Glucose: 116, down from 151 a year ago
A1c: 5.8, down from 7.7
My diabetes is much more controlled.
SGOT: 26, down from 66
SGTP: 25, down from 60
My fatty liver disease is gone.
Total cholesterol: 131, down from 180
LDL: 66, down from 102
HDL: 42, down from 46 (this is the good stuff) The doctor says heredity has a lot to do with this number.
Triglycerides: 115, down from 160
Total cholesterol/HDL ratio 3.1, down from 3.9
My arteries thank me.
The doctor wants to see me again in June. If my numbers stay down, he will wean me off some of my medications. I’m hoping the numbers will be even better in 3 months as I should have lost another 15 pounds by then.
I love my doctor. He never, ever, got ugly about my weight. He seemed to recognize that when the time was right I would do something about it. Meanwhile, he has kept me in reasonable health through medication, and he was as happy as I was about my weight loss. He wrote down the name sparkpeople.com, and so did his assistant.
I love my family, too, because they all love me no matter what I weigh, and they support my efforts without ever saying “it’s about time.”
I love numbers, too. In fact, I was a math major in college many years ago. Here is a wonderful poem about numbers by Mary Cornish
Numbers
I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.
I like the domesticity of addition—
add two cups of milk and stir—
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.
And the multiplication’s school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.
Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrow take away two,
the two in someone else’s
garden now.
There’s an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.
And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.
Three boys beyond their mother’s call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn’t anywhere you look.
