Sick again? Fuck.

 I don't know what I have. I only know that my blood sugar is running absurdly high, which means I am sick. My anxiety is saying that it's Covid-19, the rest of me is saying it's likely to be another stupid cold. I don't really have any symptoms yet aside from high blood sugar readings. My morning fasting number was 180 something. I said to myself, "Ok, I can't have that bowl of oatmeal that I've been wanting. I'll do the 3 carb yogurt and the 21 carb meal bar. That shouldn't be too many carbs." In about 20 minutes, I was taking a nap on the couch instead of doing stuff like packing Beloved's lunch for work. Because I felt exhausted. I passed it off because I slept poorly last night.

Last night, I had a bunch of nightmares. They were sufficient in volume that they broke through the barrier that one of my medications causes by lowering my blood pressure. Basically, my bed time medication cocktail is one that pretty heavily sedates me and I usually sleep through the night. This time, I was up in the middle of the night in deep anxiety after having a nightmare of a screaming fight with my parents. I tried to sleep for the rest of the night but I kept having nightmares of fights. These are not memories but nightmares of the fights that I rehearse in my head when my anxiety peaks. So, basically, the rehearsing of fights is nonstop when my anxiety is bad. 

Looking at my log of where my mood has been for the last month, it's been moderately depressed and mildly anxious. I'm now wondering if I am dissociating and I'm actually far more anxious than I realize. It makes me wonder if I have been dissociating to some extent for months and that I'm not 'ok' as I seem to be to other people. It doesn't help that it's the holiday season. It doesn't help that I'm still mourning my grandparents. It doesn't help that I can't go interact with my side of the family because 90% of them are toxic and harmful for me to be around (or at least the ones who are local).

I don't know what's going on with me. That's terrifying for me. The last time I had no clear idea what was going on with me, only that I wasn't well, I got my diabetes diagnosis. The time before that, I got my bipolar diagnosis. Now, I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop and for it to be one more serious problem to juggle. One more serious thing that people around me dismiss because I don't look sick. (Beloved always takes it seriously, but there's a good number of other people who just don't.)

Yay, it's the holiday season.

 I've just finished the first three of the projects on my list. I'm not at a good headspace because I'm depressed and Thanksgiving took a toll on me. It wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that the meal was two hours late (thank goodness I had enough sense to bring an emergency snack in case that happened) and the fact that politics came up. 

Once they started on the topic, they didn't stop. It just got progressively worse to sit and listen to them downplay my concerns about Covid-19. The people at dinner were vehemently anti-mask. They decried the Governor as a "medical tyrant" and compared the Covid-19 pandemic to the flu, making a point of saying it was nothing like the Spanish Flu pandemic. The real burn came when someone talked piteously about an associate they knew with type 1 diabetes and asthma, describing them as "medically fragile" and how they were stuck in their house for months because of this business.

Most everyone in the room was somehow aware that I have diabetes and asthma. But they conveniently forgot it for the sake of their ranting. And then were baffled by the fact that I was upset with the entire conversation. At least no one said anything funny about the fact that I was limited in what I could eat. They've just decided that I am on a diet or something. Because I don't look sick.

This was also the second Thanksgiving with out my paternal grandparents around. The only reason why I'd have considered going back to the farm. But, I think conversation would have been the same. The FB posts of relatives have been along those lines and calling people who mask up cowards. These are the same people who say that instead of psychiatric care, I need a pair of running shoes and a daily routine of exercise to cure my bipolar. They're the same people who would say emotionally harmful stuff and then gaslight me about it. So, as per the last decade or so, I did not bring my family to the farm.

I'm seriously tempted to say fuck the holidays. But the kids are looking forward to the 13 days of Yule that I've done just about every year. They want to decorate. They want to make cookies. They want to have holiday fun. I just want to disappear into a black hole and not come out until it's spring.

NaBloPoMo 15: I surrender.

 There's no way that I am going to make up the missing posts for the remainder of this month. Being sick for two weeks with that sinus infection threw everything off. Then I got hyper-focused on writing books. Add to that the chaos of a few days of distance learning, the kids being off from school for a few days, and the typical afternoon/evening chaos when they get home from school ... Well, you can see why I made it to fifteen posts before I hung up my hat on this front.

NaBloPoMo 14? It's been chaos.

 I wrote two books in two weeks. One of those weeks, I was half out of it because I was still sick with that sinus infection. Fortunately, it did clear up. I'm exhausted because I haven't slept well for about a month now. I keep waking up in the middle of the night. Some nights, it is because I'm thirsty. Most nights, it is because I am anxious. 

For my birthday, my maternal grandmother sent me a very passive aggressive card that just served to reconfirm my decision to distance myself from her. When the card says 'I keep losing friends, don't know if they're dead or just missing' it makes me want to send back a 'Sorry for your bereavement' card and a bunch of lilies. Bonus points if the lilies are withered when they arrive. I am not going to waste the time or the money to do it, but the thought crossed my mind.

I find that as it draws closer to Thanksgiving my anxiety is creeping up higher and I'm anticipating a fight. According to Beloved, I get like this every year around Thanksgiving. I don't like rehearsing arguments in my head. I am still angry with comments that have been dropped out of ignorance. I don't know if I am going to be able to hold back if more comments like that come out over things like my using measuring cups to make sure that I am getting a safe carb load out of my meal.

It's been worse over the last few years because of the diabetes. I get afraid that my carbs are going to make my blood sugar spike and I'll get very sick. Beloved seems to be the one who understands that fear. Everyone else around me just doesn't seem to get it. So they keep offering me cookies and shit. I get the side eye when I say "I can't eat that." and I hate it.

NaBloPoMo 13: Forgot to add a song.

 I've been listening on repeat to Lawless's version of Dear God. It's been something that just goes with the election bullshit. I've also been listening to Les Friction's Louder than Words.

NaBloPoMo 12: Books? oh yeah, I write books.

 Still doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Somehow, I'm at 41k. If I have a good day writing, I'll be caught up on my blog posts across all my blogs and get to 45k words. This project is going well and hasn't gone off the rails plot wise. This is a relief because I was writing most of it while feverish. Who knows, maybe I'll even fire off a short story or something in the course of today.

In other news, Les Friction is AMAZING. It made me really happy to see that the other half of E.S. Posthumus didn't give up on music after his brother died. If you enjoy cinematic/orchestral music, check both of them out. Also, I think you'll really like Really Slow Motion. 

NaBloPoMo 11: Desk Whiskey.

 I need desk whiskey.

NaBloPoMo 10: Behind again.

 I'm not juggling too many things right now, really. I'm just processing life at about half speed and forgetting about the blogging portion of this challenge. That is because I'm still sick. Ugh, it took me three tries to write the word 'sick'. That's annoying. I am probably going to re-write the saga of the fall of Mysticwicks. I've written it out a few times now. It's ridiculous, tragic, and insane. It carried out like a tragedy in three acts. I've been considering how to write it down and I keep leaning to something in the style of the Eddas. There was a lot of flyting going on. I don't remember exactly what everyone said back and forth but it was brutal.

This was the time where Beloved came up with one of the worst insults I had ever heard: sand blasted vaginal train wreck. It was hilarious in a really dark way the way he said it before typing it down. People act all surprised by the pettiness in the pagan community at large, but, honestly, it's been there from the beginning. They want their power games and to feel important at the expense of others. It's part of the reason why I tend to avoid large groups.

I used to enjoy big online groups of pagans because I got to interact with a bunch of diverse people. Now ... Well, now I don't have the spoons for calling out bullshit on a daily basis like I did before. I have this bad habit of not recognizing authority that is self declared but not demonstrated. Just because you claim you have all the details on ancient history doesn't mean that you get to dictate to me how I'm doing everything wrong in my worship practices, for example. And when you post propaganda as 'historical fact' when all the evidence from the archeologists out in the field point otherwise, I'm going to be that person going 'citation needed'.

When you decide that someone else's relationship dynamic is 'abusive' because they don't share the same faith and begin slandering the 'abuser' with baseless claims of psychological abuse, you can bet your ass that I'm going to walk into that fight wielding a baseball bat. When you engage in harassment of people and attempt to black mail them, I'm going to be there for that fight too. It's just part of my sense of justice.

It's a Loki's person thing, it seems, to be the person who speaks truth to power and be willing to square off against them. I know other Loki's folk who do the same stuff. We are the speakers of the unwanted truth. We are the ones who will utterly destroy you with words because you broke frith with one of our own or because you broke frith and we're offended by it. I've been feeling the pull to re-engage the FB Lokean community. It's a lot like the pull I had back before I got sick and I waded in to the fray with people who were talking smack and harassing a Lokean who wasn't practicing like a 'proper heathen'. I don't know if I have the spoons to answer that call, but it feels like the call of the dead when my Grandfather was dying and they were telling me that the family needed me.

So, I may be swinging my proverbial baseball bat with a railroad spike in it again. People hate it when you sit there and go 'prove it' when they're trying to present UPG as actual history. People hate it when you refuse to bow down to them despite the fact that they're an authority on some given subject. I don't care about how big your name is in the community. We all sit down and take our britches off when we have to shit. It's how you act that I care about. If you can be decent with people, I don't care what you do. Start being and asshole and I get angry. Doesn't matter if it's a religious group or a political one. 

I've been booted out of them too. I just can't abide bullies. It makes me so angry that I could spit.

NaBloPoMo 9: Yet more Ramblings.

 I'm not feeling great. This sinus infection / head cold is still kicking me in the teeth. I've begun to get to where I am not dizzy when I'm upright and mobile. But I am in no condition to go visit anyone and I don't want to because I don't want to make them come down with this rotten thing. I'm on week two of this hellscape and I do not enjoy it.

Because I'm sick, I am having emotional flashbacks to being sick as a kid. It was a psychologically traumatic experience pretty much every time. As a result, I have massive guilt for not doing things like cleaning the apartment, being immaculately groomed, and doing the low impact stuff that doesn't suck up all my spoons (like writing this post). When I got sick as a kid, my parents kept telling me things like I wasn't really that sick and I was just trying to skip school. While school was a hellscape in its own way, it was my escape from the hellscape of home. I could do things like sit in study hall and play cards with a friend while being completely ignored by the study hall monitor. At home, if I wasn't doing school work then I had to be working on keeping the house clean. If I wasn't working on keeping the house clean, I was being lazy and that got verbal abuse heaped on me.

If I took medication for being sick, I was accused of abusing it to get high. Never mind the fact that I could have a sinus infection and be taking the minimal dose of Sudafed just so that I could breathe properly, my parents would still insist that I was trying to get high. That rhetoric as the constant background noise whenever I got sick instituted in me a deep sense of anxiety over my taking medications for any reason. When I was in college and I got put on birth control to keep me from developing ovarian cysts, my mother all but called me a slut and declared that I was going to be the most promiscuous woman on campus where I went to college. When I got put on antidepressants, my parents took it as a personal insult and told me to toughen up. 

When I got bronchitus so bad that it was nearly penumonia, my parents made a point of making a long distance call to the college to bitch at me about being so irresponsible with my health and not coughing properly.  Gods bless Stargazer, where ever she is now, she told them I was too sick to talk and hung up the phone. She convinced me that when I had a chance to get off my parents health insurance, I should do so as quickly as possible. She also convinced me to give my parents as little information about my health as necessary. Gods only know how my parents would have taken the information that I was in therapy through out college and for several years there after.

The only had a vague impression that I was seriously ill after college. I lost a job because I was having bad asthma attacks at work. They were so bad that I was taken by ambulance to the hospital at one point. I texted Beloved to let him know where I was going. The hospital still had my parents down as next of kin emergency contacts. So they called my parents. The three of them showed up at about the same time. My father looked distinctly annoyed. My mother was insisting that I had to will myself into breathing properly. Beloved was insisting that I focus on him instead of them and take my nebulizer treatment. Then a staff member of the hospital wheeled into the room with a mop and bucket of cleaner. 

The fumes of the cleaner set off another asthma attack, the cleaner retreated asap to get a nurse. Mom kept telling me to treat it like I was back at their house when she and Grandma were processing pickles. If I had the breath, I would have screamed at her to get out of the room as the nurse set me up with a second nebulizer treatment. When it was time for the hospital to release me, Beloved firmly insisted he was going to bring me home and said that my parents should get my car from work. There was something about him that kept my parents from arguing. I think it was because he was furious and was holding back by force of will the urge to tear my parents heads off for their treating my asthma as theatrics while I was in the hospital being treated for it.

Two months later, I was looking for work and trying to maintain my health. And my parents kicked me out of the house. I was still having bad asthma problems. The following year was hellish but not as bad as it could have been because I wasn't under my parents' roof getting harassed for going to so many doctors to get answers as to why I wasn't breathing properly. I was finally off their health insurance and seeing someone other than the family doctor whose secretary was the biggest gossip in town. I wasn't in a good place financially. But because of it, I had medicaid and access to specialists that my parents would have refused to pay for. And the multiple trips to the ER because of asthma attacks were covered by the insurance. And I started therapy again to cope with all of the garbage going on in my brain at that time.

By the time I was moved back into my parents house, my lungs were stronger because I was on a medicine regime that helped open up the bronchial passages and I had been singing as physical therapy for my lungs. My parents accused me of being irresponsible again when they saw this medication. They tried to come up with excuses to take control of it. I told them that if they took my medication, that I needed to function, away, I was going to walk out of that house and they'd never see me again. So, it was just verbal harassment.

Here I am, shy of 20 years after that last altercation over my use of medication, and I still get anxious and suffer from emotional flashbacks over taking medication and being sick. I take around 12 pills a day to be upright and functional between the vitamins and the medications. I get so upset over it that Beloved has taken over the task of filling the pill sorter at the end of the week. I was just about crying over the fact that I have so many pills to take. I felt subhuman for it. Some days I still do. I hate being sick. I hate having multiple chronic illnesses. Just looking at the pills, I can hear my parents accusations and threats at the back of my head echoing. Nothing like being sick with the flu and having your parents threatening to institutionalize you for taking Theraflu more than once per day and you're a minor, so they could possibly do it.

NaBloPoMo 8: Ramblings.

 So, I am wearing my reading glasses right now to type this. I'd be using my regular glasses but they're filthy and I misplaced my lens wipes that I had on the desk for just this reason. I'm currently listening to Delerium's album Karma. Specifically the track that has their rendition of Sarah McLachlan's song Silence is what I'm listening to. It's like a cross between Engima and Sarah McLachlan's music. It's pretty cool.

I had a conversation yesterday that left me angry. I get that the person was trying to emphasize their point that they wanted to do something special for my family and I for the holidays. But they came off as patronizing. It was the "what do you NEED" that kept getting hammered on that made me angry. The things I need you can't buy at a store. I need my brain chemistry not to be fucked up. I need my body to stop hating me. I need my trauma issues to be resolved. I need to not be depressed most of the time. But, for some reason, this person thinks that throwing money and stuff at a situation is going to fix it. At the same time, they don't have the money for it. At the same time, their approach is not focused on the person they are trying to do something for but on making themselves look virtuous when they talk about what they've done. I damn near ended the conversation with "I don't need your pity or your charity."

I didn't. They don't know me. They like to think they know me. They have a picture in their head of who and what I am like. It is just about the complete polar opposite of who I am. They do the same thing with Beloved and the kids. It's been making me angry. They talk down to the kids because they're on the autism spectrum. They ignore us when we tell us what the kids interests are and go off half cocked to get what they think would be 'cool'. Regardless if it is at their level of ability or not.

I'm furious. I'm trying not to be furious because it's like being angry with the weather when it's raining. They're just acting according to their nature. But I keep expecting better from them. Every so often, they show genuine compassion and do acts of genuine good. It raises my hopes and then they turn around and let me down. I just have to stop expecting this person to think about someone else and accept that they're focused on making themselves look good at the expense of people around them. 

NaBloPoMo 7: I made it through another year.

 Yesterday was my birthday. I'm officially 42. Beloved got me a lovely bouquet of flowers that matches the color of the autumn leaves. The kids were kinda bewildered but they didn't really know it was my birthday because we didn't really do anything special for it. I tried to spend some time writing but I didn't get that far just because I was tired. I did add more to my NaNoWriMo playlist for this year. It's disorganized but so is pretty much everything about my writing right now.

I spent about an hour this morning working on my planner. I still have more to do. Beloved was so kind as to design new planner pages for my notebook. It is like what I was originally using. Front side for bullet points and back side of the page for notes. He had the gal who runs Copy Town, the print shop a few towns over where he works, take a full ream of paper and print and cut to size pages for my day planner. It takes a big amount of the stress out of my planning for the week or the month. I'm not drawing tons of little boxes on pages. It helps a lot.

Apparently yesterday was national fountain pen day. I did not do any writing with any of my fountain pens. Now that my planner is done up in heavier paper stock, I might start using my beautiful steel fountain pen that Beloved gave me for yule last year.

NaBloPoMo 6: I am a zombie.

 Well, I just got off the phone with the doctor's office. They said that the antibiotics sound like they're working. It sure doesn't feel like it but I was told to be patient and give it until Monday. In the meantime, I have a killer headache and congestion that is making me miserable. I'm frustrated because I actually ate a real salad for dinner last night and my fasting blood sugar was 200. I felt rotten and debated skipping breakfast. I didn't. I forced myself to eat a meal bar (21 carbs) and a pot of diet yogurt (3 carbs). I drank water with it because I was too blurry headed to make coffee.

After I got the kids through their morning routine and off to school, I laid down. I planned to sleep for a half hour and then get up and start doing stuff. I did not. I slept for an hour and a half. What woke me up wasn't the alarm on my phone but the sound of my husband getting ready for work. Beloved all but ordered me to go lay back down. Apparently, I looked about as miserable as I felt. So, he headed out to work, I locked the door, and then I fell asleep for another hour or so. I guess it was about 11:30 when I was waking up. I had enough brainz to make coffee. Then I sat down and stared at my NaNoWriMo project too mentally toast to write anything. So, I played around on Spotify and started a playlist for this project. It's completely disorganized, but the tracks are great for various scenes and characters. Also, it's got the coolest version of Seven Nation Army on there from Skáld. 

Now I am trying to get caught up on my blogging and then I am going to work on my planner. Yesterday was sucked up by writing because I felt too woozy to do anything else. My fever has come down some today. I'm not quite as woozy but I don't feel great. I don't trust myself with stuff that's sharp because I'm operating with half a brain and I'd likely poke myself if I tried to do embroidery if not possibly sew myself to the project. I may do some crochet later. Either way, I am going to have to do something to keep me awake that isn't to taxing on my mental capacity. Stupid sinus infection and cold. I was hoping to be over this thing by now.

NaBloPoMo 5: Huzzah, the kids are at school!

 They're finally over this stupid cold. They tested negative for Covid-19 last week and I received the letter from the doctor giving them the ok to go back to school yesterday. Now, maybe, I can get some stuff done with out playing referee or constantly reminding them to be focusing on their school work instead of cat pictures. A part of me says I should lie down and take a nap, but that's because I've been up since 4 am. 

I forgot, somehow, to take my ton of bedtime medications. I was just feeling rotten last night. I think in my brain fog, I was sure I did take them. I woke up early this morning partly because of my lack of medications and partly because I coughed myself awake. I was practically choking on congestion at first, it was pretty awful. Fortunately, this sinus infection/head cold hasn't dropped into my chest like I was thinking was happening at first. This morning I realized that the ache in my ribs was right where I fell and landed on a shovel a few years back and fractured a rib. It was my arthritis complaining about the weather, not the beginnings of something nefarious.

Speaking of weather, the weather we've been having has been strange. It's been swinging between unseasonably mild and the seasonably cold and wet weather. The mild stretches, I am less achey but I am suspicious that we're going to get nailed with a blizzard or something when this breaks. I haven't been out walking or doing much outside. I still have that mess on the back deck to clean up from a few months ago. Being sick just has been taking the life right out of me for the last week. Meanwhile, the kids have bounced back and Beloved just has the sniffles. I don't know if that means their immune systems are better than mine or if I am just more susceptible to getting sick. I've kind always been that way. And the weather swinging back and forth is not helping. At least I haven't had a migraine in a little while. Of course, I probably just jinxed myself on that one.

NaBloPoMo 4: Where does the time go?

 I'm typing this during a stolen moment. The kids are playing math games on their chromebooks from school as they wait for their next Zoom class session (which is in a half hour). I feel rotten but I'm trying to persevere. My blood sugar keeps running high when I eat anything close to 30 carbs. It seems to be tied to my having this lovely cold and sinus infection. The doctor put me on an antibiotic that I can't spell, but it's fairly strong and should take care of the infection quickly.

I have been trying to find time to do things like type up blog posts, work on my manuscript, and fold laundry at the same time I have to ride herd on the kids to make sure they're not playing video games when they're supposed to be doing school work. It's been an exasperating morning on that front because Snuggle Bug desperately wants to show off the fire truck his big brother gave him yesterday. As such, he kept interrupting the other Zoom class sessions with requests to show everybody something cool. It got to the point where the teacher put his camera on mute and turned off the video feed. He could still hear what was going on and see what the teacher was presenting but he couldn't keep disrupting class like that.

He's been complaining all day about how he doesn't want people telling him what to do. I said to him that he had to get used to it because that was going to be at least the next six years of his life. He wasn't pleased. So, I have a grumpy pre-teen who is begrudgingly doing his school work right now. His big brother is focused on getting as much of his work done as possible. He's expressed that he really wants to go back to school. 

We were waiting on the letters from our family doctor stating that the boys were Covid-19 free and cleared to go back to school. They arrived today. The kids are mostly over their colds. So, I'm giving them a bit of OTC cold medicine that lasts 12 hours and shipping them off to school. I figure with the medicine cutting down on the slight cough that remains and them wearing their masks, everything should go ok. Tomorrow is going to be exhausting because I have things like laundry and dishes to catch up on. I'm still feeling pretty run down from being sick myself, so getting those done is going to be a bit of a challenge.

I swear, there is simply not enough time in the day.

NaBloPoMo 3: Welp, I'm doing NaNoWriMo.

 Last night, about a half hour before I went to bed, I was struck with an idea for a novella. I'm not sure what my word count is. I'm not going to worry about the word count. I'm just going to focus on getting the story down. If I am lucky, I won't run out of spoons half way through. I may post random snippets here or something.

NaBloPoMo 2: Can't decide if I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year.

 I want to do NaNoWriMo, but I feel like I don't have the time or the spoons to do it. I'm filled with dread that we're going to go to remote learning when the cold and flu season hits full time. Right now, I'm trying to get my writing this post in quick as the kids are doing their assigned journal entry for today. We've been having some glitches with the assignments posted today. So, I did the sensible thing and cycled the power on the chromebooks for fifteen minutes before having the boys get back on to do their work. As the chromebooks were powered down, they were doing some reading work. I currently am struggling to get writing in while the kids are on their breaks from classes, it's not working so great.

I don't know how I'm going to do this.

NaBloPoMo1: So, it's not Covid-19, but it still sucks.

I, well, we all in this household, have an upper respiratory virus. It's pretty nasty. Last week, our family doctor had the kids tested for Covid-19 (because they were the only ones sick at the time). The test came back negative. That was great. No, seriously, it was a huge relief. In the span of time from the test to when the results showed up, Beloved caught it and then I caught it.

Where the guys have had a wicked head cold, I have developed a sinus infection. I have a telemedicine appointment with the family doctor at 1:30pm. We tried having a Zoom appointment with the kids last week and Zoom did not get on well with my computer. We wound up discussing things over the phone. Because my computer is still having issues, I am not doing a Zoom appointment this afternoon. 

This virus has a wicked sore throat, lots of sinus drainage, and coughing. To say the least, the doctor was concerned, especially with the kids having a fever spike in the range of 101.7 (all hail ibuprofen that miracle drug that brought the fever down). Of course, because I am sick, my blood sugar has been stupid.

I am eating 'large snacks' for meals (approximately 20 carbs) and having one meal that is 30 carbs. After the 30 carb meal, I pass out about 30 minutes later. This has been messing with my brain. My latent eating disorder is beginning to make itself known again. Intense feelings of disgust towards eating and being seen eating have been rolling over me. I have been struggling with the urge to make it less carbs. I have been finding myself struggling with the urge to sneak eat, that's where I basically hide and eat a snack. It's distressing to find myself on one hand encouraged to reengage in the anorexic eating behaviors I had as a kid and on the other hand painfully aware that those eating habits are going to have disasterous long term consequences.

This business with my having issues with carbs seems to be coming from my being sick. But I've been struggling with elevated fasting carb levels since the switch from the metformin-algolpotin combo pill to two separate pills. It's just been a problem and I go to get my 3 month fasting A1C measured later this week (provided I am over this stupid cold). A part of me is hoping that it will be 7 this way they'll take my concerns seriously. Another part of me is hoping that it will remain at 6.9 because if it goes up to 7, they have to take other steps to medically intervene. I don't know what I'm going to do if this ends up with me on insulin. I'm not good with needles. I don't think the insurance company will spring for an insulin pump.