Weird Science

We were back at the dietitian's last Friday after a couple of weeks away, and both I and The Boy were dehydrated. Not a huge surprise, really: We'd been walking around the college, in the heat, I'd been working out a bit more, etc.

As a coda to this post about my weird dream, the dietitian was giving us signs of dehydration to watch for, so that we would know when to drink extra water. First one she mentions? Weird dreams. General sleep disturbances (I hadn't been sleeping well, or at least not long enough.)

So far, though, everything that she said would happen has happened. We had some blood sugar crashes early on (as The Boy's body released the artificial insulin it stored up) and then, in line with his graph being in the right place, he's started to have sugar in his urine.

Generally, you don't want sugar in your urine, but in this case it's supposed to be indicative of the healing process. Intriguingly, The Boy's sugars are very well in control, if a little wild. (They'll get suddenly high, then drop down just as suddenly, though never into a dangerous zone.) He's also on half the per-meal insulin he was a few months ago.

The theory is that artificial insulin is like a cast for the pancreas, so once the body starts healing, you need to take the cast off, letting your sugars get a bit high so that the pancreas will be stimulated to start producing.

I'm sure this could cause a panic attack in a lot of medical professionals. I'm sure it's dangerous. But you know what? So is diabetes-for-the-rest-of-your-life. They kind of feed you a cock-and-bull story about how you can be in the NBA and live a normal life, but the long term consequences for a diabetic, even one with well-controlled blood sugar, are really pretty horrible.

I love mainstream medicine, don't get me wrong, but really only for emergencies. Bad infections, broken bones, heart attacks, and so on. But if I have high blood pressure, I don't want to take a pill forever. I want my blood pressure back to normal. Same with high cholesterol.

But even if you're an all-mainstream-medicine-all-the-time-guy, the FDA sits on drugs that might help people in the name of protecting them, essentially protecting them to death. "Excuse me, Mr. Government, sir, but I'd like to try that cancer medicine, even if it might kill me. Because I'm going to die anyway."

I think Man has an inalienable right to his snake oil, as I've said here many times. I'm sure, in my case, that it's part of the pursuit of happiness. And in everyone's case, it's a matter of sovereignty over his body.

If the government would leave my body and my property alone, I'd be happy to have the social liberals and conservative battle out whatever they wanted.