On Going Quasi-Cyborg, Maybe

For the last year-plus, a persistent recommendation from my endocrinologist to upgrade my $10 blood glucose testing apparatus with its 50 for $10 testing strips and fingerprickings to a CGM, a recommendation contraindicated by learning that it would exacerbate my OCD. But, a compromise (won’t mention the name here – unless they’ll give me a free reader and free refills for life since insulin already costs enough even with insurance thankyouverymuch) not without promise: 14 days between replacement bits n bobs! Only look at it when you need to! Even better! 

Yet still I’ve spurned his songs of praise: I’m happy with Tabitha, the aforementioned $10 devourer of four-times-daily blood sacrifice who can sometimes fling a 30-point difference between two pricks in the same finger (as I write that, yes, yes, I know…); and the question of insurance coverage overshadows all…

This line of thinking, however, hasn’t survived the current arc of reality: by the blessing and the curse of being an only child, I’ve had to stay with my mother during her initial post-broken hip / femur-homecoming and have watched – for the first time since I myself was dying in the hospital from what was revealed to be T1D – commercial television and its seemingly ceaseless drum-beating for the aforementioned quasi-cybernetic CGM enhancement. 

By the fourth time through the smiling faces, I had succumbed to the advert’s sway and caught myself in the recognition of how good an idea this quasi-cybernetic enhancement (augmentation?) might be… though perhaps with some space, I’ll have a better perspective of whether or not it’s truly good for me or if it’s simply a means to generate torturous small talk (though I’m leaning towards the former – it would be nice to gather further data as to why, exactly, my levels leap one day and stay the same the next with the same dosage in the afternoons); writing this is part of gaining that perspective.

DEUS EX, here I come. Maybe.