One Year Later

A year ago, I discovered, after waking up one morning to find my vision had suddenly and severely deteriorated, that I had developed Type 2 diabetes.

I've been through many life changing experiences in my 65 years, but this one has been bigger than most. Being a pig-headed and contrary woman, I was determined to fight it. I left the doctor's office without much idea of what to do, with a booklet that told me little that was helpful in the way of dietary advice useful for a gluten-free vegetarian. I have, of necessity, found my own way to deal with eating: the first step was cutting out sugar of all kinds. The next was searching the internet, reading on the computer, and then on Kindle because my vision was too bad to read a book: on screens, words can be made bigger.

I settled on following, broadly, Michael Mosley's book, The 8 Week Blood Sugar Diet. First the food and exercise components.

My diet is now not quite as strict as at the beginning, in that I often eat 2 portions of fruit a day now instead of just one, and I have slightly bigger helpings than when I was trying to limit myself to 800 calories a day. I eat vegetables, though never potatoes, and never more than one small serving of other root vegetables per day. I eat eggs and cheese. I have a protein shake made with milk kefir and / or yogurt each morning, and a little homemade buckwheat cereal with a small portion of fruit. I eat nuts and seeds, and a little grain-free bread - a loaf lasts me two weeks. I eat legumes, despite their carbs, because they are also protein.

I also started walking: 2 - 3 times a day to start with, but now usually only once a day, sometimes not at all as in, no deliberate fast walking.

The strict regime I started with enabled me to lose another 20kg on top of the 5 kg I lost prior to diagnosis. I have gone from the top end of the 'overweight' category (though I never quite hit the obese category) down to the lower middle end of the 'normal' category.

My blood sugar fluctuated quite a bit to start with, and I had to be very careful to eat  very little and to exercise every day. We went on holiday for two weeks and sitting in the car proved very detrimental to those blood sugar levels. Now the levels are much more stable: I don't get down as far, nor as high, as in those early days. It will be interesting to see how driving affects them when I go away a year later, this April. As well as testing my levels two or three times a day, I also have a blood test every three months, which measures my average blood glucose over the previous 4 - 6 weeks At diagnosis, mine was 98 which is 'extremely high'. At my latest test it was 31, one point down from three month's ago: the normal for non-diabetics is under 40. If I had not had the previous tests, I would not now be diagnosed as diabetic.

The following are some of the benefits of finding out I have diabetes, and of removing sugar from my diet, and considerably reducing my consumption of other carbohydrates.

• weight loss
• improved fitness - I can wield a chainsaw again for the first time in 3 years.
• the disappearance of the 'heat' rash I'd had on and off for a few years - and it disappeared as soon as I stopped eating sugar, before I lost most of the weight
• the headaches I'd had increasingly, disappeared. I noticed in December when I cracked my head on the watertank stand - the resulting headache made me realise I hadn't had one for months.
• the mental fuzziness that had worried me for a several years, and which had cleared somewhat when I had stopped eating gluten, disappeared. Alzheimer's might not happen for a while longer.
• the athletes foot that always troubled me in winter disappeared.
• For the first time in decades, I have been able to find swimming togs that fit me - the bigger sizes assume that you have broad shoulders, so for years I spent my time in the water constantly hitching up my togs, and sometimes, embarrassingly, not quite soon enough. And for the first time in decades I have lain on the beach sunbathing.
• the hot flushes which have plagued me for since the onset of menopause, and which remained long after I was post menopausal, reduced in both frequency and intensity as soon as I cut out sugar.
• I'm enjoying clothes: I've bought a few, altered a lot, thrown away huge bags full, and have bought a proper dressmaker's dummy to replace the customized paper tape one Mac made for me. Not only was it totally the wrong shape, but now I felt I deserved the real thing.
• I have found out which friends are worth keeping, and which ones proved not to be worth keeping. The former were people who asked how I was at least occasionally, who listened, who still cared, who still spent time with me. The latter included those who distanced themselves, avoided me, judged me for my so-called self-inflicted condition and found me wanting, and those who continually try to get me to eat and drink: 'just one or two won't hurt you.' Apparently some people can't cope with conversing with me unless I am poisoning myself at the same time. 
• I have a greater appreciation of life.

In Michael Mosely's book there is a third strand, beyond the diet and exercise stands: the mind. He recommends meditation, mindfulness in particular. I have tried meditation off and on since 1969, and always felt uncomfortable. Actually, it scared me shitless: I would find myself falling into oblivion, losing my Self. However, I was committed to following this man's suggestion, so I enrolled in a night class. I didn't enjoy it. The same old problem arose, and this time my body took over and saved me by constantly, and pretty much instantly falling asleep every time. However, I really liked the guy who taught it and at the end, it emerged that he was also a counselor, and so I started going to him on a weekly basis. He has helped me immensely - previous attempts to get help for my mental health issues have had very limited benefit, but this time, with someone that really gets me, I have finally reached a point where I feel I am becoming the person I am meant to be. I'm putting depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, and childhood issue behind me. And I'm finding I'm now able to meditate sometimes.

Thanks to diabetes, I've finally got to grips with life. I'm ready for new adventures. They might not be what most people would think of as adventures, but that's what they will be for me.

Sculptures at Gibbs Farm

What a lovely day! A few months ago, after two years of trying, I finally got four tickets to visit this awesome place. It is free to visit but you have to book a place.

We had to get up a bit earlier than I'm accustomed to , needing to leave at 7.15am, but the morning was a very beautiful one.

 It was a lovely day, with just enough cloud to be interesting, and to keep us from being too hot. We were joined by friends from down the road, Paulina and Neil.

lan Gibb's 'Farm' is an amazing setting for oversize sculptures. 

 The 'farm' is mowed by pretty serious mowers, rather than grazed.

 Although there are a few animals, they are not, in the main, farm animals as we think of them.  Buffalo, emu, deer, alpaca, oxen, coloured sheep and goats.....

This giraffe is a sculpture though.

This, one of my two favourites, Horizons by Neil Dawson, is amazing. I thought that when I saw it,  it would look real, but no. In real life, even up close, it still looks like someone drew in on the landscape. Totally fucked with my head, and I kept blinking, trying to clear my vision. Wonderful.

 My other favourite was Anish Kapoor's Dismemberment

And here with Len Lye's Wind Wand in the background.

Paulina and I missed this one because, so Mac says, we were too busy talking. Meh - just makes for a good excuse to go back another time.
Some of the others, and some views of the land: photos really can't give much idea of the scale of these art works.

Richard Serra's Te Tuhirangi Contour is pretty impressive. It's about tracing the contour of the land, and 'collects the volume of the land', but to me it was a wall, but even though it's ends were free, it still seemed to have been effective, because we saw no Mexicans. Which was, perhaps, a shame.

 All in all, great art, great company, great day. I'll be back.

The 1960s: Mine, and Hidden Figures

Last night I went to the movies to see Hidden Figures, the blurb for which reads:

The incredible untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson - brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation's confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.

I was born in 1951. So the 1960s, the time in which the movie is set, covered, in today's terms, my school years from Year 5 to 13 plus my first year at university.

I remember the excitement surrounding the space race, the excitement and fear of the Cold War. I remember lying awake in bed, looking out my window at the stars, wondering if tonight would be the night the atomic bombs came. I remember that fear, nay, terror, which filled me especially strongly after my Standard Six (Year 8) teacher, Mr Thomas, taught us about the Cold War.

I remember the amazement and excitement, but also fear, when the Russians got to space first: Sputnik was a fabulous monster. I remember the excitement and pride when the Americans got there too, and the huge joy that surrounded the moon landing by the 'free world'. We didn't have tv, but were invited to watch it at friends of my parents.

At school, in those days, 'history' meant European history - British history plus, as described by my text book title, 'Europe Since Napoleon'. We learned little about colonialist New Zealand history, even less about Maori history, and what tiny bit I learned about America was mostly in relation to Britain, or to WWII (the Boston Tea Party, the bombing of Pearl Harbour in the Pacific.)

In my mid-teens, my mother bought me a magazine subscription one birthday or Christmas: the american 'Seventeen' magazine. Mostly for the fashions, so that she, and I with her help, could make clothes that were fashionable before other kiwi teens knew they were fashionable. But these also had articles in them that I read with complete bewilderment. Why were people upset about some people catching buses to school? I asked questions, which were mostly shrugged off, with, 'oh things are different there.' I couldn't seem to find out what 'desegregation' meant. I thought America wasn't like South Africa with it's apartheid system, yet there was obviously something weird happening.

You have to remember that back in the 60s in New Zealand only a few people had tv. In our house, we got our news from the NZ Herald, the pink-covered, picture-filled Auckland Weekly News, the NZ Broadcasting Corporation (National Radio), and the once a week, several weeks out of date, News of the World at our Friday movie night, held in the Te Kauwhata Town Hall. (Saturday afternoons in winter, the hall turned into a roller-skating rink.) There was no internet - hell, we still had a phone that hung high on the wall so I couldn't even sit down when talking, and no privacy - even if no one was around home, there was still the other people on the party line - Mrs Kearney for sure - and the exchange operator listening in! The local library was in a room about the size of our laundry, and no non-fiction. Information was hard to come by.

Racism was deeply embedded in our culture, and not recognised as such. Racism, back then, was what South Africa had, and the idea that Blacks there (I cannot use the words used for them back then) were lesser creatures, sub-human even, was only just starting to be questioned among the general population. Maori were regarded proudly as the most advanced of the 'native peoples'.

But gradually the ideas of the American civil rights campaigners, the feminists, the anti-apartheid campaigners, the anti-Vietnem War people, the 'make love not war' hippies started spreading, and in my years at university I absorbed many of those ideas.

Then came travel and children and homeschooling and depression and joy and So. Much. Learning!

When I look back at how much my ideas, and the world, have changed over my life, it astounds me. When I look at how much I am still learning and thinking and changing, it excites me.

But when I went to see Hidden Figures, it overwhelmed me. I re-experienced the excitement, the fear, the joy of those days. I remembered the terrible tears and fear when JFK was assassinated. I rejoiced in the lives of those amazing, brave women who stood up and created a doorway to a new world. And I cried all the way through, realising that all through those cruel and difficult times, I was living a life of white, privileged ignorance. Was? I still am! I am aware of it, but only when I think of it, and I can easily avoid thinking about it if I want. Some days I do just that - retreat into a media-free day and make art or garden or go to the beach. I don't HAVE to feel it all the time. That's a huge privilege.

In the era of Brexit and Trump I am increasingly aware that I need to stay aware, to stay in the world, and to do what small things I can to keep our world from the new Dark Age that seems to be threatening to eclipse our sun.



(ps - those amazing women learned FORTRAN and how to put it onto punch cards! I failed that three times at university! And I'm still clueless about hoe to work a computer properly!)

Firewood Days

Last winter we had a tornado go through our area: this tree was ripped in half. It's pine nut tree, and it was the first year it had cones on it. Being a type of pine, the fallen part will presumably be good for burning, and we got a good trailer load from it.

A few days later we cleaned the driveway up  bit. Mac used the tractor to pull some of the big gorse out by the roots, and chainsawed up some of the bigger stuff. It's fantastic wood as it burns really hot.

The tornado also ripped a large kahikatea out of the ground, but when we went to look at it, found it was going to be just too hard to cut it up, and to get the wood out of the bush would need a lot more people and effort than Mac and I have.

 So, under the supervision of the flock of cockatoos, we sawed up a fallen gum tree instead.

 It's incredibly satisfying to cut your own firewood, and to clean up gorse and fallen trees at the same time. Sure beats doing housework! And best of all, my health has improved sufficiently for me to do some of the chainsawing again, for the first time in 3 years.

  We parked the trailer of wood under the pohutukawa tree for a couple of days before transfering it to the wood shed.

  Such glorious trees.

 They even make the old trailer beautiful!