Monitoring

I’m three weeks into thumb tendon recovery. Thankfully, all healing is going as planned. Even with the nondominant hand, losing one’s grip compromises daily functions. You’re going about your business, and suddenly you’re faced with a zip lock bag or jar to open, or you’re ready to cut into that luscious dense bread, and you need to grip it, for example.

This picture is not my thumb. I can’t bend it even that much. At this stage, Chuck warns that doing the exercises too aggressively will undo the surgeon’s work and could stretch the healing tendon beyond repair. Yikes!

I’m in the throws of monitoring minute movement and worry about doing it just easy and just hard enough.

As you may know, I’ve been into paying attention to insulin resistance. About three weeks ago, I started using a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to sleuth more closely. This is a picture of that deadly time, 3:00 in the afternoon, when the office is sharing a birthday cake.

Look at this nice example of a spike! Notice also how it dips way down before going on its merry, stable way. The spike and the dip are linked with feeling a certain way: for me, concentration slips, I am a little bit edgy, then energy sags. It turns out to be a time when one is naturally tempted to eat more sweet things. If you’ve lived this way for awhile, you don’t feel the roller coaster ride; your cells (in many departments) get a bit tired of it all–they become less responsive to insulin. And don’t forget the mighty overworking regulating hormone, insulin working harder day in and day out.

It was supermarket cake, too sweet and tasteless. Not worth the spike. But I’m glad to have a visual now. Over-sugared and tasteless cake should be a crime or at least taxable to highest extent of the law!

Alas, we are built to succumb to the sweet and forked tongue.

Using a CGM can get lonely and <ahem> obsessive, where you check it all of the time! I decided to get more help reconfiguring my sweet tooth habit. I joined a four-week group. Meet Jessie Inchauspeto, aka Glucose Goddess. She’s generous and joyful and the most skillful science teacher I have come across. Please do read her first book, Glucose Revolution (in the finest of libraries and bookstores). If you want to implement changes, then check out her new book, which has recipes and is structured to help you start feeling the ride. Get a group of friends and ‘do the book’; If you have Instagram, then please follow her.

Week one, where we learn our way around the habit of savory breakfasts is underway. I’ve been working on this one since before the group started. I’m a homemade jam and toast kind of breakfast person, so it’s a big change. More later, but spoiler alert: I’m amazed what a difference a savory breakfast makes!

Spring has been beautiful, as usual. The drought last year did its damage, but the mild winter gave some plants an early start. That’s tarragon in the front right foreground. And look how tall the garlics are! I grow them for the scape phase, but I’ll harvest the tiny bounty no matter how comically small the garlic head.

This herb bed was born in the spring of 2020, along with millions of other people, I took up gardening.

I’m hooked now. I garden.

I monitor whether there will be one more frost. I track each success and heartache. I scheme, and plan, dig and pull, and re-plant.

The flip-side of March is the end of April and finally May. Blossoms exploding, new green building to a crescendo, fuller and stronger each day. If you’re lucky to have birdsong, then good luck to you! It’s loud in the morning!

Afternoon weekend walks in the park, blue sky with puff clouds and with blossoms everywhere…is there anything more distracting, more dreamy and hypnotizing?

A zoom-out, wider, looser view; a lovely antidote to all of this monitoring.