Steven Lee Gilbert's Blog

by Ridha Arem

First off: This book is not just about the thyroid or those who suffer from thyroid related issues. Second: Anyone interested in extending their life should read it.

I have for years been interested in the connection between food, exercise and physical health and this book, which falls along the same lines of Gary Taubes’ Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars and anything by Michael Pollen, does a wonderful job explaining it using both science and a keen ability to speak in terms any layperson serious about their health should be able to understand.

I was much more interested in the first two-thirds of the book in which Arem goes into fabulous detail about sugar, fat and how these foods breakdown and based on various factors combine with the body’s multitude of hormones (but especially insulin and leptin) to regulate/affect/and in many cases generally muck up the body’s natural metabolism (i.e. Garbage in. Garbage out, which reminded me a great deal of Alejandro Junger’s, Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body’s Natural Ability to Heal Itself, which I also highly recommend). The last third spells out specific recipes, which I may or may not use, but offers to those not interested in coming up with their own menus, excellent examples of not only what to eat, but when to eat it. Great information to anyone, regardless of what state their personal health is in, in terms of converting food to fuel as opposed to fat.

While I don’t agree 100% with what he says—for instance, I don’t follow the low-fat-is-better-for-you theories on health—rarely have I found a food book that speaks so clearly in terms of sugar, fat, hormones, and exercise, and also of aging, stress, sleep, and detoxification and the affect these have on mood as well as pant size.

In honor of a very special day we recognize this time of year...


Wednesday morning, December 23rd. Starts out, almost, like any other. I say almost because the kids are out of school; we slept later than usual; and our littlest one, Lia, is seemingly slow to recover from both a cold and a busy weekend. She comes downstairs as my wife and I are headed off to the gym.

I couldn’t sleep, she says.

Do you want to go lay in our bed, one of us asks.

No. Can I watch TV on the couch?

So we settle her in on the sofa, feel her forehead and ask is she feeling well and she nods and we leave.

An hour later, my wife realizes she has missed a call from home. She calls the house and learns from our son, who is home from college, that Lia has thrown up. She gives him instructions on cleaning up the mess and making his sister more comfortable and then she dials the pediatrician.

At the doctor’s office they do what they’re paid to do and ask lots of questions. A urine test is ordered, then a blood test. A few minutes later the doctor comes in and asks would Lia mind waiting alone a moment while she talks to her mother and father. We follow her, our hearts trembling, down the hall.

We found a great deal of sugar in her blood, she says. Normal is less than 140. Hers weighs in at 480. There are ketones in her urine. Something to do with acidosis.

I am quiet. My wife is quiet. We look at one other. These are strange words to us.

It looks like diabetes, the doctor says.

Now I can look at no one. Not my wife. Not the doctor. Not even Lia, who is back in the tiny examination room reading a book and waiting quietly for us to return. Perhaps with some medicine. A little something to make her feel better, less tired. She has no idea.

At the ER they poke her and draw her blood and further confirm the diagnosis, then she’s sent to the PICU where she will spend roughly the next thirty hours before moving to a room in the pediatric wing. It is Christmas Eve. Lia is told we won’t be going home today. Now she, too, is heartbroken.

Christmas Day. We wake. Lia and her mother in the hospital. I, our son and other daughter at the house. We all are exhausted. But Santa came, delivering stockings and gifts and treasures in the middle of the night to whichever place we happen to have laid our heads. Lia is delighted, of course, to have not been forgotten or misplaced.

He came! she smiled and said. He came! Santa knew where I was all along.

Yes, he did, my sweet little girl. Yes, he did.

It is late in the afternoon and we are finally heading home. We have Christmas opening still ahead of us, while the rest of the world wrapped that up hours ago. It is something bright to look forward to, other than just being out of the hospital. Something that does not involve counting carbs, or calculating doses, or fretting over the rotation of injection sites. It is Christmas and we are all children again.

We sleep soundly that night from exhaustion.

Tomorrow, a daunting and strange new day awaits. It starts at three a.m. Her blood sugar is 409.


For more information on raising a child with type 1 diabetes to live life to the fullest and without envy, please visit: Without Envy

I read this after my eldest daughter gushed over and over about it and I’m glad I did, but not for any real reason found in the book. Don’t get me wrong it was all right. I enjoyed parts of the story and the characters seemed mostly very real to me, but like others who’ve commented I felt the dialogue was too much/ too heavy in parts (and in other parts dead on); I didn’t care for the drunk Dutchman and his role; or fully understand the connection to Anne Frank (other than it was local). Pretty much, I think the back 1/3 of the book just wasn’t as well written and developed as the first 2/3.

Why I am glad I read it though is I believe Green did a very good job of injecting into the story (and thus into me, the reader) the yearning, heartbreaking, character-searching and angst-ridden soul of a teenager, offering a glimpse into the thoughts, aspirations and musings of my own precious teen. That’s worth way more than any stars.

I read this after my eldest daughter gushed over and over about it and I’m glad I did, but not for any real reason found in the book. Don’t get me wrong it was all right. I enjoyed parts of the story and the characters seemed mostly very real to me, but like others who’ve commented I felt the dialogue was too much/ too heavy in parts (and in other parts dead on); I didn’t care for the drunk Dutchman and his role; or fully understand the connection to Anne Frank (other than it was local). Pretty much, I think the back 1/3 of the book just wasn’t as well written and developed as the first 2/3.

Why I am glad I read it though is I believe Green did a very good job of injecting into the story (and thus into me, the reader) the yearning, heartbreaking, character-searching and angst-ridden soul of a teenager, offering a glimpse into the thoughts, aspirations and musings of my own precious teen. That’s worth way more than any stars.

Then there are the books I should have read but didn’t, or did with so little regard for what was in them. I read them—or not as the case often was—for assignment, for a grade, because somebody said that I should. I didn’t read them for pleasure, not usually. Nor for what they said about the world and about human nature. Not for the mysteries they exposed about life.

That’s not to say I didn’t read. I loved reading and have teachers and good parents to thank that my passion for books became strong and long lasting. But given the choice what I chose to read back then did not ask too much of the reader, not with language, tone or content. They had more to do with nightmares, international espionage, occasionally a dragon, certainly a cowboy or two, than with complex multi-layered works that wrestled with universal dilemmas. Not that both can’t deliver a rousing good story, I just tended to stick to the formulaic ones that fell within certain central themes and avoided the more thought-provoking taxonomies of the human condition (nor did I ever talk like that).

George Bernard Shaw—a playwright I never read but probably should’ve—once said, “Youth is a wonderful thing. What a shame to waste it on children.” I’ve found myself thinking about that a lot as I turn the page on another year, with the next chapter a few pages back just sitting there looming alongside my future membership card to the AARP. I think about where the time went and those books I should have read and I wonder how in the world did so many words slip past me. Words once belonging to such a long, storied list of authors I’d fail just mentioning a handful.

There is another famous saying though (un-attributable, but backed up by science nonetheless): You’re only as old as you feel, and with that sentiment in mind I’ve made a New Year’s Resolution to re-visit what should have served as my formative discover-myself-in-literature years. For the next year, starting with January, once a month I plan to read a work from one of the greatest writers ever known—or not if you believe in those identity theories—the Bard of Avon himself, William Shakespeare.

(Oddly enough, Shaw himself, apparently, would have thought such a commitment ludicrous, at least in terms of following down that path in pursuit of a serious observation into social problems, as he disapproved of Shakespeare as a thinker and philosopher and to show it coined the term bardolatry.)

That said, it might be too late for Shaw to change his tune, but it’s not too late for me. Besides, with Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour having given up the ghost, I need something to fill their esteemed place.

Here’s my list of books and the month I’ll be reading them. If you’re interested in tagging along and sharing your own thoughts, I’d love the company.

January              Hamlet
February            Romeo and Juliet, of course
March                  Much Ado About Nothing
April                     Macbeth
May                       Henry V
June                     The Sonnets
July                       A Midsummer’s Night Dream
August                 Othello
September         King Lear
October               The Tempest
November          Julius Caesar
December          The Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night

 

As Steve mentioned a few weeks ago, we packed up the gear and the kids and headed off to the mountains of Southwest Virginia for some much needed back-to-nature time. No cell phones, no computers, no television or Red Box. A chance to detox from the connections that keep us firmly rooted in our busy lives. And also the opportunity to remember that there is a great, big, beautiful world out there and the best entertainment is often the sharing of stories with those with whom we share it.

This was our second foray into the wild with diabetes and to be honest we felt like pros. Meals were planned to the nth detail, the food pre-measured, pre-packaged and pre-labeled, and in some cases even pre-cooked. The load divvied up amongst us. Supplies checked and re-checked. Our plan for managing all things diabetes researched, discussed and settled. All that was left was the leaving.

In terms of blood sugar control, we opted to try something new: dose 100% for the food Lia ate, and use negative temp basals to reflect the increase in activity. This turned out to be a better plan than last year’s and easier to manage. The first half-day, we only put the temp on for four hours and then forgot to renew it, so she battled some lows later in the day. For the rest of our trip, we put on temps for twelve hours before we left for the day and this worked out perfectly for the most part:

By the Numbers (Data from Diasend)

Average Blood Sugars While on Trail: 153

BGs within range: 67%

BGs above range: 16%

BGs below range: 5%

Average daily basal insulin: 8.2 U (a full 2.3 units less than at home)

Average daily bolus insulin: 11.5 U

Average BG correction: 8%

The Hike

We hiked a total of 22 miles: 8 miles the first day to the top of Mount Rogers; 8 miles the second day to the Scales; and 7 miles the third day back to our car (two miles on VA 603).  Both girls did a great job keeping up and staying in high spirits, even when feet and backs hurt from the rocky terrain and from the climbs and descents.

On the first day, Lia hiked all day with her pants on backwards and didn’t even notice until lunch. She also fell over once when having to get over a fallen tree and needed help getting up from her overturned turtle position. Our hike was mostly uphill, and rocky only in places. The night was cold but not unbearable and it took us longer to get up and going on the second day than on the first. We lost time and had to adjust our route by cutting across the park on a horse trail, which in hindsight was a bad idea.

Horse trails, designed for horses, are filled with large loose rocks that are difficult to walk on. The horse trail was four miles long and muddy. At one point, Steve was out front and saw a copperhead snake. He turned around just in time to see Lia nearly step on it! Their quick reaction saved her from a snakebite and a disastrous end to our trip

(and possibly an upcoming plot line for a novel). We were all shaken so much after this that we just wanted to get to our destination and take a load off. The four miles felt like eight and Steve’s near-constant assurances that Scales was “just around the bend,” made Krista and I want to scream.

Change in Plans

We love Southwest Virginia. The beautiful vistas we saw during our three days were some of the most breathtaking views we’ve seen as a family. We saw our favorite friends, the feral ponies of the park. At Scales we encountered 50-60 heads of long-horned cattle, and continued to hear their lowing long into the night when a mama and her young were separated at dusk. Unfortunately, on the second day, our memory card malfunctioned and all the pictures from the first two days were mistakenly erased! We did manage to take a few on the last day.

On our last morning, we awoke to frost and a temperature of 25 degrees! Before the girls woke, Steve and I decided not to spend our final night at the campground as originally planned, but to head to West Jefferson, NC for a night at a hotel.  We ate breakfast and everyone was ready in record time. On our way down the mountain, we encountered a young man who was through-hiking the Appalachian Trail with his beautiful black German shepherd, as well as several other

campers who were short-term hikers like us. The last two miles on the road were brutal. We were once again subject to Steve’s continued assurances that the end was “just around the bend.” We were happy to finally see a sign designating the Grindstone Campground.

For all the preparation and work that we put into going on our trip, nothing compares to going to the great outdoors. It sounds like a cliché, but the clean air of the countryside, the reduction of noise and light pollution, allowed us to see things we would ordinarily miss. We noticed each other, our idiosyncrasies and habits, manner of speaking, and things we say. We listen.

And yes, diabetes, our unwanted companion, is always along for the ride. But the planning, preparation and organizing we do in advance allow us to put diabetes second, and Lia and Krista time first.

To say that we enjoyed our trip is an understatement. For three days the girls didn’t bicker, they rarely complained, and we, the parents, did not need to scold. We were surely tired when it was over, but this is the one time a year that we truly reconnect, without electronic intrusions of any kind. We are connected through our disconnectedness. We live simply and purely for these days, and we are better for it. We feel confident that we can plan for even longer trips, even if diabetes has to come along for the ride. It is Lia’s favorite activity that we do as a family and this year it has made me think of the old Steve Winwood song. It is true that life goes on too fast with these trips we hope to slow it down.

“We’ll be back in the high life again

All the doors I closed one time will open up again

We’ll be back in the high life again

All the eyes that watched us once will smile and take us in

And we’ll drink and dance with one hand free

And have the world so easily

And oh we’ll be a sight to see

Back in the high life again”

Metaphorically, that is.

 

For those interested in our supply lists and menus, here they are:

Supplies

Glucose meter w/ test strips, lancet device, extra lancets
2 spare infusion sets 2 syringes
2 vials of 50ct test strips 1 vial of insulin
spare meter extra batteries for meter and pump
glucagon kit spare battery cap, spare cartridge cap
Emergency info, copy health insurance card, and prescriptions
glucose tabs

The Menu

Dinner on Friday:  Fried chicken, potato chips
Saturday
Breakfast: Whole Wheat Bagels with cream cheese (with chives, bacon, and sundried tomatoes)
Lunch: Veggie Burgers, dried apples
Dinner: Gnocchi with sage butter, bacon, and sundried tomatoes
Sunday
Breakfast: Apple Almond Couscous
Lunch: Ollalie Wrap (spinach and whole-wheat tortillas, cream cheese, roasted pepper pesto, and Israeli couscous, with bacon)
Dinner:  Manly Man Orzo
Monday
Breakfast: Strawberry Almond Couscous
Lunch: Esmeralda wrap (spinach and whole wheat tortillas with cream cheese, avocado, sundried tomatoes and bacon)

Snacks

Roasted Pimenton Chick Peas and Pepitas
Trail mix
Juice Beef Jerky
hard candy (Jolly Ranchers)

The Kitchen

2 stoves
2 pots with lids (1 small, 1 large)
1 serving/stirring spoon
4 sporks
4 bowls
4 cups
1 cutting board
½ sponge
camp dish soap
4 small cloth placemats
1 wiping cloth (for drying dishes)

 

In honor of our upcoming 2nd Annual Into D-Wild Backpacking Adventure, I’d like to share the post Franca wrote about last year’s family trip. We’re taking what lessons we learned and  heading back into the woods, this time hiking longer (4 days) and further (27 miles)—but with hopefully less gear. We’ll follow up with a fresh story in a few days of diabetes and the great outdoors.

Click here to read Into D-Wild, published October 9, 2011, by Franca.

One of the great things the internet has brought is the ability to reach out and make a difference in the lives of people we’ve never met. I’ve been a part of that phenomena for almost three years now, since starting this blog about raising a child with type 1 diabetes to live life to the fullest. To me, helping others is essential to fulfilling that goal. I might even argue, it’s the entire goal.

Last summer, I was thrilled to discover & support my good friend, Dan Masucci, as he was just starting his loving and exceptional short film about a family coping with diabetes called, DxOne. If you’ve somehow never heard of it, well, get ready, it’s about to take the diabetes community by storm. Dan’s a fantabulous director, an excellent writer and the film is a true to this world depiction of what life is like for a child with diabetes.

Now comes another film about diabetes I’m pleased to support. Give a listen to Jason’s video intro.

“Logic, strength and love”. That sums up just about everyday with diabetes. How could you not support that?

If you’re a parent of a kid with diabetes, have diabetes yourself, or just interested in doing something good today, don’t wait. There’s only a few hours left for Jason to hit his funding target of $7,000. The good news is he doesn’t have far to go. So click on over to kickstarter, here, and give your pledge.

Good luck, Jason

I had the chance today to guest blog over at ShaynaGier.com and because it was day 1 of my 2 day Kindle eBook Giveaway, I took the opportunity to reflect on what that promotion meant in terms of readership.

For starters, giving my work away on such a large scale endeavor meant I no longer had any part whatsoever in selecting my readers, which was kind of nice as a self-published author. I solicited reviews after spending a fair amount of time on blogs and book sites before soliciting anyone’s time and opinion.

What handing out hundreds of copies for free means is a plethora of personalities and unique book perspectives, i.e. readers who perhaps aren’t interested or even ready for a book like mine. That’s not to say that Departure is exclusive, it’s not. Honestly, it’s written with no one reader in mind but the story experience itself, which includes all the human nuances and life experiences that a reader brings to it.

And you’ll see, as I point out in the guest post on Shayna’s blog, sometimes life just hasn’t caught up enough to make the story come alive inside every reader who could possibly get their hands on it. That’s a risk every author takes. There are no exceptions.

Click here to visit Shayna’s blog and my guest post, and then click on over to Amazon and my Kindle Free Day and get a copy of the book for yourself.

 

Thought I’d begin a new thing here where I share the first few lines of my favorite books. There are many, but to start, and because I’m a loathing, self-loving writer, I’ll turn of course not to someone else’s but to the book I am working on at the moment:

In the late evenings of that summer he would sit with her photo at the table in the middle of their small kitchen and by the light of the lowly stove lamp study the old road atlas. There all the land opened wholly before him, pallid and bleak in the dim lit night, the corners reaching skyward and curling, the paper folds thin and deteriorating, like life itself, and he like a wretched lost pilgrim searching for what he knew not amongst the smudges and gray silhouettes, a bloodshot array of roadwork, some mark perhaps on that pale depthless country on which to affix for himself a crude bearing. —The Dead Lion, by moi