Hi everyone,
This has really been a cat week.
My Hercules, the diabetic cat, has to change to a new form of insulin which will require monitoring with a glucometer, just like a diabetic human. I got a glucometer with the insulin donated for him, but it turned out to be broken, could not be repaired, and those are expensive buggers. So I put an ad in the Jerusalem "Anglo-Saxon" electronic network and within a couple hours I got the donation of another old glucometer, this one working.
Just went over this morning to pick it up. One of the older, poorer tenement areas of Jerusalem, tiny flats. But when the donor opened the door, the first thing I saw was an 18-kg bag of kitty kibble by the door. Ah, one of us cat people! He kindly gave me a working glucometer, all the instruction manuals, and some lancets for taking blood from Hercules (which will be an interesting exercise in itself, just hope my blood doesn't get mixed with his in the sample....)
Mused on my way home that it isn't necessarily, or even often, the wealthy who are quick to donate help or materials. In my experience (which is more than I would have expected, thanks to the wartime situation most of the time here), it is the humble people who are quick to give and do it naturally. I've seen poor people whip out their wallet and donate all the cash they have on hand for something they consider an important cause. It's one of the few redeeming traits of human nature.
Hotter than hell today. After I picked up the glucometer, I went to ground in the house, windows and drapes closed, fan on, before 11 am. These old stone and concrete houses of the Middle East are freezing in winter, but the thick walls ensure that indoors it is cool if you don't let in the hot air from outside. It's gonna pass 100oF, or 35oC today, but inside my concrete cottage the temperature is not bad. I'll emerge again after 4 pm when the garden starts cooling down.
Aside from August's torrid weather, I'm feeling pretty fine right now, for the first time in months. Switching from iron sufate to iron bigluconate supplement for my anemia resolved most of my bad symptoms (faintness, dizziness, stomach pains, diarrhea, etc) and the few that remained were almost instantly removed when I started taking aloe vera extract, the kind for internal troubles. I never knew that you could swallow the stuff, although I use it often enough on my skin. Turns out that at least the Russians knew about the treatment of gastritis by using aloe very quite a long time now. I got the idea reading about gastritis on the internet, picked up a bottle from my local health food store for about seven dollars for a month's worth, and was feeling my normal healthy self after two days of it, for the first time since last May. Gee, I wish somebody had told me about this stuff earlier....With the stomach problems gone, I can tell the anemia is gone also, and I have normal energy. Sheesh, what an experience--among falling off a ladder, anemia, and gastritis, I've been sick all year, and that has never happened before. Hope it is a long time before it happens again.
Work goes well. Now that my head is clearing from the fog of illness, I can think, which is kinda important in my job (conservation informatics). I just picked up a new project with statisticians at Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics (very good bean counters) which promises to be fun. (Shows you what my head is like, that my idea of fun is a project with a bunch of statisticians, I guess--but really, it is puzzle solving, like some video games....).
I also have an invitation to teach multivariate analysis at one of Israel's universities next February, a master's class of about 20 students. Haven't taught in ages, this should be interesting.
More stuff going on, and I'm grateful to feel healthier now. As I was feeling in July, this much activity would have scared me. The experience has been a real window into the lives of the chronically ill...guess I'll be there someday myself, but not quit yet.
shabbat shalom,
Linda
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