monumental shifts in personality or outlook that happen in their lives are either unobservable as slow and subtle, or overwhelming as fast and hard. The latter are usually full of loss and grief and pain. We see those shifts.

My adopting Adventure! as a response was slow and subtle. It became a light in the dark, a chance for me to keep the flame of hope lit during my depression and denial of agency.

We don't usually have fast and subtle. We very rarely notice the subtle, slow or fast. And yet, I have this one.

My adopting, "It is a gift to exist" has arrived hard and fast. It has been the whisper when things are going well, and I want to remember the joy of the moment. It has been the gale force winds when things are going poorly, and I need to remember this moment so that I can be better next time.

I have a single tattoo. I got it to represent my "what I wish had not happened." I unbelievably wish the bad stuff had not happened, that I had made better choices. I would endure the bad stuff again for the good stuff, because the good stuff is and was that good.

That tattoo no longer represents the bad stuff. It is no longer a reminder to make better choices. It is a symbol of the good stuff, the love I found, the adventures we had, the laughs and joy we shared, the beauty in our mundane.

All of this is an adventure. It is a gift to experience this. All of this.

Update: Edited the Adventure section after Jonathan kindly reminded me of its origins. 8/11