. . . are helping me keep some of my New Year’s resolutions. We “obligers” need lots of outside prods. (Don’t know what an “obliger” is? Read about the “Four Rubin Tendencies” here. I think she’s really onto something.)
I write about my efforts to quit my small-but-annoying habit of picking at my fingers and chewing on hangnails in the chapter on habits in my book. I’ve been doing pretty well, but there have been some slips. A couple of weeks ago I had to get a filling redone at the gumline, third bottom tooth over from the center on the right. I hate getting fillings! Hate it, hate it, hate it. It takes forever. And those needles!
So get this: a day or two later I caught myself chewing on a hangnail with the usual teeth: yes, using the tooth I’d just gotten filled. Oh no! I thought. I’m flexing this tooth. Did I make the filling pop out? And I started having some pain there. I could just see it: I go into the dentist and she says, “Yes. Popped right out. We’ll have to re-do it.” So I got them to take a look, which was a little more complicated than I had expected. I thought I could just open my mouth and they’d peer in with a mirror, but no sir-ree. First I had to get into the chair and put on one of those bibs. “Do I really need one?” I asked. “I hate to use it up for just a 30-second exam.” “Yes, we always put on a bib,”she hygienist said. She put on gloves and peered in. “It looks okay to me,” she said. “But Dr. Fritz needs to look at it, too.” So then the dentist came in and she put on a pair of gloves. “No, looks fine.” They were very gracious, and they didn’t charge me, so that was nice, even though they had to use up time, a bib, and two pairs of gloves. Have I done any more hangnail chewing? No sir-ree.
I also got some rather bad news about my blood sugar. Both of my parents had diabetes, although there’s no way now that I can get the details. I know that my dad was taking medication for awhile and then said that he was able to go off of it and just watch his diet. He died in 2009. My mother was a more serious case, apparently. She died in 1994, though, and I don’t remember discussing her treatment at all. While 85% of diabetes sufferers are overweight or obese, that statistic leaves 15% of us whose weight is fine but who still have a problem. I’m built just like my mom, a skinny little birdlike woman. And while I don’t drink pop (yes, pop–soda is soda water) or eat much candy (much), I had drifted back into putting sweetened, flavored non-dairy creamer in my coffee (a lot–five tablespoons!) and eating sweets far more frequently than my special-occasion, no-more-than-once-a-week limit that I had imposed earlier last year. My blood sugar seemed to have been holding steady over the past several years, and my family physician had said at one point, “You don’t have diabetes.” I don’t know what he based that assurance on, as my numbers weren’t really all that good. I kept saying, “I’m hovering on the brink of pre-diabetes,” but I didn’t take the situation all that seriously. So when I asked for an A1C reading at my end-of-year checkup I figured that they’d call and tell me I was still below 6.0, which used to be the top limit for normal; I’d been going up and down between 5.7 and 5.9. (A1C is a reading that gives a three-month average for blood sugar and is looked upon as more accurate than a straightforward blood-glucose reading; the top of the normal range is now considered 5.7.) After all, I’d been exercising faithfully. (Except for that week or so in December.) So when the office called to give me the results I was all set to be proud of myself. “Hey,” I could picture myself saying, “My blood sugar actually went down over the holidays!” Well, was I wrong. My A1C was 6.3, now considered to be tipping over into diabetes. The office wants to do further testing, so I’m giving myself a month of very strict adherence to the no-sweets rules before I go in again. But up until I got the test results I just figured that I was fine. Why deprive myself unnecessarily? Now that I’ve been given a warning by an outside party I find it much easier to do some depriving. Recognizing my innate nature can only help me stay healthy.