Pretty Jewelry

I love my new jewelry.

Not that I can wear it out of the house. Not without looking like some sort of perverted pathetic dork, anyway.

But I guess I could wear it around inside the house.

No. That wouldn’t work either. I’m sure my wife would be quick to point out that I look some sort of perverted pathetic dork there too.

Anyway, let me tell you about it.

It’s silver.

And shiny.

Very shiny.

And round.

It’s about three inches in diameter and hangs on a blue ribbon.

Can you guess what it is?

Nope. Not an Olympic Medal. Good guess, though. But who are we kidding? I’m hardly an athlete. (And no, it’s not a Senior Olympics Medal, either.)

I got this medal in the one area where I’m truly talented.

No. Not a hot dog eating contest.

No. Not for binge drinking.

No. Not for swearing in a public place.

OK. I guess I do have more than one talent.

Not for photography.

Not for teaching.

Think letters, and words, and sentences! Oh my!

Yep. Now you’ve got it! It’s a writing award!

Beyond Fingersticks, my Continuous Glucose Monitoring “bible” just won a finalist medal in the Health/Wellness category of the 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Awards!

And if you’re not supposed to wear it, then why does it come on a ribbon? Hmmmmm….. I’ll bet Gary Hall, Jr. wears his medals around in the house.

On Tuesdays.

Late at night.

After his wife goes to bed.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

OK, Spanish speaking Kindle lovers (if there are any of you): I’m proud to announce that Domar al Tigre: Tu primer año con Diabetes is now for the first time ever, a Kindle book!

And it’s premiering for only 99 cents. That’s only eleven and a half Mexican Pesos according to Google.

For those of you who don’t know the story, despite all my Argentinean Facebook friends (Hola, all of you!); I don’t actually speak Spanish. Well not much anyway, my wife is Hispanic, so I do know all the bad words. Not that she ever loses her temper with me, or anything like that.

Naturally, working in the mountains of New Mexico, a lot of my patients speak Spanish. Thankfully, most also speak English. But, some of the elderly only speak Spanish, as do what we call “visitors.” The less compassionate might call them illegal immigrants. But I’m able to function with translators and wild gestures.

Anyway, about… Oh… I don’t remember… a few months after my wee book for folks just dx’d with type-2 diabetes, Taming the Tiger, came out my director of nursing said, “wow, I wish we could have that little Tiger book of yours in Spanish.”

(Picture a light bulb appearing above my head.)

Well, one thing lead to another and we got a Centers for Disease Control grant to do just that.

And I got to tell you, it scared the shit out of me.

Think about it. Would you be comfortable having your words translated into a language you don’t speak, read, write, or understand very well?

Anyway, long story short… Oh screw that. I’ll just tell you the whole story. As it turns out, there is no Spanish language. Folks in Spain and folks in Mexico don’t speak the same language at all. Oh and the Spanish in Central American is different from either of those. As is what the folks in Puerto Rico are speaking. And here? Hah! The folks in New Mexico don’t speak Spanish at all. They speak 15th Century Calistian.

Where, or where, is the Advil when you need it?

In the end, Trusted Translations, Inc., in Mexico City, professionally translated the English manuscript to “U.S. Standard” Spanish. Then the fun began. At the time we had five Spanish speaking staff members at the clinic. Three were “native” New Mexicans and two were Mexican. We also had a wonderful blonde-haired, blue-eyed gringa medical student who’s bachelor’s degree was in Spanish language.

All of them read Trusted’s manuscript and commented.

The glue who held this project together is a woman named Ariel Hubbard-Cordero, who I can’t say enough wonderful things about. She’s a bi-lingual New Mexico native social worker married to a Costa Rican. Oh yeah, and her little daughter is a T-1 and my youngest patient. Ariel was able to combine the team’s various comments, changes, ideas, etc., into a body of work; and patiently explained to me the various shades of grey of in word choices between the two tongues. She also had a flexible and functional understanding of the various dialects of Spanish.

Under her patient care I went from fearful, to confident, that the experience of the Spanish reader will be much the same as the experience of the English reader. After all, diabetes itself is a universal experience that makes us all one family, regardless of the tongue we speak.

In the over the two years since the project was completed, many local and south-of-the border folks have told me how much they like it. Recently, corresponding with a T-3 father of one of our little sisters in Spain (who got Domar off of Tu-diabetes), I learned that from the Spanish point of view in Spain, “the translation is excellent.” Wow. That made my day. To think that we created a work that spanned the globe of Spanish speaking people and worked for all of them is…. is… well, crap. I don’t have the words in any language to describe how I feel about that.

Anyway, at the time, there was not enough funding for a e-Book version, so it only existed on paper. A while back a PDF version was made as part of the free Tiger project which you can get here.

But it was never made into a Kindle. Not commercially viable and all of that. But advances in software for stupid people (read that as things I can use) has changed the face of e-Book publishing. So, yeah, I was able to spend a mere 2,000 frustrating hours to convert the damn thing into a Kindle. I hope to sell two, as that would double the Amazon sales of the paper version. Amazon sold exactly one copy. Ever.

Anyway, if my mission was to get rich, I’d be working on Wall Street, not Diabetes Way.

If one person benefits, my time was well spent.

So anyway. Domar on Kindle. Today.

Oh, right, the link is here.