There's an old joke about two blind men who, having never before encountered an elephant, are asked to describe it based on what they can touch of it. The one man, brought to the elephant's trunk, has a completely different description from the other, who was brought to its hind leg.

There's a famous experiment, proposed as a test for artificial intelligence, in which a person queries two entities about themselves and tries to determine which of the two is a man, and which is a machine.

And then there's the famous "black box" which, in theory, creates solutions from inputs, without any single entity knowing what it does to "create order from chaos". The black box is, in other words, magick.

Each of these requires that someone (or some thing) create a definition and a solution to a problem based on insufficient, empirical data.

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About a year ago, my PCP's office decided I needed to make separate appointments to have my blood work drawn, a week before my PCP appointments, extorting an extra co-pay so that my doctor and I can have some meaningful interaction (my insurance requires the lab work to be sent out, with about a five- to seven-day turnaround). There's nothing unusual about the blood work -- just the standard glucose panel (with HbA1c), metabolic (liver function) panel, lipid panel (cholesterol), blood count, and urinalysis.

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I have to do something this afternoon that I've never done before. And I'm not looking forward to it. In fact, I suspect there will be ridiculous amounts of screaming and crying.

No. 2 needs bloodwork. *sigh* Actually, she's the toughest of all the kids when it comes to stuff like this so she may surprise me and not throw a fit, but I'm seriously not holding my breath.

She has a strange mix of things going on with her and the doctor thought getting some bloodwork would either help rule out a connection or help us treat the problems as a whole.

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Tonight I'm walking a fine line.

I usually prefer to wake up higher than the recommended fasting. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be sky high, but being over 110 really rocks my world because that means I don't have to eat anything before I exercise.

This morning for example, I was 116 mg/dL I believe. Had a wonderful walk that wasn't preceded by food.

Tomorrow morning, though, I'm having some fasting bloodwork done. And not until 8 a.m. Even on mornings when I walk I've usually eaten breakfast by 8 a.m. Remember last time I had bloodwork and woke up on the super high side and then wound up nearly close to low while I was getting my blood drawn? No? Well then read this.

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Bob.Fornal on Flickr

As a diabetic, blood sugars aren't the only numbers that I have to deal with on a regular basis. There are cholesterol levels, triglyceride levels, protein and potassium levels, and all sorts of other issues that pertain to the "hardest hit" organs in my body. So every doctor that I go to makes sure to keep track of this multitude of lab tests.

My most recent doctor's appointment (not with an endo but with the hormonal specialist that I see for my other conditions) included this plethora of lab tests. So when the results came in last week, I made sure to compare last year's tests with this year's. I wanted to see how my body was reacting to the supplements I take, prescriptions I'm on, and routines that I do.

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