My 100th Post - Fun With Diabetes

It will be a day long remembered when the symptoms began to pry themselves into my life. It was a lesson on the fourteenth amendment, standing in front of twenty-five fifth graders in various states of mind from rapt attention to glaze eyed stupor. Surely you recall from YOUR school days that the fourteenth amendment is what is known as one of the three reconstruction amendments. It is the amendment that blew a hole in the laughable Dred Scott decision that ruled that black men were not citizens of the United States, even if they had been born here. Teaching the reconstruction amendments is enjoyable because the kids are always so shocked at the way things used to be in this country. Some even look at me skeptically as if the facts are being made up simply to shock them. Teaching history is a lot of fun.

Anyway, there I was, just getting warmed up on the story of Dred Scott when my bladder, which is usually as silent as a character witness in a Lindsay Lohan trial, began to shoot urgent messages to my brain. In the span of three seconds I went from teaching history to struggling not to darken the front of my khaki pants in front of my students (imagine those conversations around the table at dinner time). I tried to talk through it but my bladder was screaming at me like it was filled with the urine equivalent of the Adriatic Sea. Fortunately for me there was another teacher in the room who could supervise the class while I broke loose the Hoover Dam.

This was only to be the beginning.

For the next several weeks my bladder continued its impersonation of a ninety year old man's. I was going to the bathroom once an hour, including waking up to go several times a night. I was starting to run a groove in the linoleum flooring between my classroom and the faculty bathroom.  I was drinking oceans of water yet my mouth remained as dry as a mummy's arm pit. My eyesight began to deteriorate. I began to go farsighted for the first time in my life. It got so bad that I had to purchase a pair of reading glasses from the local drugstore.

Being a reasonably intelligent guy, after several weeks of this I deduced that apparently, something was wrong. So I did what every reasonably intelligent guy does in the twenty-first century when he has a heatlh concern and wants a medically sound diagnosis. I logged onto Web MD. After inputting all the symptoms it spat back to me that I could potentially have any one of a number of conditions ranging from bladder cancer, to a urinary tract infection, to diabetes, to a rare Peruvian Tsetse Fly disorder (ok, I made that last one up). My mother, an RN, had suggested diabetes to me a few days earlier and wanted to test my blood sugar. She informed me that it runs in both sides of my family and wanted to test me. I refused but after consulting the great, and always totally dependable medical resource known as the world wide web, I agreed to let her test my blood sugar.

Three hundred seventy-six. Normal blood sugar levels after a meal range from eighty-five to one hundred ten. To put it lightly, I was surprised. I had always thought diabetes was a disease that only fat or lazy people got. Unfortunately this is a perception many people have and it is incorrect. I knew nothing about it. I have had to change my entire diet. After a week of completely changing EVERYTHING, my blood sugar was back down to an average of one hundred. I have taken up regular exercise, changed my diet, and have read everything I can about diabetes.

It has been almost two months since my diagnosis. I have lost 23 pounds and I feel great. I have more energy on a daily basis than I have had since I was in college. My eyesight has completely returned to normal and my bladder is once again under control. My docs have not put me on any medication. I am controlling this thing completely with diet and exercise.

It really has been a blessing in disguise. To call my diet before diagnosis simply 'bad' would be like saying Mel Gibson is just a little bit grumpy. My diet was an abomination. I have no doubt that I was on the fast track for a heart attack by forty-five. I think I can safely say that diabetes has helped add years to my life.

I'm not saying I am wearing a t-shirt that says I HEART DIABETES...but the silver lining is pretty big.