Salty Zebra

 Last year about this time, I wrote to you all asking for a little help from my friends , and you showed up! We raised $357.68 in donations over the month and I wanted to share with you today how that has influenced my blog this year.  First, it showed me that there were real people out there reading what I was writing who actually valued it enough to contribute financially. That means more than I can possibly express! I love  writing, but it's hard when you put things out into the blogosphere day after day and you wonder if anyone sees it, if anyone cares, if it's making a difference. When you all showed up for me last December, it encouraged me to keep writing, to keep traveling, to keep learning and sharing things with you. THANK YOU!!!  Next, by having some level of financial income, my blog was legitimized as a business. This enabled me to open five different credit cards and two bank accounts earning me 365,000 points/miles and $1,200 in account signup bonuses....

  How do you make decisions about your health? I'm facing an interesting one at the moment, and I'm not entirely sure how to proceed. Sometimes God makes things really clear to me. Sometimes it feels a little more ambiguous. Take yesterday morning for example. I pray about a lot of things, big and small, and yesterday I was praying about which game my husband and I should play for our date morning. Before I even finished the thought, Terra Mystica was front and center in my mind, so that's what we played! On a much larger scale, a couple of years ago we attended a fundraiser for the Tacoma Rescue Mission and Duke, their director, gave a presentation on the Community First! Village in Austin, Texas and his heart to replicate it in our area. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt in that moment that we would be moving in there the moment the gates opened, and I didn't even know there was such a thing as a missional yet ! God knows that I struggle with making decisions, and th...

 Well, it's been about a month since I've started working towards managing my blood sugar with diet and exercise, and I'm happy to share that I have something to share! Yeah, for a while there it looked like I wasn't going to learn anything. God is good and He opened my eyes to a few bends and quirks that I think I'll be able to use to continue to improve things.  I say continue because I can honestly say that it looks like things are doing better already! The following graphs show a time range (typically 3 weeks) of data put onto one graph.   This first graph shows my blood sugar without any diet or medication to mediate it. The yellow bits at the top are when I went over the target range. The graphed values are pretty wide meaning that I had a pretty big range of "averages."  The second graph shows my blood sugar on a double dose of Metformin. Turns out I'm allergic so while this graph is quite a bit better than the first one, continuing this treatme...

  Brain tumors and Brain surgery do crazy things to people! To be honest, we don't actually know if my current challenges were caused by either of these, the 12 weeks of intense IV antibiotics I had to take, or something else entirely (hey there, perimenopause! I see you!). So what are the things I'm dealing with? Blood sugar and cholesterol levels. Prior to my brain surgeries, these were completely normal. The only indications I'd had of something potentially being off was during each of my three pregnancies when I consistently tested positive with the initial glucose test and had to return for the four hour test for gestational diabetes, which always came back negative. Apart from these, I've never had a problem with my A1c or my cholesterol levels.   My doctor's theory is that either the trauma inflicted on my brain during my surgeries and healing or the tumor itself has caused my body to go wonky. Regardless of the cause, though, I am not faced with the reali...