Pen-Elayne on the Web

Choiceless

Well, I hear the College World Series was a real nail-biter yesterday, with UCLA pitcher Keira Goerl throwing a no-hitter to beat defending champs California in 9 innings (2 innings over regulation play). I only found this out on the website. I wanted to actually watch the game as promised, but ESPN and ESPN2 apparently found it more urgent to run news shows with the same features every half hour, or means-nothing-at-this-stage-of-the-season Major League Baseball games, rather than showing the CWS. They didn't even report on the score! It's not like the NCAA was completely ignored, mind you; the men's baseball regional team selections were announced; the news even showed the score of the men's lacrosse championship, complete with highlights. But if you wanted to know anything about women's sports on ESPN yesterday, Serena Williams was pretty much it; and if you wanted to know anything at all about women's collegiate sports on the championship level, forget it. What, you thought you had a choice? Anyway, congrats to UCLA.

Speaking of having no choice, I've been told by my doctor that I have insulin resistence (metabolic syndrome X, according to WebMD) and will have to go on medication. The medicine they want me to take seems to be contra-indicated for people who've had liver problems, like my formerly-elevated ALT levels, so it looks like they'll have to slug it out with my PCP (that's Primary Care Physician in modern med-speak, not the angel dust drug) before I actually ingest anything. Meantime, I'm going to try to cut out the white rice with the sushi (i.e., eat more sashimi!) and drink more green tea and see if that helps too.

Now, the usual recommendation for this type of thing - in fact, for everything remotely related to possible diabetes - is to lose weight, which advice many fat activists know is about as practical for some of us as losing height or eye color. And which advice never seems to be given to thin people with insulin sensitivity or diabetes, but never mind. I now have to seriously think about going on a prescribed diet-and-exercise regimen of which 95% do not work and often incur gaining more weight afterwards, or just leaving things be with the sensible diet and increased exercise that I've already started plus a medication that could cause all kinds of lovely side-effects. As I get older and my body starts betraying me, I get very resentful of these rock-and-hard-place situations.