My diet is pretty varied. And I do like to eat well. (Yet I've always been slim.) But the only meals, as such, that I eat are a small lunch and (very) early evening meal: I cook for my 93-year-old mother and myself. And whatever else I may eat, I simply have to make sure that I eat around 220g of rye - from when I get up in the morning, until 4pm. This is what tends to keep my blood sugar stable for 24 hours.
I said that ON AVERAGE I test around once per waking hour. And if I were still 25 years old, then I believe I might now return to work as a motorcycle messenger just as I did soon after I was first diagnosed as needing insulin in 1983. (There might now be more of a problem with insurance, and with the motoring licence.) The visually read strips had only just then become available, and that's what I used pretty well as often as I do now. (Before that, it was urine testing or nothing.) But it's not always so easy in the cold and wet, I acknowledge.
My self-described state of being professionally unemployed is a bit of a joke, really. For I show some marked features of Asperger's syndrome; and I know that I have something important to contribute: something involving the very nature of autism itself. But I immediately need to qualify that: I'm NOT thinking ONLY of the developmental disorder for which the name 'autism' now tends widely to be exclusively reserved. And the very fact that I should need to make that qualification effectively serves to illustrate a certain quasi-medical 'problem of communication' I'm up against. On account of this problem of communication, I have to wait for the attention to come to me. And I have been waiting quite some time: I'm certainly one of those described by the Prime Minister as having been "left for dead". (That was around two years ago, I think.)
I can illustrate something of what I have to contribute, and also something of what I'm up against, in relation to the control of blood sugar in diabetes. (The illustration may be elaborated by some responses to what I write here.)
Here's a definition of 'hypoglycaemia' that I can live with: "(Symptoms resulting from) low blood glucose." (I found it somewhere on the internet, I'm not sure where.) However, that's quite different from the orthodox view. According to the current orthodoxy, a hypo is a reading of below around 4 mmol/l. This orthodox view makes no reference to symptoms at all.
Now, note that the first definition is ambivalent: it has "either or both of two contrary or parallel values, qualities of meanings". (I quote from the OED entry for the adjective.) And note also that the very word 'ambivalence' is one of a triad of terms coined by Eugen Bleuler: 'schizophrenia' (1910), 'ambivalence' (1910-11), and 'autism' (1912).
Hans Asperger himself wrote (in 1944): "The name 'autism', coined by Bleuler, is undoubtedly one of the great linguistic and conceptual creations of medical nomenclature." And of the developmental disorder which he described, versus the mental disorder of schizophrenia, he speculated: "It could well be that these two disorders of the will are closely related!" But he also wrote this: "The autistic psychopath is an extreme variant of masculine intelligence, of masculine character." And that's particularly significant for present purposes.
For since Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner, the term 'autism' has become intrinsically ambivalent in meaning, and yet also very strongly one-sided: it's just like English 'man', and 'masculine', and 'dexterous' and 'right'. (Isn't that right?!)
Moreover - at least in the case of those beyond the age of three or four - there is also an occasional, somewhat pathological human tendency to COMPLETE one-sidedness. This tendency is most certainly a masculine tendency. (And indeed it seems to involve a disorder of the will.) But note that the concept of masculinity is not itself completely one sided. (Otherwise that famously butch, pin-striped, necktie-wearing, cigar-smoking Spitting Image puppet of Margaret Thatcher would not have been so perfectly fitting as it so obviously was.)
Not dissimilarly, the concept of hypoglycaemia is not completely one-sided: notwithstanding the etymology, it doesn't simply mean 'low blood glucose'.
One has to take account of symptoms.
And because of my rye-based diet, I get low blood glucose readings pretty well throughout the day without experiencing symptoms. And if I do get symptoms (as I certainly will if I'm not careful), they are very much slower in onset than they used to be.
Before, experiencing a hypo was like going over a cliff. Now it's more like stepping over the crest of a windswept sand dune: I get a chance to climb back up.
