My Complicated Journey with Diabetes

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I don't really know when my story of diabetes began. I know that I was diagnosed in October 2010, but I already had complications that take years to develop and they were well developed by that time. Both my and my doctors best guess is I had this for something over 10 years before diagnosis.

In fact, now that I know what I do about my body and how I feel at different glucose levels, I recognize that I had hypoglycemic episodes decades before I developed diabetes. My earliest of these recollections dates back to the late 1970s. This may or may not have anything to do with it, but my understanding is that it probably does.

I really knew nothing about diabetes when I was diagnosed. I knew the disease in a general sense and that it involved blood sugar and insulin. Beyond that I had to learn.

As it turns out, these complications are much more devastating and life altering than the disease that brings them on. Dealing with diabetes can be like playing three-dimensional chess. Each complication becomes a new game. Pretty soon you are trying to juggle five or six three-dimensional chess games at once. In each game the opponent is a Grand Master. If you like a big challenge this disease is for you.

I probably spent about 30 hours a week for something like two years studying and experimenting to understand diabetes and how I could work with it. This too was made more difficult because of the complications. Both my vision and hearing were impaired severely. Neuropathy made it impossible for me to make comprehensive notes. I had to learn about my condition, but I also had to figure out how I could go about learning and retaining that information without the tools I had used for over 50 years.

Space does not allow me to truly tell the whole story. But I worked at these things as if my life depended on it. Because it did. It does. It was a lot of hard work with a lot of ups and downs. So many low blood sugars at one point that my dog was excited when the EMT truck pulled up at the neighbors house. But I kept at it and I kept improving my results.

Today I have been able to significantly improve all of my complications. But none of them are gone. With much hard work, and many times walking a fine line, I have been able to maintain an average A1c of under 5.5 for almost 6 years. This, along was good medical treatment, has been the key to improving my health and my life.

This has been a very, very long and slow process of recuperation. It has literally taken every minute of seven years to get here. It took eight months to see a glimmer of hope and two more years to BEGIN to feel and act somewhat normal. During most of that time, especially the first two or three years, I was in constant pain. Indescribable and unimaginable pain as I had never felt before in my life.

All of those symptoms, the pain and numbness, near blindness and limited use of my hands and ability to walk are sufficient motivators for me never to go there again.

I hope that by telling my story some who have been diagnosed but do not have any complications will see the importance, for themselves, of taking their diabetes management seriously. I also hope that anyone seeing this who already has complications will find hope for eventual, if not immediate, improvement. It can be done.