I bought a really beautiful, wooden cross today. It’s called a San Damiano Cross. I already know that I want to make a wooden rosary this time, and I’ll be using olive wood beads, unless I can get my hands on scented sandalwood beads. Those, for some reason, are hard to find.

Here’s the cross:

Here’s a short bit about the cross:

The San Damiano Cross is the large Romanesque rood cross that St. Francis of Assisi was praying before when he received the commission from the Lord to rebuild the Church. The original cross presently hangs in the Basilica of Saint Clare (Basilica di Santa Chiara) in Assisi. Franciscans cherish this cross as the symbol of their mission from God. The cross is of a type sometimes called an icon cross because besides the main figure it contains images of people who have a part in the meaning of the cross. The tradition of such crosses began in the Eastern Church and probably reached Italy via Serbia and Croatia.

I think this will turn out to be a lovely rosary.

On to other things…

These last few weeks have been weird and tiring. Two weeks ago I stopped taking the metformin that is supposed to help control my blood sugar. The dizziness was just getting out of hand, and even though I was also taking meclazine which helps with travel sickness and dizziness, it was putting me to sleep and not helping.

I was born without Depth Perception. This means that all of you see things in 3D. In order for my eyes to be able to do a passable job at gauging distances properly, my eye muscles have to work extra hard in addition to a few other cheats my body worked out loooonnnngggg before I even knew I wasn’t seeing things right.

Generally, someone who doesn’t have depth perception is a clumsy person, not artistic, and certainly cannot drive or work on a computer. I’m not clumsy. I’ve always been graceful. I certainly am artistic and my pen & ink work was a chaotic study in skewed perceptions. I can also work just fine on a computer.

Can’t drive, though. I sit in the driver’s seat and I swear, all the traffic coming the other way, on my left, is actually driving straight at me. It’s a good thing I don’t drive.

So, back to this metformin. It was messing with my equilibrium to the point that I’d get up from bed and fall against the wall. I tripped over my dog as I was walking him and fell down the stairs three times. The pharmacist switched me to an extended release form of the metformin that I took at night, but I was still dealing with enough dizziness that I just couldn’t function right.

I stopped taking it.

However, I also stopped taking it for another reason. My blood sugar, although it’s not at 100 my doctor wants, it is NOT over 150. I have managed to improve my diet (it’s a WIP) and there’s room for more improvement, and since I’ve stopped the metformin, my blood sugar is staying steady at about 120. When I had my fasting blood test my blood sugar was 143.

Everything that I’ve read on Type II Diabetes says that I’m pre-diabetic, NOT diabetic.

I’ll concede that I might be missing something, but this just has me asking a bunch of questions, ya know?

Another reason I’m not such a big fan of metformin is that it is also an appetite suppressant. Not a bad thing, but I took a log of two weeks of meals in for my visit to the doctor and showed him, that although my diet was heavy on the carb side, I was only eating two meals a day and getting around 950 calories a day.

You don’t give an appetite suppressant to someone who is already not eating enough. Right?

I’ll be seeing the doctor in April and discussing this with him. I’m hoping this won’t be another doctor who gets his nose bent out of shape because I have questions, do research, and don’t always think the doctor is always right.

He was warned, though. It says in my patient files that I’m a difficult patient, so there.