Diabeties

On Friday 11th April I was advised that I was Diabetic, Type 2. This had been picked up on a regular blood test given 2 weeks earlier when my GP, Dr Paul Birch, was checking out a recurring problem I've had with my waterworks.

So now, 9 weeks later, I have to realise that I'm actually coming to terms with the impact of this discovery. You might ask "why is he having to come to terms with it?" Simple really, I still don't have any symptoms that I can recognise or relate to "being diabetic". When you have a cold you have a runny nose and sneezes. With hayfever you may have sore eyes, sneezing and perhaps a rash. But with Type 2 diabeties all you have is a high sugar content in blood, otherwise refered to as a high blood count. So what?

And that's the problem. You can't see it. You can't feel it. And if you can't see it or feel it then who gives a damn? If it was a cut, you'd treat it until it healed. For gut ache you'd look to relieve constipation or frequent trips to the bathroom. But what do you do with diabeties? How do you visualise it?

On my first visit to the Diabeties Clinic held at the surgery I was asked to run through my diet, list what I typically ate and drank. Virtually everything I mentioned got a "that will have to go" or "you can't have that" type comment and to be honest I came to within 2 minutes of decking the nurse. That's not the right approach for me, and it won't be for many like me. The literature I was given was all about buying the right food and drink from specialist suppliers, and many will do just that, for a while, and then resort to what they did before being diagnosed. Some of the stuff was quite scary, talking about the possibility of going blind and of loosing the use of extremeties, especially the toes and feet.

Fortunately, on my second visit I saw Marion. A nurse with a great sense of fun and a compassion for patients like me who see no point to changing established eating and drinking habits. What she said made more sense. But she, like her colleague, said that they didn't advocate daily checks, just regulation by diet and pills.

But the biggest help of all has come from Fred. Now Fred lives 2 doors down from us and we've known him since he moved in some 15 years (or more) ago. Importantly, Fred is a Type 1 diabetic and has been for roughly 30 years and at 62 he is 10 years older than myself. He produced and lent me a booklet outlining and illustrating a method of counting the sugar and carbohydrate content of food stuffs and drinks. We sat down and went through what I'd eaten that day and "counted" my intake, it was 33. As a diabetic I should have aimed for a count of 20-24, so I was well up but not as high as had been expected. So, I borrowed his booklet and for a week I referred to it before eating or drinking anything I didn't know the "count value" of.

Then he turned up one Tuesday night about 3 weeks ago with an Aviva Accu-Chek blood glucose system. This is an electronic gadget that samples very small amounts of blood and gives a virtually instant readout of the sugar count. It comes with a pen sized tool that uses lancets to prick you finger/thumb. Squeeze out just a drop of blood and let the analyser pick it up with a capiliary action replaceable strip and seconds later you have the result. It's child's play once you get used to it -- which takes 3-5 days. So I started doing a single daily check.

On the Friday following I met with Marion again. She explained that they didn't like doing the daily checks because they can be meaningless, but, I explained that I needed to visualise my problem and this was the only way I could see of doing that. So, she gave me a booklet in which I am to record the readings, which is great because now I can see high and low readings on a chart and relate them to what I've done. Now I can regulate by diet and by pills my sugar level BECAUSE now I can SEE my sugar levels and understand the cause and effect that has lead to a particular reading or set of readings.

So I AM coming to terms with diabeties. Slowly but surely I am moderating what I consume. I will admit that I have room for improvement, but, I'm getting there.