Kiki's Memos

Category: Personal Experience

  • Seeing Inside Me

    Wearing a continuous glucose monitor has been life-changing. A tiny sensor under my skin, quietly tracking my blood sugar every few minutes, sending numbers to my phone. Seeing in real time what is happening inside me — how food, activity, and even stress affect my blood sugar — is exciting and eye-opening.

    One insight surprised me: my early-morning bathroom trips were caused by low blood sugar — dipping to 59mg/dL. That triggered cortisol that woke me up and disrupted other hormones. A small bedtime snack of nuts, yogurt, or lentils now keeps my sugar stable all night, and I sleep through.

    Another discovery: eating pomegranate on an empty stomach spiked my blood sugar to 147mg/dL. Now I eat fruit only with nuts or after a meal to avoid peaks. Eating protein or fat before carbs and sugars keeps blood sugar from spiking, so the order in which we eat makes a difference.

    One of my goals is to keep blood sugar stable and rising gradually after meals and returning to the starting point within 2 hours, while learning how my body reacts. Even walking, thinking hard, or feeling stressed shows up on the monitor.

    It’s about curiosity. About noticing, learning, and making small changes for my wellbeing. Watching my body in real time has taught me more than I expected — a tiny device, a big window into how I live.

  • Learning “Vidit Suum”

    I started learning a new piece for my second year of intermediate singing lessons — Vidit Suum from Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. It’s challenging, lyrical, and completely absorbing. From the very first notes, I knew it would push me — both technically and emotionally.

    Pergolesi (1710–1736) was an Italian Baroque composer who died very young, at just 26. Despite his short life, he left a powerful musical legacy. Stabat Mater was composed near the end of his life and is a sacred Baroque work, sometimes described as a cantata or hymn setting. It’s devotional and meditative — a series of 12 short movements for soprano and alto soloists with strings and basso continuo. The text reflects Mary at the foot of the Cross, grieving for her son, and the music mirrors that sorrow. The continuo, usually played by a keyboard instrument like a harpsichord together with a cello or bass, provides the harmonic and rhythmic foundation, supporting the singers and keeping the music flowing.

    “Vidit Suum” is one of the soprano solo movements, intimate and emotionally charged. It’s beautiful, but it challenges me in multiple ways: long, flowing phrases that test my breath control; delicate ornamentation and Baroque phrasing; and finding the balance between pure tone and expressive depth.

    I’ve spent hours breaking it down: studying the music, noticing where my breath needs to stretch, where the phrasing needs to bloom, where I can let the sorrow come through without collapsing under it. Baroque ornamentation and dynamics add another layer of challenge — not just singing the right notes, but making them live, making them feel.

    Practicing this piece reminds me why I keep studying singing. It’s more than technique. It’s stepping into someone else’s world, a world of beauty, of loss, of human feeling that has survived hundreds of years.

    Even as a single movement from a 12-part work, Vidit Suum feels whole. I love this challenge. I love how it asks for patience, focus, and empathy — and gives it back in richness and depth.

    This is what keeps me going. One movement, one phrase at a time, connecting to centuries of music and to my own voice.

    These are the lyrics

    Vidit suum dulcem natum,
    moriendo desolatum,
    dum emisit spiritum.

    And the translation

    She saw her sweet Child
    dying in desolation,
    while He gave up His spirit.

  • The Night I Found Judo

    July 12th, 2016. Around 10:30 p.m., I was driving home through the dark village of Manna, Abby in the car.

    In the middle of the road, I saw something. A tiny mass. A small cat, lying in blood. I slowed, stopped, and gently moved it to the curb. It was breathing, barely, but alive.

    A month had passed since my dad died, and the sight of suffering hit close to home. I couldn’t leave it there. I had a piece of cardboard in the car, so I carefully lifted the kitten into the car. Abby sniffed curiously the whole way home. My heart was heavy, but at least it would die somewhere warm.

    At home, I made a small bed with a box, an old blanket, and a towel. I decided: if it survived the night, I would take it to the vet.

    Morning came. It was still breathing. I rushed it to the vet and asked if there was any chance of a normal life. He stabilized the kitten, repaired a broken jaw, and started fluids. Later, he warned me it might be blind, unresponsive to light.

    I had to return to Athens for my dad’s 40-day memorial, so I left the kitten in care, knowing it needed the vet more than me. When I returned to Syros, I picked up a skinny little orange male, roughly three months old, with a slightly crooked jaw. Abby instantly loved him.

    I named him first Roulis, after my dad, then Yoda, and finally Judo, after watching a judo match on TV while he curled up next to me, staring at the screen as if curiously following the action.

    He grew into a fully fluffy, sensitive, shy, and loving cat. He can see — maybe not perfectly, sometimes missing his jumps — but he navigates his safe home like any other cat.

    We took him back to Syros a few times, but the outdoors stressed him. Athens became his sanctuary. He gets along wonderfully with Abby and Olive, Irini’s Cavalier, and we have photos of them napping together.

    Funny enough, a few days after Judo came home, someone dropped off another tiny kitten — tri-colored this time. She became Nina’s cat Chanel.

  • Vertigo, Not the Movie

    The New Year started spinning. Sorry—the room started spinning for a few seconds. I sat up too quickly in bed, and suddenly the world was off balance. It happened again a month ago but went away on its own. This time, it made me feel really sick and unable to function.

    It’s called Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV). Tiny crystals in the inner ear, called otoconia, shift when you roll, turn, or sit up. They’re made of calcium carbonate — literally crystals — but very small, fragile, and grain‑like, almost like fine sand. Normally, they help your body sense movement and gravity. When they dislodge into the semicircular canals of the ear, they trigger that sudden whoosh of spinning. 

    Some patterns show up again and again with recurrences of BPPV. Low or fluctuating vitamin D — which plays a role in how calcium is regulated in the ear — seems to be linked to more frequent episodes, and supplementing it may reduce how often it comes back.  Reduced bone density or mild osteoporosis, where the body’s calcium metabolism is altered, also appears more often in people with recurrent BPPV.  There’s even evidence that microinflammation in the inner ear and general metabolic shifts that affect how calcium is used in the body may contribute — not just simple head movements. 

    There’s a simple fix if done correctly: the Epley maneuver, a sequence of head and body movements, that often helps put the crystals back where they belong. This is what I did and it seemed to work. You may have to repeat it once a day for a few days. Balance exercises, staying hydrated, and ensuring your body has the nutrients it needs can help too. Even after the crystals are back in place, it may take a few more days of mild dizziness before you feel fully normal.

    It’s brief, it’s unnerving, but it’s manageable. Tiny things inside our bodies can make the world feel upside down for a moment.

    And as the first day of the year, maybe that’s a thought to take: beginnings can feel spinning and unsteady. Balance requires patience, but it always returns.