The Regimen

So I realize since I've returned to blogging I've been kind of a two-trick pony; posts have either been about Halloween or my new life with diabetes. If you haven't been happy about that, well, this post will disappoint you, because it's another diabetes related post. But it's the last I have planned, I swear! I've talked previously about how sick I was, how I got my diagnosis, and how I've bounced back, and I've also talked about all the lasting damages I've had to deal with. When I talked about how I bounced back, I mentioned how my new diet has led to getting into better shape and a lot of weight loss; I've lost 48lbs now, and it's still doing, albeit more slowly. I've had plenty of people ask what I've been doing, so I thought I'd let you all in on a typical day and the things that I've changed to get where I am.

When I first wake up in the morning, I get a 12 ounce glad of water and take my first pills of the day, a Pantoprazole for GERD and acid reflux, and a multi-vitamin. I've been taking that pill for three years now, but the multivitamin is new, as is the glass of water. You'll see a theme here eventually.

A little while later I'll get ready for breakfast. First, I'll check my blood sugar, make sure things are normal. Normal for me in the morning is between 100-110. If it's in that range, I won't check again for the rest of the day; if it isn't normal, if it's high, I'll adjust my meal plan for the day and check again later. So after checking my blood sugar, I'll take my first Metformin pill of the day and have breakfast, usually a bowl of cereal with nuts for extra protein, or a yogurt, again with nuts. Sometimes it'll be waffles or pancakes, and I'll add a stick of string cheese after for protein. And sometimes it'll be a spinach and cheese omelet with toast, no addition needed. In any case, it'll be accompanied by another 12 ounce glass of water. I try to keep breakfast to somewhere between 30 to at most 40 grams of carbohydrates. I've never been a big breakfast person, so this alone is a big change.

A few hours later, it'll be lunch time. Lunch is usually a sandwich, either PB&J or cold cuts off we have any, with chips or crackers on the side, or sometimes some sort of frozen meal, again with chips or crackers on the side, depending on the carb count. I usually try to keep lunch to between 30 to 50 grams of carbs, bringing me to between 60 to 90 grams for the day so far, which is less than my daily maximum total. I also now take a Jardiance pill with lunch. And, like breakfast, lunch is washed down with a 12 ounce glass of water, and I'll usually get another glass after I'm done.

Sometimes after lunch my wife and I will go for a walk to get some exercise in, or I'll ride the stationary bike we bought a few months ago. I used to ride the bike more often, but it scares the hell out of George, which keeps me from doing it, as silly as that sounds. In any even, a walk or bike ride will be followed by another glass of water.

That brings us to dinner, which could be any number of things. It's almost always a combination of a protein, carb source, and vegetable. So it could be chicken or fish, or very, very rarely beef, with rice, pasta, mac'n'cheese, or sometimes fries, and there's usually kale or spinach, and more infrequently string beans or broccoli; usually it'll total anywhere between 40 to 60 grams of carbs, which will bring my daily total up to the 100 to 150 range, still well below the 180 max amount I'm allowed in a day. With dinner, I'll take another Metformin and an Atorvastatin. Dinner will also be accompanied by a can of soda... sugar free, of course. And dinner will be followed by dessert. Yes, I'm still allowed dessert! I usually have a good 30 to 50 grams of carbs allowed at that point, so there's absolutely nothing wrong with grabbing a pair of cookies, a few spoonfuls of ice cream, or a pack of peanut butter cups, as long as it's controlled. It's all about portion size, not taking in more carbs than my body can process, especially in one sitting.

Finally, an hour or two before bed, with the carbs I have left I'll grab a protein bar and another glass of water (for a total daily water intake of at least 60 ounces, sometimes 72 or even 84), a Lisinopril pill, and a protein bar. The protein bar is to make sure I have a few slow-processing carbs in my system close to bedtime to prevent hypoglycemia overnight, which could theoretically happen because of all the meds.

So there you have it, that's the regimen I've been following more or less since March. It's how I've gotten my diabetes under incredible control and how I've lost all the weight I have. It really all comes down to carb counting, portion control, and keeping things balanced. And of course, just like any diet, letting yourself cheat sometimes to keep yourself from falling off the wagon hard. That's why there's some Skittles waiting for me on Halloween!

31 Days of Halloween: Week 3 Recap

Time to recap the third week of the Halloween horror marathon my wife and I have been doing, so let's dive right in!

This week's update starts off with Day 17, where we watched the "classic" horror flick Leprechaun, starring a pre-Friends, pre-nose job Jennifer Aniston. I've always thought this while series was ludicrous but fun in some spots, including this one. Marisa thought this was silly and predictable, but fun for what it is.

For Day 18 the plan was to binge Helstrom, the new Marvel horror show on Hulu. We made it through two episodes before I couldn't take anymore and had to stop. Not because it was scaring me or anything, but because it was just so fucking dull. Marisa was enjoying it though and thinks it's more interesting than I do, so we'll finish it off at some point. It was basically cancelled before it ever aired so there will only ever be these ten episodes and I've watched every other Marvel show, regardless of quality, so why stop now. 

Day 19 brought us to I've of the big guns, A Nightmare on Elm Street. It's of course I've of my favorite classic horror movies. I was hoping this would be one of the ones that Marisa would actually enjoy, while also hoping it would scare her at least a bit. This one freaked Marisa out, so mission accomplished!

We went back to the Blumhouse on Amazon Prime for Day 20 and watched the third of their four new movies, Evil Eye. Much like the first two we watched, this wasn't scary, but I liked it best of the three so far, it had a more interesting plot, better acting, and actually wasn't boring. I think this is the first of this anthology that I liked more than my wife did; she liked that it focused on another culture and was interested in that aspect but that's about it.

I made an unscheduled change on Day 21. We were going to watch Rebecca, a new release on Netflix, but it's apparently not a horror at all and is also getting terrible reviews, so I subbed in the last of the alternates I had waiting, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, which I had never seen before. This was easily one of the best movies we've watched so far, and one of the creepiest. Great acting, great plot, fun effects, and a suitably chilling ending. Marisa found this one informative and educational, which I'm not sure was the point, but she liked that it was basically House with a demon corpse instead of a patient.

Day 22 was a movie called Malevolent, which was a pretty dull disappointment, honestly. I think I fell asleep at one point. The ending was pretty twisted, which was fun, but other than that it was a dud. This is another one Marisa liked more than me and liked the twist, which she did not see coming.

Lastly, Day 23 was the 2011 remake of Fright Night. I threw this on the list not because it's scary but because it's fun and I knew my wife would love the cast, especially David Tennant. As expected, she loved this one.

I'm not sure enough fear is being generated here so far, honestly. Hopefully this last run of movies will change that; we're starting off the final week with remakes of both The Amityville Horror and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, ending up in Halloween day with The Exorcist. Yeah, there should be some scares coming up!

31 Days of Halloween: Week 2 Recap

Time for a quick recap of how the second week of our 31 Days of Halloween marathon is going. Does my wife like the movies? Is she losing sleep at night, worried about the monsters under the bed? Am I? Only one way to find out! Last week we recapped Days One through Eight, let's pick it up from there...

Both Days Nine and Ten were spent at Camp Crystal Lake. My wife had never seen Jason in action, but before we could get to Jason, we had to start at the beginning with Mrs. Voorhees in Friday the 13th on Day Nine. Then we watched Friday the 13th Part 2 on Day Ten. Boy, I'd forgotten how bad that one is. My wife enjoyed them both, liking how straightforward they were and how the survivor was always a girl (she had never heard of the "final girl" trope before). She does she that the first one is better than the second one.

Day Eleven was meant to be spent at Bly Manor, but I had only gotten about four hours of sleep the night before and wasn't up for a nine hour binge, so we flipped the schedule and watched The Final Girls, which was also fitting given Marisa's introduction to the trope over the last two days. I had never seen this one anything it had long been on my list, and I wasn't disappointed. It was clever and a lot of fun, an affectionate spoof/tribute to the slasher genre. My wife thought it was really funny but very predictable and said it wasn't scary say all but she liked how it brought more heart than usual to the slasher genre.

We finally got to watch The Haunting of Bly Manor on Day Twelve. I had been looking forward to this ever since The Haunting of Hill House blew my mind, and I was not disappointed. It's very different than Hill House, more of a slow burn; it might not grab you right away but stick with it, it's worth it. The cast is great, full of talent and chemistry. It's creepy more than scary in a very gothic way. It's hard to say anything more without spoiling things, but I definitely recommend it. Marisa loved this one by the time it was over, but I had to push her through the first few slow episodes. She very much loved the narrative structure and the ending and thought it was very well done overall. We were both just a little disappointed that it wasn't as scary as Hill House but loved it as it's own thing.

For Day Thirteen, we watched Black Box, the second of the four Welcome to the Blumhouse movies on Amazon Prime. This one was moderately better than The Lie, with Sam interesting concept, but the execution didn't live up to that concept and it wasn't scary at all, just a creepy moment here and there. I'm really hoping for more from the two remaining installments. My wife agreed that the premise was interesting and liked it more than I did, even though it was more of a mystery/thriller than horror.

We had to change things up again on Day Fourteen; we were supposed to watch 1408 but I couldn't find it streaming for free anywhere so I swapped on one of our alternates, The Monster. This was a fairly gripping, gritty movie about a mother and her young daughter who have a very fractured relationship, stranded in their car in the woods under attack by a monster. I enjoyed it a lot, although aside from the emotional content it was pretty by the numbers. Marisa thought this was an interesting movie, mostly good but not scary. She wished there was a little more to the fairly abrupt ending and liked the relationship and growth between the characters.

The plan for Day Fifteen, the halfway point, was to break up the horror with a little bit of stupid comedy. Even though things haven't been as scary as we hoped, we stuck to the plan and watched Adam Sandler's new Netflix movie, Hubie Halloween. And boy, did we get stupid comedy. It's stupid as hell, but it's also hysterical, and the twist actually psyched me out a bit. My wife really liked this one, she liked the cast, the gags, and said it's just a really fun Halloween movie, and I have to agree.

Lastly, on Day Sixteen we had to change the schedule again. We were supposed to watch Love and Monsters, the new video on demand release, but that just wasn't in the budget. So I went to the alternates again (only one alternate left now so hopefully things go smoothly from here!) and we watched Would You Rather, a slightly torture porn-ish flick I'd seen before and it's pretty good overall. Marisa didn't like this one; she didn't like any of the characters and thought they were all just stupid, so she was sort of rooting for them all to die, which just isn't good.

That brings us up to date. Later today we'll be watching Leprechaun, and tomorrow we're going to binge the new Marvel show on Hulu, Helstrom, which was meant to kick off a Marvel Horror line before things changed. I'll have another update for you at the end of the week! In the meantime, are there any horror flicks you've been watching to get into the season? Drop a comment, let's talk about it!

Damages

In my return to blogging a few weeks ago, I talked about my diabetes diagnosis and how recovery has been going. I mentioned the tapering off my medications, the weight loss, and how good my blood sugar levels have been. All of that is still true: I'm off insulin and managing things through meds alone; I've lost forty-six pounds now; my average blood sugar over the last month is 103, over the last two weeks is 98, and my a1c at my last checkup was 4.8. In a lot of ways, I'm healthier than I've been in almost a decade, and feel better than I have in maybe longer than that.

Despite all that though, there are damages.

Being in diabetic ketoacidosis as long as I was caused permanent nerve damage in my hands and feet. Nothing extensive or severe, but I'll get pains in my hands and feet occasionally, especially my feet, sometimes for days at a time before it just vanishes. My hands same feet will also "fall asleep" faster than they used to, and once they go numb it'll take longer than it used to for that to pass.

I also get unpleasant sensations in my chest now. I say sensations because it isn't pain, but I'll feel a throb sometimes, or a dull ache, or some warmth or something, and it isn't like localized to one place. Don't worry, it's been checked out, it's fine; I'm told it's partly due to interactions between the five different meds I'm on now and partly due to the fact that it takes me longer to digest food now because the nerves in my stomach are damaged, and that sometimes doesn't mesh well with my acid reflux.

I'm also dealing with diabetic retinopathy. There's been some damage to the blood vessels in my eyes, which has affected my vision. Things are blurrier than they used to be, especially at a distance. I can stay very easily, very clearly watch TV without a problem of I'm sitting on the couch, but if there's any subtitles or other words on the screen, I can't read them. To use the program guide, I have to get up and stand in front of the TV to see it clearly. I can't get treated for it right now either; I'm on my wife's employer-provided vision plan, but apparently treating this is covered by health insurance, not vision. Go figure. Again, it's not something serious, I'm still good and functional, but yes, there are damages.

That segues pretty well into another big set of damages, the financial damages. Fifteen thousand dollars in hospital bills, a few of which I'm disputing, some I just have to pay, with monthly minimum payments of almost five hundred bucks. Which made as well be a million, they're both equally possible. It's pushed me to start a ko-fi page, linked to this blog on the right there, to ask for help. It kills my pride to have to do that, and I can barely bring myself to actually share the link to that anywhere, but there it is.

Then there are the medications. As I mentioned, I'm on five of them now, and they all have side effects. The big one is that metformin, my main diabetes drug, can (and does) cause diarrhea, which makes it a hell of a thing to have to take twice a day when you also have IBS, let's just leave it at that. In addition to that, every single one of my meds lists dizziness, drowsiness, and lightheadedness as side effects, so as you can probably imagine, I'm dizzy, drowsy, and lightheaded. A lot.

Maybe the most extensive damage of all, though, has been psychological. Other than the usual ways everyone gets sick, I've never been sick before. And except for some sprains, twists, and a deep cut that needed stitches when I was a kid, I've never been injured. So to suddenly find myself laid up in a hospital bed, attached to two different machines and three separate IVs in the ICU, being told by nurses I was probably a day or two away from being on a coma? And to then find out my new condition makes me a prime vulnerable target for the pandemic that was about to take over the country? Yeah, there's been some serious mental damage from that. I've been scared constantly. I'm fighting it and it's starting to fade a little finally, but that fear, that new dreadful sense of mortality laying in that hospital for five days have me, is very much still there.

Yes. I'm doing a lot better than I was.

But there are damages.

31 Days of Halloween: Week 1 Recap

We've reached the end of the first week of the 31 Days of Halloween experiment my wife and I are doing, designed to broaden her horror movie experiences and provide me entertainment for a month, and spoken about at length here. I thought it would make sense to check in every week and let whoever might be interested know how it's going, what we liked and didn't like, and so forth.

We kicked the marathon off on Day One with one of my favorite horror movies Trick 'r Treat, one of my favorite horror movies and one that my wife likes as well. Despite the fact that we've both seen it before, I wanted to start things off on a good note with something we'd both enjoy before getting into the unsorted mixed bag of nuts the rest of the month will be.

For Day Two we watched The Prophecy, one of my favorite Christopher Walken movies. It's been quite a while since I've seen this and... it hasn't aged well. Walken is still amazing in it as a crazy, evil angel, and Viggo Mortensen pops up with a very chilling performance as Lucifer, but the movie itself is more than a little ridiculous and poorly done otherwise. My wife thought this was just okay; it was a little too biblical and dated for her, and not really a horror movie at all in her opinion.

We watched The Strangers on Day Three. This flick made the list because we watched the sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night, a few weeks ago and it was really, really bad; I had remembered watching this one in theaters and it was way better, so I thought my wife should give it a try. My wife enjoyed this one and found it pretty creepy, especially how it's loosely based on true events.

Day Four brought us to our first TV show binge of the marathon, Hulu's new show Monsterland, which I reviewed earlier this week here. Much like in my review, my wife only liked a few episodes, specifically the first, third, and eighth. She also agreed that there needed to be more monsters actually involved.

There's a movie from the mid-eighties on Amazon Prime called The Stuff, which is what we watched on Day Five. It was recommended to us by two friends of mine on Twitter, and I have to tell you I have no idea why. This movie was just laughably bad. Low-budget, horribly acted, and just utterly ridiculous. Although, Garret Morris was in it playing Chocolate Chip Charlie, who's hands were lethal weapons, so it wasn't a total loss. I asked my wife what she thought about this and she just groaned at me.

We stayed on Amazon Prime for Day Six, watching a new movie called The Lie, which is the first in Prime's new "Welcome to the Blumhouse" series of movies all produced by, duh, Blumhouse. I wasn't too impressed by this movie throughout most of its running time, finding it kind of dull and overwrought, but there's a twist on the end that really changed things up for me a bit. We both agreed that the acting was pretty good, but the plot was pretty flawed, but disagreed about the twist; she liked it a lot less than I did.

For Day Seven we switched back to Hulu for another new movie, Books of Blood, based on the old John Carpenter series. The movie is set up as a three-chapter anthology, and the first chapter is both the longest and by far the strongest. Honestly, the movie itself would have been much better if that chapter had been fleshed out and turned into the entire movie, but the other two chapters have a narrative purpose as framing devices so I understand why they did what they did. It makes even more sense when you learn this project was initially developed as a TV series and not a movie. My wife liked the anthology aspect, especially how the stories were all connected, but thought the other two stories needed more time. She also agreed the first story should have been its own thing, because there's a lot to unpack in that one.

Finally, for Day Eight last night we watched the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead, one of my favorite zombie movies and also one of the only Zack Snyder movies I enjoy (please don't come at me, Snyderbros, my dislike of his movies takes nothing away from your enjoyment whatsoever and I'm not here to bash anything). My wife really liked this one, especially the characterization, some of the techniques used to tell the story, and the zombie baby idea. She also complained there was too much violence... but hey, it's zombies.

It's Friday, and this should be one of the better weekends of the marathon. We're watching Friday the 13th tonight, followed by Friday the 13th Part 2 tomorrow, and then The Haunting of Bly Manor on Sunday, which is really the centerpiece of the whole affair. The Haunting of Hill House was just amazing, so I'm hoping for a good time on Sunday!

Monsterland: Too Much Man, Too Little Monster

Anthologies are tricky things. I say this all the time about short story collections, and it's no less true when it comes to an anthology TV series. You really never know what you're going to get from episode to episode. Not every episode will connect with every viewer. Different tones between episodes can be jarring. Different writers and different directors all have different styles. That's especially true about the topic of today's blog, the new Hulu "horror" anthology Monsterland, which has no less than eight different directors (one per episode) and four different writers.

Monsterland is itself based on a short story anthology, written by Nathan Ballingrud. Each story takes place in a different city in the United States, and while I don't know about the book, the show is a mixed bag for sure. Some of the episodes are entertaining and some are decidedly less so. Across the board though, the show's biggest drawback is that it's very light on the actual monsters and very heavy-handed about the idea that people are the monsters. And I mean VERY heavy-handed. It gets a bit oppressive in some episodes to the point that I really, really wished there were less people and more monsters.

Personally, I enjoyed half of the episodes, all four of which were the ones written by Mary Laws, who also created the show for television. Her episodes felt like they stuck the greatest balance between man and monster. I don't know if I recommend the show as a whole, honestly, but I do recommend checking her episodes out; she wrote the first, third, sixth, and eighth, and the first and eighth in particular are really good, especially in how they bookend each other.

Overall, Monsterland is just like your typical anthology: a few hits, a few misses, and a few standouts. You may want to give the show a try, tis the season for monsters and all, but don't expect to be scared.