Diabetes Won't Win

In April 2020, during the lockdown, I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. Due to the lockdown, I was working from home and was inflicted with an abscess on my back that required a doctor's visit. During that visit, and in order to determine if there was an infection involved, the doctor did blood work, gave me an antibiotic and a reference to another doctor to get the abscess removed. That was a Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday late morning, my doctor called me with the news of my Type2 Diabetes. My blood sugar was over 600 (dangerously high) and he wanted me back in the office the next day.

Needless to say, those were the longest 24 hours of my life and of course, Google was both my friend and my nightmare. A blood sugar of 600 was dangerously high and needed medication right away, in fact, according to Google, I shouldn't even be walking around alive. I barely slept that night. My mother, who had passed the previous year from pancreatic cancer was a Type2 Diabetic and it was a disease she had been fighting for the last 30 years of her life, between insulin shots and medication, I knew what diabetes did to a person, their eyes, their heart, their kidneys, their limbs, the disease that slowly eats you away. I also knew that diabetes was hereditary and many people on both my mother and father’s side had been diagnosed with diabetes.

The next day I went to the doctor and he gave me the prognosis and the treatment. Metaformin and Glimepiride to lower my glucose levels, Lisinopril to protect my kidneys and Atorvastatin for my cholesterol. Up to this point, at the age of 54, I had been medication free. The last time I took medicine on a regular basis was birth control pills and I had stopped taking those 20 years ago when I went through early menopause. In fact, I barely took a Tylenol unless I had a headache that just didn't go away. Of course, there were other things I needed to do as well, including changing my eating habits and losing weight.

I started reading everything I could get my hands on about diabetes and whether you could "cure" it. Most articles I read said no, diabetes is a disease that once you have it, you have it for life. A few articles talked about "curing" diabetes through lifestyle changes. I went from taking no medicine for anything for the last 20 years to now taking 4 different medications, twice a day and checking my blood sugar levels at least twice a day.

And so, I started on this new way of life. I vowed to cut out ALL sugars. I figured out what was good cholesterol/fat and what was bad cholesterol/fat, starches, potatoes, rice, white bread, wheat bread, no bread, vegetables, lean meat, fish, exercise, walking, running, cardio. And I started making those changes AND I started seeing results in about 30 days. My daily glucose level went from an average of 450-625 down to 250-325 (still too high). But I was determined to beat diabetes, or at the very least, not have it beat me.

It is now February 2021, 10 months after my first diagnosis. My blood sugar consistently tests at 110-130 and I weaned myself off of the Glimepiride after realizing that not only did it lower my blood sugar, it lowered it too much and I started having bouts of low blood sugar which made me jittery, nervous and faint. I've lost 23 pounds and I feel good. My goal by the summer of 2021 is to lose another 20 pounds and to be free from all medications associated with diabetes.

Diabetes will not win and medicine will not rule my life.