Tirelessly Speeding Them

Today's Prompt: Titles. If you wrote a book about your life, your community, your condition, or your Health Activism – what would you title it? Come up with 5 working titles. What about your biography?

I ruminated on this prompt in 2011. I came up with working titles for all of those things. I don't think I was satisfied with any of them.

To say that I'm particular about titles would be an understatement. It's often the last thing I add to a post. The element of a poem to which I gave the most consideration. Sadly, I spend more time crafting a title than I do drafting the content. My titles often allude to something in literature or song. Or they have a double meaning. Or they're funny.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge once said, "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order."

I'm a poet. As silly as it may sound to declare that in most modern circles, I am. My heart will always be in poetry before it is in song or prose. I don't create much poetry because, the older I get, the more deficient I find my attempts. I'll keep writing until I get it right. I forget which author said that that's why we continue to write. We write because we haven't said it the right way yet.

I think every title holds the potential for poetry. The best of the best words in a single line. Sometimes a single word.

And at the end of the day, I'm honestly not ready to slap a title on my life. Titles are the last thing I do. I'm not there yet. You'll find my title on my tombstone if you care to read me that long.

Until then, you can find me here, sitting over a post for an extra half hour, thinking about what to call it before I hit Publish. Wishing it were poetry.

That's me, second from right, 8 months after diagnosis, in March of 1991.
I was photographed for the local paper for winning a poetry competition.

Borrowing Trouble

Today's Prompt: Pain-Free Pass. What’s a day that you wish you could have used a pain-free pass (either in the future or the past)? How would being pain or worry-free impact that day?

Worry-free.

I can't imagine the freedom that would come with a worry-free day from diabetes.

I've had a lot of big days in my lifetime where being worry-free would have helped. Graduations, performances, big presentations. I've sung for thousands of people several times. My wedding was a typically gorgeous wedding day - stress-free diabetes would have been nice (especially considering my BG was 450+ after the reception and a bad site). And there are the days my children were born, of course. Those were big days. Being worry-free would have been great, but it obviously wasn't necessary for me to pull off a successful day.

The worries I have in any given day... I try not to let them trip me up. I try not to let diabetes be the Lego in the floor (y'all know what I'm talking about). I knock them out as soon as they appear like a game of glucose whack-a-mole. Worry? Whack! Worry? Whack! I wrote just a couple months ago about not letting fear hang around and be so fear-ish-y.

Tidbits and Tricks

Today's Prompt: Learning. Share something you learned from another Health Activist (that everyone should know!).

First of all, I am not a licensed medical professional. I'm not trained to give advice on anyone's diabetes but my own.

That being said, I want to share a revelation that I picked up online that changed the course of my diabetes. It changed my blood sugar spikes. It lowered my A1c. I credit this piece of advice more than any other in getting my body ready for pregnancy. It changed everything.

It matters when you take your insulin.

Online we call it pre-bolusing.

The last few years, continuous monitoring has taught medical professionals a lot about how insulin works in the body. When the newest fast-acting analogs came to market, we were told we could take them right on top of meals. When my doctor started me on Apidra just after it was approved by FDA, we thought it would help me because I usually bolused after meals and this insulin would supposedly accommodate that habit.

Fast-forward to the days of continuous monitoring.

We now know that the "fast" insulins are not as fast as we thought. When taken on top of (or worse, after, meals), Humalog/Novolog/Apidra miss the post-prandial (post-meal) spike entirely. They should be taken earlier. I won't give advice on how early, as I think it can vary from person to person, but I know how many minutes before the first bite of food works for me at most meals.

The pushback I get from most people when I suggest pre-bolusing involves one of the next two arguments: 1) But what if I go low before the meal? and 2) But who knows how much little Timmy will eat? It's easier to bolus afterward.

I'll address each of these valid concerns.

Caught Red-Handed

Orange Colored Sky

Today's Prompt: Day to Day. Write about something ordinary that’s inspiring to you, something simple, perhaps overlooked, that fuels your activism. Today’s post was recommended by Abigail of http://hiddencourage.wordpress.com/

I was walking along, minding my business,
when out of an orange-colored sky,
FLASH, BAM, ALAKAZAM,
wonderful you walked by...

The ordinary thing that fuels my advocacy is when I run into you in my daily life.

You might be the guy who installs my dining room flooring. You might be my labor and delivery nurse at the hospital. You might be my dental assistant last Saturday. But you're out there in everyone I meet.

I would never know you have diabetes except for I can't shut up about mine and that prompts you to tell me about yours. It frustrates you. Your numbers suck. You don't know what to eat. You don't think your doctor is helping you. You live with it. You live through it. But you're just treading water.

I tell you about what we are out here doing via social media. I give you my card and I circle the url for TuDiabetes.org. I might scribble my endo's name and phone number at the top. I might tell you about a particular blog I think you'd relate to.

But the most important thing I do is tell you not to blame yourself for where you are in your diabetes management. As Maya Angelou said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

There I was at the dentist after a ten year absence. Ten years, seriously, since I'd been in. I'd been letting it slide. My teeth seemed fine. It was a medical thing I could shuffle to the back of my health closet and not think about. But it was time I got back on track. I'll go back in six months, too. I'm not going to chastise myself for the absence - it won't accomplish anything constructive. Instead, I'm going to congratulate myself for the return. Prodigal son, etc, etc.

It's what I urged my dental assistant to do. Don't beat yourself up because your numbers are high and your meds don't seem to work anymore. Start fresh. Find a new doctor. Get online. Share with others. Find out you're not in this alone. Then decide how far you want to take it.

As I said in a DHF board meeting last year, I believe what the online community offers is that there are opportunities here for each of us to Learn Something, Do Something, & Change Something. It's up to you how far you want to take it.

But meeting you always gives me a little punch. A jolt. A flash bam alakazam. This is why I do what I do.

And speaking of what I do, here's a little orangey jolt of fun.

Fairy Rings

Today's Prompt: Adversity. “The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.” – Mulan True or false? When do you bloom best?
Today’s post was recommended by sweet Christina of www.stickwithitsugar.com

When I began considering flowers that bloom against the odds, my first thought was not of flowers, but of mushrooms. This begs for a repost of my first ever blog post, on my 18th anniversary of type 1 diagnosis, on a blog that is since kaput.

----originally posted July 3, 2008----

Today makes 18 years for me as a Type I diabetic and my first blogging experience as a diablogger. So I'd like to introduce my blog.

There’s this species of mushroom, Armillaria mellea, that scientists kept finding growing along the northwestern seaboard back in the late 90s - mostly in Oregon. Anyway, they continually dug up the honey-colored stalks and killed them, hoping to save the trees from root rot in the national forests, but the growths would come back, again and again. What they finally discovered was that it was one giant fungus – growing under the state, spanning for over a thousand football fields and weighing in at over a hundred tons – and what they had thought were multiple occurrences were really just parts of this überfungus rearing its ugly honeyed head up above the surface of the ground.

So what I've always wondered is, when a climactic, traumatic, personality-forming event happens to you when you’re still a little, little child, is there any part of your adult form that is untouched by that? You can work to pull and dig and uproot piece by piece of your rotten core as it pokes out into your visible psyche, but what if we're made of it – the hurt, these events, the guilt, your baggage – what if your whole soul is just one spongey fungus? How far back do you have to go before you're at the beginning, before you went down that path? Who would you have been without that trauma?

And it's described many parts of my life, from abuse to bad relationships to...*drum roll please*...diabetes. Kerri's "Six Until Me" back-story reminds me of my troubled relationship with diabetes over the years and this analogy I've gone back to in multiple circumstances. The question "who would I be without diabetes?" is not a valid question. I am the only me that's ever been and that me comes with diabetes mellitus - the honey-sugared syndrome. I don't get to pull off the stalks for a day. It's underneath. Deep, deep, deep within.

---end post---

I heard the term fairy rings this week to describe the natural phenomenon of mushrooms forming rings above the ground as they interlock below. I have a three year old Tinker Bell fan in my house, so it warmed my heart. In the first film, she stands in a fairy ring when she discovers her unique fairy talent.

I much prefer that image to football fields of fungus.

Either way, I still pull off any ugly stalks when they pop up. But, like Tink, I think I have found my talent there, too.

Ignition

Today's Prompt: Burnout. Write about burnout. What does it feel like? What are your burnout triggers? What gets you OUT of the pit of despair when nothing is going your way?
Today’s post was recommended by Lori of http://misdiagnosedme.wordpress.com/

Not everyone experiences burnout in the same way, but I believe that anybody managing a tedious chronic illness will come up against that match that won't ignite one day. That wet log that won't spark.

I know burnout. I spent years there.

I sat next to the ashy firepit and dutifully stoked the fire, poking at it with lancets, blowing on numbers that didn't budge. I just also knew it was pointless. My fire wasn't burning.

I never really stopped checking my blood sugar except for about a month in college. And I didn't even realize I'd done it. I was just busy. Backburnering the Big D. I found this photo from Thanksgiving Day at my grandma's house when I was 22:

I remember checking my number before the big feast that day and scrolling back and seeing that my last check had been in October. It frightened me. I started trying to remember to check again. I threw another damp log on the empty firepit.

Burnout for me meant that after over a decade of doing what they told me to do - testing, injecting, pumping, measuring, etc - my numbers never got better. My A1c never improved. I never felt better. The doctors were never happy.

It was exhausting seeing no results. I truly believed my diabetes was unlike other people's diabetes because when I did what I was told, I still had lots of high and low numbers. No one in the medical community told me that that was NORMAL. They didn't understand how I could let my fire go out. Try harder.

Okay, thanks.

It took a few major changes in my life to come out of that years-long burnout. Each change provided a little turbo boost for my burnt-out ignition.

My new career as a teacher meant that I had to be on my A-game for my students. The day I had to borrow fifty cents from a high school student because I was low and didn't have any food with me to treat was the spark of a match.

A bad relationship ended and I was alone and facing a future I'd imagined differently. I needed to figure out how to be more financially independent and how to live completely on my own - which is freaky with diabetes. Another spark.

My new endocrinologist was supportive and knowledgeable. And a year later, so was my new educator. They saw a light switch that needed flipping.

Meeting my husband changed everything. He was a loving package of support, reminders, and patience. He took some of the confusion and guesswork out of my life, provided me with structure. He lit the pilot light.

And then he brought me to the online community where, after 18 years with diabetes, I learned that my diabetes was normal. I was normal. And I felt a flame start to flicker.

By the time I was pregnant with Sweetie, the fire was roaring. Roaring. It seems easier to tend a flame when it's so warm and bright and present.

I think about my diabetes all the time now. I can't imagine going back into that dark place. And when the tedious tasks of prepping the kindling and occasionally getting burned seem to be too much, I remember how cold and lonely it was next to the empty hearth.

After all, once you know the secrets of the Fire Swamp, you can live there quite happily for years. I'm not saying I'd like to build a summer home here, but the trees are actually quite lovely.

Unrelated to the content, but this is a photo of how I typed this post.
Though I suppose Dibbs could tell you all about exhaustion.

Vintage

Today's Prompt: Vintage. Post a vintage photo of yourself, with a caption about the photo and where you were in terms of your health condition.

a week or two after diagnosis, age 10, 1990

Early Injection, focused

with my state of the art Accu-check meter kit

Voice of Reason

Today's Prompt: I Take it Back. Write about a time that you lashed out at someone close to you because of frustration/fear/anger resulting from your health condition and you wish you could take it back. Forgive yourself and let it go.

This prompt resonates with me.

One of the symptoms of high blood sugar is rage. I won't call it uncontrollable, but it kind of is. The surge of stress hormones that occur with a high blood sugar is the same as that which occurs in the nervous system's Fight or Flight response. And my response is always Fight.

There were times early in my relationship with my husband where I would snap his head off while my blood sugar was high and he would snap back and I would escalate it and it would explode. We found out that, for us, it was important that he knew my blood sugar was high and that he touch me and tell me I was okay. The touch snapped me out of it and his gentle tone gave me no resistance. Nothing to fight back against. I always instantly stand down and realize what's happening.

When my blood sugar level returns to normal, we can talk about what I said or did.

If you love someone whose blood sugar fluctuates, one of the most supportive and gentle things you can do is honor that request - wait until their blood sugar has stabilized before you deal with the way you're upset that they behaved. Wait until it's level before you ask "what did you eat?" or "how dare you speak to me that way!" or "what is your problem?"

Their problem is that they are fighting for a shred of normal.

Now that I'm a parent, there is a new kink I haven't worked out yet. When I'm high, sometimes I snap at my daughter. My Sweetie. My everything.

And there's no begging patience from someone whom you are charged with protecting.

Here Comes Treble

Today's Prompt: Wordless Wednesday. Go to http://www.wordle.net/ to create a word cloud or tree from a list of words associated with your condition, blog, or interests. Post it!

Y'all know by now that I can't do wordless.

I didn't create this cloud on wordle.net. I created this cloud on wordle.net. I made today's image on tagxedo.com and have fiddled with it time and again until the words are exactly the way I want them.

It makes an interesting blog icon - the intersection of words and music - and a really really crappy iPhone cover. Thanks for nothing, Zazzle.

It's Cuplicated

Today's Prompt: Sharing. Comment! Pick someone else’s blog post and write a comment to them. Write that comment as your post for today and link back to them to let them know you were inspired.

This isn't sharing. It's venting. But the person I care about and want to respond to does not have a blog.

I have a person in my life with a different form of diabetes than I have. Call it prediabetes, glucose intolerance, type 2, whatever. It's different. I'll grant that.

It is not, however, as different as she thinks it is. And I'm constantly frustrated. I can't seem to help her the way I want to or make what I feel would be a positive impact. And if I can't help those closest to me, how can I call myself an advocate?

Sometimes chocolate will "drop her sugars" and sometimes chocolate will "bring them up really fast." Even though I know that chocolate can do neither. It's an unsuitable treatment for low blood sugars because it will raise blood glucose slowly and the fat will keep it elevated. (This does not mean that I don't occasionally eat chocolate when I'm low. Shush. We're not talking about me.)

Anyway, if eating candy is being used as a way to drop the glucose level, what's actually happening is that it is overworking that last handful of remaining beta cells and causing insulin overproduction in this person, leading them further down the path toward needing insulin replacement. Chocolate is a treat, not a treatment.

Granola bars with 19g of carb are not protein sources, even if they have a few grams of protein. They're starchy snacks. Turkey is a protein source. Yogurt is a protein source. A grain is not. And protein will not lower your glucose level. Protein converts to glucose as well.

Blood sugar may be volatile, but it is not magical. All our bodies work pretty similarly. (Unless you're that guy I learned about in high school biology class whose stomach ferments rice into rice wine. Or that poor lady whose hair follicles produce fingernails.) You're unique, sure, but you are human.

Food you eat converts to glucose, high glycemic carbs more quickly than low, all carbs more quickly than protein, protein more quickly than fat. Glucose requires insulin to regulate how your cells process it. Your body makes the amount it makes and, if it doesn't make enough (or any at all, like mine), you have to take it via some kind of injection or infusion.

If your body still produces insulin but seems to be losing its regulatory abilities, there are dozens of "anti-diabetic" drugs that nudge it along. Maybe you've been prescribed acarbose, which slows the post-meal spike. Maybe Metformin which keeps you from absorbing so much glucose from food and makes you more sensitive to insulin. Maybe you've been asked to live a more active lifestyle and eat a healthier diet - which would also make you absorb less glucose, have fewer spikes, and make you more sensitive to the insulin you produce.

All of these treatment strategies are for one goal - controlling how your body responds to food so that your glucose level does not rise above the level it would in a non-diabetic body. So that it does not rise above 140 mg/dL.

What raises blood glucose? Almost everything. Food - all of it, even protein. Stress. Illness. Hormones. Steroids. The act of even thinking about eating a bowl of cereal.

What lowers it? Only two things, really. Medications designed to do so and physical activity. That's it. There is nothing you can eat to lower your blood glucose.

Until they make this.

Unsung Heroes

Today's Prompt: Spread the Love. Thank a few of your fellow Health Activists for what they have done. Call them out by name or twitter handle. Share your love.

This is one of those "I don't wanna leave anyone out" kind of prompts, but it would be unrealistic for me to just roll out a blog roll for you when there are SO many amazing activists and writers in the DOC (Diabetes Online Community). You can go down any list of patient opinion leaders/torchbearers/etc, and for almost all of the names, I'll nod my head and say mm-hmm and oh-yeah and she's fabulous. Then I'll think of 20 or 30 more who should have been included.

But there are health activists you probably don't know who deserve a little bit of spotlight and I want to make sure they know that what they are doing truly matters.

Verses

Today's Prompt: Acrostic. Write a health acrostic for your condition, hashtag, or username! (acrostic = a poem where every letter of a word serves as the first letter of a word or phrase i.e. DOG = Digs Others’ Gardens)

Since I composed an acrostic for the word DIABETES during the first year of the HAWMChallenge, I thought I'd take a different approach this time.

Singing a lot,
Writing a little,
Evolving and growing
Everyday, hoping to find
The middle ground.
Living off kilter,
You cherish the normal.

Vertigo,
Of sorts, as your glucose values
Increase, decrease, and throw you off track.
Career, parenthood, social media, marriage,
Elegantly juggled into the story of one woman's life with
Diabetes.

Pollyanna

Today's Prompt: Hindsight. What have you learned about being a patient that has surprised you most?

I became a patient as a child. I didn't go in with a lot of expectations.

Or maybe I did.

I don't know why, exactly, but I was fascinated as a young child with the thought of having a handicap. I wanted to know what walking on crutches felt like, what it would be like to be the kid in the wheelchair. I wanted attention in some way perhaps. I know that the movie Pollyanna left some sort of profound impact on me. In the film (and novel), the eponymous character is so perfect and pure and good. She gets injured, loses the use of her legs and loses all hope, and the whole town rallies to her bedside. She emerges in the spring like a hero, held up for her courage, her selflessness. She learns to walk again and is all the more optimistic afterward.

At the age of 10, after months of telltale signs like bedwetting, fruity breath, excessive thirst, and weight loss, I experienced 3 days of flu like vomiting and lethargy before going into a coma from DKA. I remember rousing out of my comatose state to tell my mother "I'm glad it was me and not some other kid because I know I can handle this." Apparently, I lost consciousness again and my mother cried.

How brave. How strong.

What the hell was I thinking?

While I know realistically that I did not wish type 1 diabetes on myself, I clearly did not understand what it would mean to have the deck stacked against you. It isn't about being the underdog who gets to rise to the top. It isn't about people finding you noble and brave. It's about having to live with a body that is essentially a broken machine.

Big Girl Undies

Today's Prompt: I don't really care about today's prompt because it's about smartphone apps and there aren't any good ones for diabetes, so I'm going to talk about pee.

Diabetes management and potty training have a lot in common.

As you can guess, I'm in the thick of both.

We tried potty training at Christmas a couple of months before she turned three. Sweetie wasn't ready. It was accident after accident. This week, however, four months later, she randomly decided she wanted to wear big girl undies.

While I know she is doing great so far, the accidents are frustrating. What works one day doesn't work the same way the next. Some accidents make us cry. Sometimes we have to wash up and start over.

Just when I am celebrating because we had a great trip to the potty, twenty minutes later, she has an unexpected accident. Damn it, I should have been more vigilant. I wish she was picking up on the signals her body is sending.

Diabetes is exactly like that.

Perspective

Today's Prompt: Wordless Wednesday. It’s often hard to like pictures of ourselves – post your favorite picture of yourself. Today’s post was recommended by my friend Christina of www.stickwithitsugar.com

I know this should be wordless.

But there's something magical about being captured in someone else's gaze, without your forced smile for the audience. In a genuine moment of contentment. My husband took this photo and in it I see his adoration of both of us. He saw a moment and grasped it.

My daughter and I are distracted by a small train pulling in in the distance. And that's significant for me. At probably the lowest point in my life, my friend's mother read me a poem about a traveler so distracted by the train in the foreground racing past without him that he failed to see the second train parked behind it, ready to board. She pointed me in a different direction.

I don't see the pumpkins. I don't see the sun dancing off my shoulders. I see the train that you can't see. I see the photographer I love. I see myself as he sees me.

And it's beautiful.

A Lesson in Self-Care

Today's Prompt: Caregiving. As a parent with health conditions (or parent to a child with health conditions), what do you hope you’re doing right?

There are a few things I know I'm doing right as the primary caregiver to my children.

One of those things is my diabetes management.

I worked hard to get ready for pregnancy, literally years in advance, before meeting my husband, as I tried to bring my A1c down from the dangerous levels of my childhood, teen, and young adult years.

I worked extra hard to maintain that control while trying to conceive my first and then throughout both of my pregnancies. I didn't stop in between either. I knew I wanted a second within a few years, so I kept my targets at pregnancy levels. And since he was born, I have continued to keep up nearly that level of control. Not pregnancy tight, perhaps, but I've kept low targets and high expectations.

It's exhausting sometimes.

But here I find myself parenting with a chronic disease. Many of the women out there with pre-existing diabetes who are considering parenthood can't help but worry about this part of it, too. What happens on the other side of those fought-for pregnancies?

My mantra is that I have to take care of myself so that I can take care of them. I hope that I'm teaching them that self-care is essential.

Hibernating

Today's Prompt: Animals. If your health condition (or the health condition of a loved one!) was an animal, what would it be? Is it a real animal or make believe?
Today’s post was recommended by my buddy Christina of www.stickwithitsugar.com

I wrote on this prompt two years ago and I thought about re-working it for today, but my original was too cute. So it's repost day! Less work for me. (I'll just be here lion around.)

Go here, please:
Number 1 on the Threat Down

And since I need something to make this precious, here is Sweetie saying "lions, tigers, bears, oh my." Enjoy.

Pet Peeve

Today's Prompt: Sensationalize. Say WHAT!? What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve heard about health or your condition? Where did you hear it and what did you think?

There's nothing I would rather write about LESS than cure claims. They don't deserve much chatter. And they piss me off. Not to mention that I've written on this prompt before two years ago.

My community had a recent "upset" (that's a nice word for it) when one of our respected members claimed to have insider knowledge that the cure might be at hand.

Spoiler alert: It was bullshit.

Some of us who have played this game for a while knew it was going to be bullshit. We braced for the aftermath. But others didn't. People wept. Genuinely wept. And it got so unnecessarily ugly.

The "end" has been in sight for NINETY YEARS. I'm not joking. The earliest news articles about the discovery of insulin in the spring of 1923 touted that scientists had figured it out - insulin was the cure.

Then FORTY years ago, scientists figured out how to cure diabetes in mice via transplant of islet cells! So, really, in humans it would be any day now. Whew. That's a relief. We can wait 5-10 years. 15. 20. Okay, so it's like 30, 40 now, but who's counting. Off by a hair. Islet transplants are still where researchers are spending their energy. We'll have it. Just, um, I'm sure, it's probably 5, well, I mean, after FDA approval, surely at least, you have to consider red tape and all, so maybe like 10 years out.

I was diagnosed 23 years ago. My pediatric endocrinologist looked at me, a 10 year old girl in a hospital gown just coming out of a coma, and told me point blank "They've been saying a cure is 5-10 years out for many years now. Who knows - maybe they're right? But you more than likely need to learn to live with this disease for the rest of your life."

Listen folks, I won't stop you from believing. Hoping. And I desperately don't want you to stop funding research. Every bit of research gets us closer to 'functional' treatments like insulin pumps that work with continuous glucose monitors.

But when you are brand new to this game and want to chide me for giving up?

Sister, you have just found the way to press my biggest button. You had best take a step back.

I meet these women in forums for parents of type 1s where I lurk. One recently told all the other parents how she was going to cure her daughter with a restrictive diet. That she'd cured her other child with behavioral/developmental problems through diet. And that she wasn't willing to "sit back and take" the diagnosis like the rest of the parents.

My first thought: These are the parents you hear about in the news. The holistic ones. The faith healers. The ones with the dead kids.

And then I met one.

Beauty and the Beast

Today's Prompt: Letters. Write a letter to your condition – what do you want to get off your chest?

You know, you'd never know it to talk to me about diabetes, but one of the first emotion words that wells up in me when I think no one is around to judge me for it is ANGER. Anger. Not at the universe. Not at fate or my lot in life or the path I've taken. Just undirected, unfocused, impotent anger at the daily crap that this disease brings my direction.

Having no one to blame is a hard anger to sift through. You don't ever find the bottom of the barrel. As soon as you dig your hands into the sand and make a hole, more sand rushes in around your fingers. You never quite scrape past the surface. I suppose that I'm angry that life couldn't have been easier. Angry that my body didn't work the way it was supposed to. Angry that it has cost so much money when my family didn't have a lot to start with. Angry that it in some way affected my momentum.

Disclaimer: These are not our actual angry faces.
Just our pretend ones. About a year ago.