Enlightenment

Today brought enlightenment. Twice. Hence it also brought a raging headache that neither ibuprofen, a hot bath nor copious amounts of caffeine have eradicated.

My son received a birthday present in the mail today. This shouldn't surprise anyone as his fifth birthday was on Thursday. And while he is enthralled by the Legos, I am somewhat less enthused with the enlightenment it brought along with it. You see, the gift was from my brother-in-law. It suddenly occured to me that to my brother-in-law, Adam's birthday is worthy of rememberence because he is a blood relative. My birthday, on the other hand, is consistently and repeatedly overlooked. I don't know the reason for this, but I do know that my step-mother-in-law's birthday is also repeatedly overlooked. I also know that he and his wife do not consider her part of his family. Therefore, simple deduction would tell us that I too am not counted as family. Therein lies the first enlightenment of the day.

I shed many tears over that bit, but I have a plan to deal with it. I'll keep you posted.

As you can imagine, I really needed a long, hot bath tonight. I decided to also take along with me some "mindless reading" aka magazines. There on the page, in a little tiny text box was the blurb of enlightenment. Did you know that a gum infection can cause insulin resistance in turn raising your blood sugars to prediabetic or even diabetic levels? Oh my.

I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes while pregnant with Gracey. At my appointment with the diabetic educator, I told her I had had a gum and tooth infection at the time of the testing and was still being treated for that. (My test scores were only 2-3 points over the cut-off and my daily numbers were in the normal range with the exception of my morning number which was only slightly elevated by about 4 points) She actually laughed at me and said, "So? I had my gall bladder removed when I was pregnant and that didn't make me diabetic." I was polite and didn't say anything. Fact is, when she was pregnant (she's in her 70s) there was no such thing as gestational diabetes and having your gall bladder removed is very, very different from having an infection. Anyhow, during the course of my pregnancy, I had 2 different gum and tooth infections and a sinus infection all of which went mostly untreated because antibiotics during pregnancy is tricky at best.

So, I will be clipping out that blurb and attaching with it a letter then sending it on to this not-so-nice woman. Perhaps then she will be the enlightened one.