stewart.uk said:
Your choices will be taken away from you if your blood numbers deteriate. You are at a crossroad and fortunate to be aware of your position. A little control now may save a lot of disruption to your life down the road. Wish I had been given your present opportunity, I was in deep water before I knew it. Like so many people here. Spend a couple of hours reading other peoples probs. Take care
Thank you for your kind words - I have been reading some of the posts on this and other diabetic forums, including that of an American lady who had just had one foot amputated. I also took another look at a clip from the "Embarrassing Bodies" program where one of the doctors gave a thorough scolding to a man who had been largely ignoring the diabetes issues and was now discovering circulation problems. "You have to prioritise your diabetes - it's a
horrible illness.
Have you heard the "but" hovering in the air?
But No 1 is aimed partly as the poster who recommending, "boosting your fats."
Does this apply even though I've just been put on statins, because my cholesterol reading was 8.1 and my BMI is awful (probably cause of diabetes)
It gets a little worse. Actually quite a lot worse. For the last 25 years I have had severe ME - this is the "spend a lot of your life in bed, and only go out when someone else pushes your wheelchair for you variety ." That has over the last couple of years largely removed many of the pleasures of life - going out too tiring, exercise very damaging, concentration very patchy (email a great way to communicate - doesn't matter if it takes you ages to read and proof what you' trying to say
) so I can't enjoy the reading which was once of life's greatest pleasures. Flowers (and perfume!) make me sneeze. I don't smoke or drink. I'm told I'm a nightmare to buy presents for.
So eating has been both a sensory delight and a outlet for stress. Unfortunately, the ME has also mucked up my digestion somewhat - my bowel gets rebellious over spicy food, fibrous food, over-rich food. I call it IBS, because that'd exactly what it feels like. The specialists hate that term, but when I got rushed into hospital late one evening, they gave my bowel a good checking over and found nothing but diverticulitis. I know what foods give me severe abdominal cramping.
And then 3/4 years ago, I was told that I have MS.
This means that, amongst other things, I could be good as gold over my diet and still lose my sight to the MS. I could lose my foot to diabetes, but (from the way things are going) my legs to MS even sooner.
My experience, and that of others, is that many physios and other medical types have decided that the ME is at best, MS that went undiagnosed and, at worst, a form of hypochondria and learned helplessness or simple fraud. This means that when a health care professional looks at me they have already decided that I need something changing - what they want depends on what disease they think I have - and the ME can safely be ignored now that I am
genuinely ill.
So I usually try to get what help I can, but letting medics tell you what to do, and do so on inadequate data is not the path the health, but to misery and confusion. Some of them are really trying to help, and some simply trying to "rescue" me and demonstrate their own superiority and control over me.
Even the better ones really don't believe me - I keep telling my doctor that I have intermittent, but increasing lower back pain, which I think is probably caused by the worsening of some damage to the spine which was diagnosed by a rheumatologist nearly a decade ago. She has, grudgingly, booked me in for a bone scan - but only because I persisted.
And somewhere in the midst of all this I would like to have a little life as well - I'm 57 now, but I don't think that I need to plan for a long life as my body is packing in around me. In recent months (since a string of family upsets) the food has been one way of coping with the spasms and the pain - I prefer it to the chemical coshes which seem to be the only alternative the works.
I'm not ignoring or forgetting about the diabetes, but it is going to have to take its turn, like everything else, and learn to play nicely.
