Scooting Through More Than A Month’s Worth Of Topics…

My fasting blood sugar on August 9th, 2025. All we see here in these posts is just a part of my life, just like that is just a part of my face from November 8th. All photos/screenshots by Ariana.

I noticed that I stopped having blood sugar crashes a few weeks after I got COVID in January. I wouldn’t expect any of you to follow the details of my life slavishly, so just a brief reminder, just a couple days after my cervical corpectomy my sweet husband became sick with COVID, and a couple days later I was in the ER with a sitting heart rate of 150, standing of 172. For those of you who may not know, a bad COVID infection can increase your risk of developing pre diabetes or even diabetes within 6 months of the infection as it damages cells in the pancreas.

Just part of the fun we could all look forward to in this post COVID world.

Didn’t help that I am one of those lucky people that Gabapentin causes to gain weight. I cut calories down to 1000 per day and still couldn’t loose weight on the Gabapentin, it just totally changes the way my body metabolizes food. But the weight gain prior to COVID wasn’t impacting my blood sugars, so I’m thinking it was definitely the COVID, not that anyone would be able to definitively prove that. Once the blood sugar crashes stopped, I started checking my fasting sugars every week to month or so. In August, I noticed they had gone to the prediabetic side. Right now, my neurologist is trying to get me switched over to topiramate (because I still have some residual involuntary movements in my right hand from the spinal chord injury) because that doesn’t cause weight gain as a side effect.

So right now I’m in the middle of some medication transitions that impact my neurotransmitters and I am feeling kinda crummy, and I could have used that as yet another excuse to not write. It seems like there have been so many lately. If you look at this picture of me and Tony that I took a couple of days ago when we were working on him wearing his vision glasses safely you can see two things: 1) he’s bigger than me, and 2) I feel down sometimes from the pace of medical challenges that keep coming our way.

I was trying to look happy, I swear I was! But not only will the ongoing DDD funding reductions still be impacting services for many individuals in our state (public comment is now open for the latest revisions to the assessment tools), I had just found out the following:

For those of you who don’t remember (and it is totally understandable that you wouldn’t), I use CBD to help manage my Mast Cell Activation Syndrome symptoms. I’m allergic to Xolair. I can’t take most of the front line antihistamines. CBD can inhibit Mast Cell activity in some people, and definitely seems to for me…unless I have a flair up caused by a virus. The sources above are the US Hemp Roundtable, Lazarus Naturals (I purchase my products there), and Cornbread Hemp (I purchase products for Andy there as I am allergic to Agave). I did a follow up e-mail with Lazarus Naturals and they verified that almost every product them make, including all of their topicals and all of the non-intoxicating full spectrum and broad spectrum would become illegal. These organizations are supporting regulation to keep inappropriate amounts of THC out of products, but if they loose this lobbying battle, it’s not just me it’s going to impact and it left me feeling down this week. So I want to try to celebrate some of the happier moments for the rest of this post if I can.

Tony’s staring to do so much better in medical settings. I want you to look at these pictures one by one. The first is him waiting in the nurse’s office at his school because someone else was in her restroom and he couldn’t use it yet. The waiting patiently is huge progress for him in that type of environment. And look at his AAC and how much he’s communicating in that environment. He actually did that without me asking him to! And below that, he sat in my podiatrist’s office while she stuck needles in areas around my Achilles tendon (I’ll explain that below) without eloping, fussing, anything. He was calm as could be, and we were there an hour and he had never been to her office before.

Ok, yes, that wreck of a foot is mine…specifically it’s my birth defect side. I have ossifications in my Achilles tendon that can press on my nerve when I am lying down. So my podiatrist is considering placing a Nalu implant, and was doing a test with lidocaine to see if it could possibly be efficacious. As I said, it’s been that year. Probably the weight gain from the Gabapentin exacerbated things there. Reducing the dose to the point of break through involuntary movements only allowed me to loose 10 pounds, hence the attempted medication change.

Then we have Tony staring to wear his glasses, both for in home and out of doors activities. Right now he’s tolerating them for about 50-60 minute stretches (thanks to the work we’ve been doing in habilitation therapy) before he needs a break, but he’s handling them safely and I am confident that in a month or two he’ll be wearing them full time for everything he needs to.

And finally, our son has been the only kiddo in his special education classes at his middle school who was unable to use a scooter due to his motor planning difficulties. Because these items are in high demand at the school, it was hard to get enough time on one to really help him learn the skill, so we bought him one that provided enough stability to account for the weaker core muscles he has from his Sotos Syndrome. Right now he’s progressed to gliding, he’s needing fewer breaks, and he’s been able to generalize it to the smaller school scooters. And with that, I’m doing to scoot on out of here for the week so that he can go ride his scooter around the neighborhood. Much love, Ari