Tag Archives: diabetes

A tale about health, both mental and physical…

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For years, I listened to every medical professional I met tell me that I’d feel much better if I lost weight. Over the last six months, as you know if you’ve been following along, I’ve finally been following their advice. I’ve been following the very broadly defined advice of “eat less, move more.” In my case, that equated to about 30 minutes of pretty mild exercise – walking or time on the stationary bike – and a pretty fanatical devotion to tracking calories. Since July, I’ve been consistently losing right around 1% of my body weight every week.

Even as I’ve closed in on my initial goal of losing 80 pounds, I can’t say I felt better. Sure, I was a bit more flexible and found that taking the stairs wasn’t hell on my knees, but I felt increasingly awful. In fact, the more I lost, the worse I felt – physically and mentally. 

For the last six weeks, I felt like someone who was definitely not me. My head was in a constant fog, I was struggling to regulate my emotions, and was spending most days in a constant basket of worry and anxiety about everything and nothing. Even my blood pressure, which has been wonderfully controlled for months started to creep up past the “elevated” level towards hypertension. My primary care doctor preliminarily identified the problem as anxiety stemming from my cardiac health scare in June and July. He gave be a very small prescription for Xanax in hopes that would get me over the hump for the worse of the anxiety. I took it, but didn’t notice any difference at all. 

Last week, after a very tough weekend, I finally made an appointment with a behavioral health professional – a therapist – convinced that there had to be something going wrong with my head. My big beautiful brain has always been what I consider the natural gift I got – it certainly wasn’t athletic ability or good looks. Something messing with my brain has always been my nightmare scenario. 

In any case, the therapist I consulted with gave a preliminary diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder and instructed me to get back with my general practitioner to discuss options for going on anti-depression medication. I wasn’t thrilled, but honestly by this point was pretty desperate to get some relief and get my thinking back under control. Fortunately, I was able to get an appointment the next morning to talk with my doctor. 

We met for almost 45 minutes Friday morning while I described all my symptoms and he asked some probing and uncomfortable questions. A few in office blood tests later, we had ruled out a lot of physical possibilities and we’re closing in on saying yes, my brain was sick… or at least we were until I mentioned how disappointed I was with my weight loss as it seemed the more weight I lost the worse I felt. 

That sentence seemed to hit the doc like someone throwing a light switch. After consulting my chart again and reviewing the bloodwork results, he noted that “You’re still taking metformin…” He went on to explain that in some case, dramatic weight loss can actually send diabetes into a form of “remission,” meaning that it was entirely possible that we were treating for a disease that was no longer trying to kill me on a cellular level. Even though my home testing had never caught any evidence of classically low blood sugar, he speculated that the medication was, in fact, causing my system to mimic the body’s natural response to low blood sugar – releasing stress hormones among other things. It’s possible, he seemed to think, that I was experiencing a form of pseudo-hypoglycemia rather than a true mental health problem. He instructed me to immediately stop taking the metformin and see if that resolved the issues over the next week or so.

Today is my 3rd full day of not taking meds for diabetes in a very long time. I’m keeping a pretty close eye on my numbers, but my head is definitely clearer and I’m feeling much more like myself. I don’t want to call it a comeback just yet, but I’d dearly like to believe the answer to two months of increasingly feeling off kilter is as simple as not taking four little white pills. 

That’s a long way of saying that I have a new appreciation for just how important it is to be your own most forceful health advocate. To our collective detriment there’s still a stigma attached to seeking mental health treatment. There shouldn’t be. The brain is just another organ capable of misfunctioning. Getting help for it is no more problematic than seeking out a cardiologist for heart troubles. Without taking to a therapist, it’s hard to say how long I’d have just stayed mired down in a bad place. If you don’t take anything else from this screed, take this as encouragement that if you need help or need to talk to someone, go do it.

Anyone who thinks less of you for it can fuck directly off.

Feel free to tell them I said it. 

I’m going to get a lecture…

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I’ve been successfully avoiding the doctor since this whole COVID-19 dust up started.  Intentionally schlepping into a building designed to cater to sick people didn’t feel to me like a particularly good idea. Sure, my own brand of sickness is killing me slowly and needs attention from time to time, but avoiding the kind of sick that causes swift death from lack of oxygen was more of a priority. 

It’s been a year since my last checkup. I’ve mostly felt fine, or rather anything that’s bothered me pre-dates COVID-19 by a matter of years and been around long enough that it all feels like my version of normal. The doc kept refilling prescriptions on schedule and I was happy enough staying put until the world sorted itself out.  Apparently, though, doc has a philosophical problem with refilling scripts for someone he hasn’t personally seen in a year. That’s fair, I suppose. Inconvenient, but fair. 

I already know most of what he’s going to tell me. I’ve picked up weight during the plague. That’s likely a side effect of working my way through the comfort food cookbook half a dozen times over the last year. My blood sugar is running higher. Again, a result of the carb-heavy cooking and an increased intake of gin and tonic.

I’ve never been a paragon of healthy living. No one knows that more intuitively than I. When you add in my natural predilections and preferences to a world that has steadily condensed into only the pleasures I can find here inside the compound, well, the results shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Trolling through flea markets, antique malls, old book shops, and secondhand stores have all been wholly replaced with the joy of tasty food and drink. It’s not optimal, but it’s what it is.

I’m going to get a lecture next week. I’m quite certain of that. I’m going to get a lecture, but I’m going to get my prescriptions refilled, so it’s probably a fair trade. 

Not indestructible…

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I’ve been going to the doctor alot lately. Probably more often in the last two months than in the last five or ten years combined. It seems that, and alot of years of hard living and not are coming home to roost. What started off as a simple complaint of not sleeping and extreme thirst have become a diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes. Not what I wanted to hear on Friday afternoon, but not hard to predict with my love of all things sweet and carb-y. My A1C wasn’t quite off the charts, but high enough to get a “wow” from Dr. Good News. My blood sugar came in north of 180 and I know it’s gone higher than that in the last month… I didn’t get a “wow” for that one.

So yeah, Dr. Killjoy sat me down for the come-to-Jesus talk about getting right with my diet and less than casual acquaintance with exercise (apparently walking from the truck to the office doesn’t count). I’m pretty sure he was trying to scare me straight with talk about insulin, but my pain avoidance instinct is strong enough to want to avoid the needle if at all possible. I guess we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. For the time being, I have a stack of new meds and will be hoping for better living through chemistry.

Last night was the great cleaning of the pantry – out with carb-y noms like cereal, pasta, juices, pop tarts, my beloved gummy bears, and maybe worst of all, the Blue Moon that was chilling in the fridge. I’ve got a fridge now full of dairy, protein, and vegetables – most of which I have no idea how to actually cook. It’s really like looking into someone else’s kitchen. Of course that’s nothing compared to the looks I’ve been giving the exercise bike that now lives in the spare bedroom – because, let’s face it, even on pain of death, I’m not bloody likely to go walk around the neighborhood in the cold. Exercise that can be done while watching TV seemed like something I would at least be able to tolerate.

I’m uneasy with change as a matter of principle and the change being called for here is no small order. It’s basically undoing just about every habit I’ve developed over the last 15 years. Apparently I’m not indestructible after all. That’s a tough one to come to terms with. There’s a fair chance that everything about this process will annoy, anger, or otherwise make me want to beat myself unconscious with a celery stalk… and when it does, you’ll hear it here first.