Well, now I’ve sailed into uncharted waters: I’ve signed up for Twitter. I’m not sure why, except that it seems like everybody’s doing it. I’m not much of a leader. I wait for everyone else to test the water first, then if it doesn’t look like they’re turning blue, I’ll stick my toe in. I’ll probably use it to give you short updates when I’m away from the computer and can’t write a full post. Hopefully this won’t be another embarrassing episode. So, please feel free to click on the link over there in the sidebar and follow me. Geez – listen to me – I’m begging, now. Go ahead – I promise not to call the cops. I believe you can “tweet” me at @RJFlamingo. This is beginning to sound a little bit dirty.

I’m still resisting Facebook. Especially after what happened to Lettergirl the other day…

In other news, MJ has (mostly) stopped freaking out about the “D-word”. We just don’t say it around here. He’s been pretty good about the diet thing, but he seems to be stuck on fish for lunch. With an occasional break for cottage cheese. Or the couple of times we had to have lunch out and he had steak (what deprivation!). I’ve been trying to get creative with dinner, although dessert has me a bit flummoxed. Thank God for Sugar-Free Fudgsicles and Sugar-Free Jello Pudding. At least I think so. I just hope I’m not trading one sugar for another that’s just as bad. As of today, MJ has been taking the full dosage of the Metformin (generic Glucophage) for one week. He’s also lost like 17 or 18 pounds. (I’ve lost 3, I think. Men.) He’s supposed to have another fasting blood test any day now, so we’ll have some idea if the strategy is working. Cross your fingers.

After my thyroid scan came back normal, I had to go back for another blood test. It still showed elevated levels of something or another, but apparently not quite as high as they had been a couple of weeks before. The quack – er, doctor – we’ve been seeing, thinks I might have been fighting off some kind of infection, but that it might be getting better, so I have to have another blood test in about a month. I think it’s just another excuse to get another $15 out of me to have my blood drawn.

BTW, is this a new standard practice, or is it just this money-grubber – er, doctor – we’re going to? Every time they’ve taken fluids from my body, they charge me extra money besides my insurance co-pay. When I asked what it was for, they told me “It’s for the labs.” I assumed that they were taking the money on behalf of the testing lab. Then I get a bill from the lab, showing what the insurance paid, yada yada yada, and then billing me $19 and change. So I call the yutz’s – er, doctor’s - office and ask why they’re charging me for “labs” and the lab is charging me for “labs”. The response? Well, it turns out that they’re charging me for the “convenience” of taking my fluids in their office, as opposed to making me go to the actual lab!

I’m thinking that maybe if I’d gone to the lab, they wouldn’t have made me 10 years younger. And while I’m flattered and all that, I’m not so sure that maybe that didn’t make some difference in the test results. I mean, do they use a different set of parameters for a 52 year old woman than for a 42 year old woman? I don’t know – I’m not in the medical field. Maybe some lurker out there does know.

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