Sisyphus on glucose & insulin

©Occasionally, I wake up feeling like I drank too much the night before, wicked sick hungover like I used to feel in college when I would drink too much. I guess I also 'drank too much' at a few parties in law school but I have not been drunk since then. In recent years, I have not drunk at all.

Around 2002, I went to my first ten-day silent retreat.  They ask you to agree to various rules for the ten days, including no alcohol. No alcohol in a silent retreat center where you have no privacy is easy. It got me thinking though:  I realized that I usually felt a little hungover if I had just one glass of wine. One glass of beer seems okay. And biodynamic wine doesn't make me sick. Any other form of alcohol, in tiny amounts, and I feel sick hung over the next day. I feel lousy. One of the many things I thought about when I was not meditating purely, i.e. I was thinking thoughts instead, was "Hey, I could stop feeling sick hungover if I just dropped drinking."

So I did. I had never gone 'out for drinks'. Never gone to bars. Rarely served alcohol in my home. But when offered alcohol socially, I drank.  By the time I gave it up, I was probably only drinking occasional glasses of wine at very occasional parties. I have it in my mind that I drank a glass of wine at a holiday party but I don't really get invited to anyone's holidays so that's a fantasy.

Happily, I immeidately realized "Hey, I don't have to wake up feeling lousy just cause I had a glass of cheap wine." There has to be something in the chemicals of many boozes that my body doesn't like, my sensitive, delicate, princess-and-the-pea self.

Do you know the story of the princess and the pea? A queen wants to be sure her son the prince marries only a genuine princess so she has beautiful young maidens spend the night in their castle sleeping on top of a dozen feather beds with one pea on the bottom. The true princess, the queen asserts and the prince evidently concurs, will have a sleepless night because she will be so delicate that she can't sleep because of the lump the size of a  pea in her mattress. It has a happy ending. They find such a delicate flower, a beautiful young woman unable to sleep well because of the lump in her bed.

Heck, if I had been subjected to that pea test, I would have just slept around the pea lump. How big could it be? How small was the bed? A set up if ever I heard one. Not that fairy tales have to be all logical but the princess and the pea lacks logic.  I'da never been chosen to be fine enough for a prince. Maybe true royalty is stoic!

I also lack logic so I am not really criticizing. I'm just saying.

I awoke just now feeling wicked sick hungover. I feel like throwing up might help me feel better. I was sure this meant I had experienced low blood sugar overnight. And I might have, a few hours ago. I think very low blood sugar feels like a sick hangover. By the time I tested my sugar at 6:30 a.m., it was 140, which is only very slightly elevated and definitely not low.

I bet anything, however, I went very low around 2 a.m. I felt to sick upon awakening. Now I know what this feeling is: dangerously low glucose. Gotta be more careful. It is a constant thing, monitoring glucose and insulin.  I keep thinking I have adapted but then I see myself ignoring it some days, then I get sick and being careful starts anew.

Sisyphus on glucose and insulin.