Filed under: Personal
This blog started as an inchoate group of nature rambles and as a trip diary. I’ve avoided personal information, telling about myself, discussing my family, my health, or my unvoiced thoughts. No more.
I’ve been living through a minor depression – not deep enough to seek formal help, not severe enough to cause others to worry – just enough to add some uncertainty to spouse’s life.
Yesterday I decided to end it all, the depression I mean, not life. I said it wasn’t serious.
Just over a year ago I went to the doctor for my annual checkup. I was new to Medicare and wanted to start out healthy. The employer I retired from still provided health insurance, but for a high price. My goal was to avoid medication except for the Fosamax I was already taking. I couldn’t blame myself for having small bones, being short, white, and getting older. I didn’t want to be like my mom who had broken many bones before Fosamax was invented.
The doctor sent me for those miserable blood tests. After I was about 7 gallons low, he said I was heading toward type 2 diabetes and had to do something about it. I cried.
My grandmother had been diabetic and took insulin injections. When I was a child my family would take my grandmother to Boston to Dr. Joslin at the Lahey Clinic. It was a favorite outing. My dad took us riding on the Boston trolley cars while my mom sat with grandmother at the doctor’s office. My father also became diabetic later in his life. He did not diet, exercise, or take any care of himself. He did give up smoking a pipe after he caught the mattress on fire and filled the house with smoke.
I cried and thought of my friend Mada who was diabetic, had lost two legs and most of her vision and was ill most of the time. I cried more. I weighted 177.7 pounds on the scale we bought. About 2 weeks later I went to Mada’s funeral and cried for myself more than for her.
The doctor sent me to a nutritionist. She helped me see how much I was eating and how little exercise I really was doing. I cried there some more. I lost some weight.
This summer the doctor gave me some medication to try. He handed me a glucose test meter and told me to use it. Ouch. For a week my fingers were black and blue. It’s hard to squeeze blood from my fingers when they flinch from the nasty lancet. I got better at it. I joined an online diabetes community. I studied everything I could about the disease.
This morning I weighed 142.4 pounds. I bought the beginning of a new wardrobe. I can’t lick this disease but it is not going to lick me. Now I have to stop typing and go walk today’s 3 miles on the treadmill while I watch CSI.
