Current location:	home sweet doublewide
Current mood:	nauseated

more Symlin fun
Recently I ratcheted up the dose to 0.06 mg (0.1 ml of standard 0.6 mg/ml) -- that's the same volume as 10 units of standard 100 units/ml insulin, and I use an insulin syringe -- after about two weeks back on Symlin, as suggested. My stomach hasn't gotten too much queasier: many days I have no nausea at all, others only a brief spell or two, but most waking hours I seem on the verge of it.

Mostly it's been a disincentive to snack. Sometimes food seems to settle my stomach, though. Ginger has been touted for women with nausea from pregnancy, and it does increase gastric motility (Symlin decreases it). I've been preparing and eating a lot of kung pao chicken since learning that it's the dish meant by the once-common mistranslation "The temple explodes the chicken cube," and it includes ginger, hot peppers, and Sichuan-pepper. Presumably it stimulates my innards and prevents nausea, but I tend to eat too much: it's a bit of work, so I make a full recipe each time, using nearly a pound of chicken thigh meat. It's chicken, garlic, ginger, scallions, and peanuts, with soy sauce and cooking wine and vinegar: I use a little peanuts-only peanut butter to thicken the sauce I add at the end, rather than cornstarch, and a little sucralose solution (generic Splenda, no dextrose or maltodextrin added, sold on line) to sweeten it. Probably I should eat half at one meal and reheat the rest for another: plenty, though I eat it without rice.

(The increased large-intestine motility from those ingredients has its own drawbacks.)

Another problem: after waking a few times in the early morning in a cold sweat soaking the bedclothes, from low blood sugar, I tend to have a bedtime snack, as I needed to as a child with my one-shot-a-day insulin regimen, if my blood sugar is even somewhat low. If it's too big, I get high fasting blood sugar, requiring more insulin (or more usually the fast-acting analog Humalog) before breakfast... but if I take too much and the Symlin brings on pre-prandial almost-nausea, I don't want to eat, and face a blood sugar crash that I'll have to stop with glucose. It's all a bit tricky at this point, a balancing act I am slowly getting the hang up.

When I don't overreact to blood sugar crashes or eat too much to prevent them, the new regimen keeps after-meal blood sugar low, usually peaking under 150: rare for me before the Symlin. Last I checked, I'd also lost weight, about five pounds, but I'm not sure that that's a trend: I eat less food because I'm almost nauseated much of the time, but I also feel less like exercising, or even moving around, and if little food ends up as sugar in my urine, more is available to keep me fat. Blood sugar always at or near levels normal for humans is surely good for me, but I just want to sit around and do nothing -- all too easy for me. Those workouts at the little gym five miles away are getting less frequent, too.

"Scorn pain: either it will go away, or you will," said Seneca. I need to scorn this borderline nausea. Maybe I'll get used to my stomach working this way. For now, I can get away with idling, but I really should try to get things done.