- Messages
- 37
- Type of diabetes
- Type 2
- Treatment type
- Other
- Dislikes
- Food
Some keywords to grab your attention
Lifestyle, Blood Glucose, Hormone levels, Weight, Information, Choices, Attitude, Behaviour, Health, Diet, Despair, Misery, Pain, Death, Outlook, Strategy, Tactics, Skills, Plan, Track, Support, Hope, Discipline and above all unbreakable self-belief.
Apart from Death, every single one of those above I have personally experienced in the last 7 years because of my diabetes.
And yes I have experienced Death but not my own.
To start with
Its unlikely I will enter a discussion about this. I will watch any comments with interest which I expect to fall somewhere between "what a loser" and "that sums it up for me". The point of this is to get it off my chest after 7 years and in some unknowable way help someone else. I apologise if I frighten or anger or disgust anyone with what I say here, that was not my goal but i admit it is a real risk.
Everyone
You are walking along a cliff top firmly on a well-trodden path towards a dim and distant end which is many years away. If you are fortunate you will reach the end “trying to skid to a stop shouting wow what a ride that was, so what’s next”. If you are not fortunate you may arrive “impatient for what’s next because it can’t be worse than what’s been happening”.
Probably you will be somewhere in between. Personally I would wish for the former for myself.
On either side of the path is a wide grassy border leading to an unseen drop. One side of the path is a cliff edge which has a sheer drop which has a very unpleasant air of certainty about it. On the other side there is a long slope and has an unpleasant air of uncertainty about it. But you put them both out of your mind and just get on with it.
The path is marked at regular points with signs saying “Beware Danger! do not stray from the path”.
That journey is that same one everyone else is travelling, some faster, some slower, some have a more direct line some weave and swerve along the way. The weather outlook as usual, is variable.
There are many “trip wires” in your way along the journey but you are no more likely to be tripped up than anyone else. Some trips wires will immediately pitch you over one of the sides. But which ones? Your physical inheritance or life choices may push you to fall to one tripe wire or another along the way.
You don’t live much in fear of the trip wires, as you are aware of them and can avoid most of them most of the time because you are taught about them early.
Again, if you are fortunate your journey is fun and you feel no real fear.
Your travels take you sometimes from one side of the path to the other. Sometimes your attention wavers and you stray over the line briefly but there are no bad long term consequences. If you are lucky and are wise you reach the end of the path and your journey is done without too many unpleasant problems along the way.
The more unfortunate experience many of the less dangerous trip wires and have a worse experience but have a long journey none the less.
It’s a mixed experience of a wide ranging spectrum.
Pre-diabetics
You are now walking along the cliff edge in the grassy border off the cliff path, the darker clouds are gathering and its often raining, you are straying more into the long grass. Your shoes are wet and muddy as you are now off of the path and where the signs now say that “going near the edge is very dangerous please turn back and walk along the path”.
Some people are afraid of heights so they take notice and return to the path no matter what it takes.
Others are less enlightened or more brave / foolish or perhaps just too busy to notice and inevitably stray more towards the long grass that hides the drop.
Here you may be gaining additional mass the nearer you get to the edge that is pulling you towards the edge and you find it hard to balance the effect even if you take notice of the signs.
There really is a camber at the edge that makes it harder to get back to the path but you can’t see it for the long grass. The truth is that you are hurtling towards the edge and it takes a herculean effort of will plus realisation to avoid the drop.
Newly diagnosed diabetics
You travelled too near the edge for too long and you slipped off.
You have a once fatal disease, that is now termed chronic. Don’t let that fool you, chronic means that is lifelong disease that won’t directly kill you. If you think that sounds ok, then dig a little deeper via google.
You cannot get back onto the level cliff top ever again.
If you are Type I or Type 1.5 or Type II or any of the sub types soon to be recognised the cause is different and the management techniques are too, but the enemy is the same.
You are confused as to why some of your fellow travellers, that you thought did exactly as you did, have not fallen off the edge. Why did this happen to you and not them? This is part of a whole range of emotions that swamp you in the first days after the shock of the drop wears off, that never really resolve. The emotional roller coaster is here to stay. Suck it up.
It’s now raining most of the time and that makes the slope you are now on very slippery and difficult to stay on the same level. It’s cold, its wet and you are not happy.
It’s not the drop like you imagined it might be, it’s now an awkward, never helpful, slope down to who knows where, and you can’t see the bottom.
You just begin to hear faint but disturbing echoes of the wails and shrieks of the people who have gone before you and who are now lower down the slope and nearing the end of their journey. You ask about that but everyone says keep a positive mind-set and that won’t happen to you. You wish you’d taken notice of the signs and stayed on the path but you didn’t and now you have to live with that now.
As you have shown almost complete disregard for the signs up top, you now have a personal guide to help you. They tell you things using more dreadful words that say there is more certain danger ahead but there is hope that if you do what we say now you can delay your arrival at those unpleasant waypoints leading to the bottom and even stay where you are now until we all reach the end of our travels. Anyway we hope that the nasty and really unpleasant waypoints on the way down can be avoided.
There are some guides who claim that for some, the slope can be re-scaled and you can get back on top if you try hard enough and quickly enough after your drop.
Most of the guides don’t agree and won’t let you try such foolishness until many other people have tried and succeeded ahead of you because it’s just not safe to try. You wonder what is safe about your predicament anyway. They seem to be saying that you were a very silly person to fall this far and it’s not safe to try something like that. You wonder what safe actually is anymore.
In short they say there is unlikely to be a way back to the top and that more danger ahead but it can be a pleasant journey still if you pay attention and do only what we say.
You now fall (no pun intended) into one, or probably between two, of these camps of thought about your predicament, in that you are either a;
Fatalist: Whatever, somethings going to get me in the end and there always is an end, it doesn’t sound so bad, and it’s no point getting worked up about it. We are all going to the bottom sometime somehow so it might as well be this route. I may/may not do what I am told by the signs now, but it will be fine. I see no problem with carrying on with my walk along this slope instead, free of care about the journey, my guides will take care of everything. There’s not much I can do about it either way.
Realist: Ouch, somethings going to get me in the end and there always is an end, but I don’t want it to be this. I’m concerned about this, my journey was pleasant and I was enjoying it. This is not funny and I want to work out how to make the best of this. It seems a bit dangerous now, but see no option in dealing with this myself and will do what the guides say from now on and hope for the best. They know what they are doing and I should pay attention now.
Activist: No way, somethings going to get me in the end and there always is an end, but it is NOT going to be this. I don’t really trust these guides much. They don’t seem to be one of us and sometimes what they say is or just seems wrong. I want to find a translator someone like me who knows the ropes round here and I want to fully understand what’s going on before I do what they say. I can hear the shrieks and wailing below me loud and clear and want nothing to do with that thank you, but what the guides are telling me does not add up somehow. Some of those people must have though the same as me and look where they are now. How do I start climbing back up onto the cliff edge so I can find the path? To be frank draw me a personalised map. I need it right now before I move a muscle.
Your diabetes progresses
The slope is a long one and the route to the bottom is still not clear. You are now living day to day unbalanced.
It seems the decisions you make on the way determine the route and its waypoints and learning what they are is confusing and difficult to deal with intellectually and emotionally.
The weather changes the rules sometimes and the plan needs adapting to circumstances.
It becomes obvious that shedding mass is an advantage that slows the descent somewhat but it’s still very slippery even if you manage that too. Some spikes on your shoes would be good, if you can get them.
Eventually your mind may pick up more echoes of the wails and shrieks that disturbed you before and you may realise with horror that they are coming from your own body, that the disease is slowly changing your life support machine and it is breaking down slowly but inexorably.
You tell your guide, but they say it is just another diabetes related complication. Tick. Next.
As a Fatalist you disregard the view on the way down and probably descend faster but don’t notice or probably care that much;
As a Realist you try your best to teeter along hoping you don’t slide too fast perhaps praying you are doing the right thing and that you will be spared the worst.
As an Activist its hard work, you do your best to climb up the slope hoping to reach the point where you can see over the top, or where you are at least able to reach up to grab hold of the fragile clumps of grass growing at the edge to increase your hope and steady your progress.
You seem to need to spend more time thinking about the next step than enjoying the journey. It’s apparently also a highly personal route. There does not seem to be any way of getting really useful help.
The guides advice is difficult to read and interpret and mind bogglingly complex. You sort of make sense of them only to find out that it’s not as simple as you are told and believed. Eventually you realise that the guides you are given don’t really know much more than you do and they are sometimes stuck giving advice that is years out of date or does not work, or put simply is too general to be of optimum use.
You can now see that some of the people further down the slope cannot see anymore, some are in chronic unrelenting and un treatable pain, some have lost limbs. You want nothing to do with that and rue the day you ignored those early warning signs up on the path.
It would be helpful if the guides knew what my new route should really be and could advise me exactly what I need to do instead of just a general “In general you should not do that, or doing this may help”.
You realise your only hope it to climb up the slope a bit so your next downward motion is back here at this level once again. This becomes your focus and is a daily struggle often against social norms which is tougher than you think. You lose count of the times other people say you are not normal.
Eventually, the most terrible thing ever has happened, you agree with them.
It’s tough trying to climb back up the slope and sometimes it’s just an endless progression of the snakes and ladders experience.
This is a time where it takes a great deal of dedication and character to maintain your focus. The great danger and ultimate temptation is that you give in to that inner yearn to be a Fatalist.
It also a really lonely time down here on your own. The term alone in a crowd does not even begin to describe it. Lost in the wilderness comes a bit closer.
What next
The destination is always the same for everyone, your experience along the way is what counts. Your old route never was certain, or that matter for anyone else, nor was the view along the way predictable.
Now it’s less than ideal, but there are some highly probable if avoidable nasty waypoints ahead.
Sometimes the dark clouds get in the way of a decent view.
You tend to take the bumps and scrapes along the way in your stride as the journey progresses and you develop ways of dealing with them but you know that your view of it all is now changed and spoiled somewhat. You are now different in some unquantifiable way. No longer a child at any age. In any event the veil that we place between us and our own mortality is stripped away.
You feel awkward about your different route especially in comparison to someone who is still firmly on the path, you can rationalise it, they can rationalise it and even sympathise, but it’s always a problem. There is a distance between you no matter how close you are otherwise. You find that you tend to seek futile counter-productive isolation from those kinds of problems.
What becomes blindingly obvious is that, those lucky people still on the path have no idea what it feels like to experience the drop, nor the doubts, nor the never ending fear of the consequences of slipping further down the slope that the realist and activist experience to one degree or another, and that the fatalist does not seem to give a hoot about.
Final thoughts?
Who is happier, probably the Fatalist. Who is physically healthier longer, Probably the Activist. Who is mentally healthier longest, probably the Realist. It really is very unbalanced once off of the path.
It may surprise you to realise that the author of this highly personal perspective regards themselves as a committed and wholly belligerent Activist, with realistic leanings. It is probably going to end in a breakdown of some sort at some stage but that remains to be seen.
After starting off with the Fatalist point of view, you might, if you would, just imagine the journey so far and what it happened or what it took to make that mental transition, and to almost bludgeon aside conventional wisdom and forge ahead into the dark. You got to be a little mad to do that or just desperate.
They have spent the last three years in detailed forensic style analysis and of and experimentation with their disease its effects, treatment and impact, and have so far managed to retreat from a near Type I pancreatic response to very nearly a non-diabetic response using extreme tactics and in the face of almost universal official disapproval.
The journey has been worth it so far but the cost was higher than expected and the currency was of an unexpected type.
The truth behind it would fill a medium sized book, not that many would believe it. The book may be written anyway. It is predicted it will not be a best seller.
The author finds that their fear of those nasty waypoints is a motivational tool, even at the expense of spoiling their view and colouring the experience from time to time. To lose that fear or even to become comfortable with it is to give in and listen to those seductive inner whispers and become the Fatalist again.
Whatever keeps you away from becoming the Fatalist, go with it. I would advise against becoming like me, a total Activist.
So to finish off, if your question might be as to whether long life AND good health are worth the daily struggle no matter what even in the face of fear uncertainty and doubt.
The author says hell yes.
Lifestyle, Blood Glucose, Hormone levels, Weight, Information, Choices, Attitude, Behaviour, Health, Diet, Despair, Misery, Pain, Death, Outlook, Strategy, Tactics, Skills, Plan, Track, Support, Hope, Discipline and above all unbreakable self-belief.
Apart from Death, every single one of those above I have personally experienced in the last 7 years because of my diabetes.
And yes I have experienced Death but not my own.
To start with
Its unlikely I will enter a discussion about this. I will watch any comments with interest which I expect to fall somewhere between "what a loser" and "that sums it up for me". The point of this is to get it off my chest after 7 years and in some unknowable way help someone else. I apologise if I frighten or anger or disgust anyone with what I say here, that was not my goal but i admit it is a real risk.
Everyone
You are walking along a cliff top firmly on a well-trodden path towards a dim and distant end which is many years away. If you are fortunate you will reach the end “trying to skid to a stop shouting wow what a ride that was, so what’s next”. If you are not fortunate you may arrive “impatient for what’s next because it can’t be worse than what’s been happening”.
Probably you will be somewhere in between. Personally I would wish for the former for myself.
On either side of the path is a wide grassy border leading to an unseen drop. One side of the path is a cliff edge which has a sheer drop which has a very unpleasant air of certainty about it. On the other side there is a long slope and has an unpleasant air of uncertainty about it. But you put them both out of your mind and just get on with it.
The path is marked at regular points with signs saying “Beware Danger! do not stray from the path”.
That journey is that same one everyone else is travelling, some faster, some slower, some have a more direct line some weave and swerve along the way. The weather outlook as usual, is variable.
There are many “trip wires” in your way along the journey but you are no more likely to be tripped up than anyone else. Some trips wires will immediately pitch you over one of the sides. But which ones? Your physical inheritance or life choices may push you to fall to one tripe wire or another along the way.
You don’t live much in fear of the trip wires, as you are aware of them and can avoid most of them most of the time because you are taught about them early.
Again, if you are fortunate your journey is fun and you feel no real fear.
Your travels take you sometimes from one side of the path to the other. Sometimes your attention wavers and you stray over the line briefly but there are no bad long term consequences. If you are lucky and are wise you reach the end of the path and your journey is done without too many unpleasant problems along the way.
The more unfortunate experience many of the less dangerous trip wires and have a worse experience but have a long journey none the less.
It’s a mixed experience of a wide ranging spectrum.
Pre-diabetics
You are now walking along the cliff edge in the grassy border off the cliff path, the darker clouds are gathering and its often raining, you are straying more into the long grass. Your shoes are wet and muddy as you are now off of the path and where the signs now say that “going near the edge is very dangerous please turn back and walk along the path”.
Some people are afraid of heights so they take notice and return to the path no matter what it takes.
Others are less enlightened or more brave / foolish or perhaps just too busy to notice and inevitably stray more towards the long grass that hides the drop.
Here you may be gaining additional mass the nearer you get to the edge that is pulling you towards the edge and you find it hard to balance the effect even if you take notice of the signs.
There really is a camber at the edge that makes it harder to get back to the path but you can’t see it for the long grass. The truth is that you are hurtling towards the edge and it takes a herculean effort of will plus realisation to avoid the drop.
Newly diagnosed diabetics
You travelled too near the edge for too long and you slipped off.
You have a once fatal disease, that is now termed chronic. Don’t let that fool you, chronic means that is lifelong disease that won’t directly kill you. If you think that sounds ok, then dig a little deeper via google.
You cannot get back onto the level cliff top ever again.
If you are Type I or Type 1.5 or Type II or any of the sub types soon to be recognised the cause is different and the management techniques are too, but the enemy is the same.
You are confused as to why some of your fellow travellers, that you thought did exactly as you did, have not fallen off the edge. Why did this happen to you and not them? This is part of a whole range of emotions that swamp you in the first days after the shock of the drop wears off, that never really resolve. The emotional roller coaster is here to stay. Suck it up.
It’s now raining most of the time and that makes the slope you are now on very slippery and difficult to stay on the same level. It’s cold, its wet and you are not happy.
It’s not the drop like you imagined it might be, it’s now an awkward, never helpful, slope down to who knows where, and you can’t see the bottom.
You just begin to hear faint but disturbing echoes of the wails and shrieks of the people who have gone before you and who are now lower down the slope and nearing the end of their journey. You ask about that but everyone says keep a positive mind-set and that won’t happen to you. You wish you’d taken notice of the signs and stayed on the path but you didn’t and now you have to live with that now.
As you have shown almost complete disregard for the signs up top, you now have a personal guide to help you. They tell you things using more dreadful words that say there is more certain danger ahead but there is hope that if you do what we say now you can delay your arrival at those unpleasant waypoints leading to the bottom and even stay where you are now until we all reach the end of our travels. Anyway we hope that the nasty and really unpleasant waypoints on the way down can be avoided.
There are some guides who claim that for some, the slope can be re-scaled and you can get back on top if you try hard enough and quickly enough after your drop.
Most of the guides don’t agree and won’t let you try such foolishness until many other people have tried and succeeded ahead of you because it’s just not safe to try. You wonder what is safe about your predicament anyway. They seem to be saying that you were a very silly person to fall this far and it’s not safe to try something like that. You wonder what safe actually is anymore.
In short they say there is unlikely to be a way back to the top and that more danger ahead but it can be a pleasant journey still if you pay attention and do only what we say.
You now fall (no pun intended) into one, or probably between two, of these camps of thought about your predicament, in that you are either a;
Fatalist: Whatever, somethings going to get me in the end and there always is an end, it doesn’t sound so bad, and it’s no point getting worked up about it. We are all going to the bottom sometime somehow so it might as well be this route. I may/may not do what I am told by the signs now, but it will be fine. I see no problem with carrying on with my walk along this slope instead, free of care about the journey, my guides will take care of everything. There’s not much I can do about it either way.
Realist: Ouch, somethings going to get me in the end and there always is an end, but I don’t want it to be this. I’m concerned about this, my journey was pleasant and I was enjoying it. This is not funny and I want to work out how to make the best of this. It seems a bit dangerous now, but see no option in dealing with this myself and will do what the guides say from now on and hope for the best. They know what they are doing and I should pay attention now.
Activist: No way, somethings going to get me in the end and there always is an end, but it is NOT going to be this. I don’t really trust these guides much. They don’t seem to be one of us and sometimes what they say is or just seems wrong. I want to find a translator someone like me who knows the ropes round here and I want to fully understand what’s going on before I do what they say. I can hear the shrieks and wailing below me loud and clear and want nothing to do with that thank you, but what the guides are telling me does not add up somehow. Some of those people must have though the same as me and look where they are now. How do I start climbing back up onto the cliff edge so I can find the path? To be frank draw me a personalised map. I need it right now before I move a muscle.
Your diabetes progresses
The slope is a long one and the route to the bottom is still not clear. You are now living day to day unbalanced.
It seems the decisions you make on the way determine the route and its waypoints and learning what they are is confusing and difficult to deal with intellectually and emotionally.
The weather changes the rules sometimes and the plan needs adapting to circumstances.
It becomes obvious that shedding mass is an advantage that slows the descent somewhat but it’s still very slippery even if you manage that too. Some spikes on your shoes would be good, if you can get them.
Eventually your mind may pick up more echoes of the wails and shrieks that disturbed you before and you may realise with horror that they are coming from your own body, that the disease is slowly changing your life support machine and it is breaking down slowly but inexorably.
You tell your guide, but they say it is just another diabetes related complication. Tick. Next.
As a Fatalist you disregard the view on the way down and probably descend faster but don’t notice or probably care that much;
As a Realist you try your best to teeter along hoping you don’t slide too fast perhaps praying you are doing the right thing and that you will be spared the worst.
As an Activist its hard work, you do your best to climb up the slope hoping to reach the point where you can see over the top, or where you are at least able to reach up to grab hold of the fragile clumps of grass growing at the edge to increase your hope and steady your progress.
You seem to need to spend more time thinking about the next step than enjoying the journey. It’s apparently also a highly personal route. There does not seem to be any way of getting really useful help.
The guides advice is difficult to read and interpret and mind bogglingly complex. You sort of make sense of them only to find out that it’s not as simple as you are told and believed. Eventually you realise that the guides you are given don’t really know much more than you do and they are sometimes stuck giving advice that is years out of date or does not work, or put simply is too general to be of optimum use.
You can now see that some of the people further down the slope cannot see anymore, some are in chronic unrelenting and un treatable pain, some have lost limbs. You want nothing to do with that and rue the day you ignored those early warning signs up on the path.
It would be helpful if the guides knew what my new route should really be and could advise me exactly what I need to do instead of just a general “In general you should not do that, or doing this may help”.
You realise your only hope it to climb up the slope a bit so your next downward motion is back here at this level once again. This becomes your focus and is a daily struggle often against social norms which is tougher than you think. You lose count of the times other people say you are not normal.
Eventually, the most terrible thing ever has happened, you agree with them.
It’s tough trying to climb back up the slope and sometimes it’s just an endless progression of the snakes and ladders experience.
This is a time where it takes a great deal of dedication and character to maintain your focus. The great danger and ultimate temptation is that you give in to that inner yearn to be a Fatalist.
It also a really lonely time down here on your own. The term alone in a crowd does not even begin to describe it. Lost in the wilderness comes a bit closer.
What next
The destination is always the same for everyone, your experience along the way is what counts. Your old route never was certain, or that matter for anyone else, nor was the view along the way predictable.
Now it’s less than ideal, but there are some highly probable if avoidable nasty waypoints ahead.
Sometimes the dark clouds get in the way of a decent view.
You tend to take the bumps and scrapes along the way in your stride as the journey progresses and you develop ways of dealing with them but you know that your view of it all is now changed and spoiled somewhat. You are now different in some unquantifiable way. No longer a child at any age. In any event the veil that we place between us and our own mortality is stripped away.
You feel awkward about your different route especially in comparison to someone who is still firmly on the path, you can rationalise it, they can rationalise it and even sympathise, but it’s always a problem. There is a distance between you no matter how close you are otherwise. You find that you tend to seek futile counter-productive isolation from those kinds of problems.
What becomes blindingly obvious is that, those lucky people still on the path have no idea what it feels like to experience the drop, nor the doubts, nor the never ending fear of the consequences of slipping further down the slope that the realist and activist experience to one degree or another, and that the fatalist does not seem to give a hoot about.
Final thoughts?
Who is happier, probably the Fatalist. Who is physically healthier longer, Probably the Activist. Who is mentally healthier longest, probably the Realist. It really is very unbalanced once off of the path.
It may surprise you to realise that the author of this highly personal perspective regards themselves as a committed and wholly belligerent Activist, with realistic leanings. It is probably going to end in a breakdown of some sort at some stage but that remains to be seen.
After starting off with the Fatalist point of view, you might, if you would, just imagine the journey so far and what it happened or what it took to make that mental transition, and to almost bludgeon aside conventional wisdom and forge ahead into the dark. You got to be a little mad to do that or just desperate.
They have spent the last three years in detailed forensic style analysis and of and experimentation with their disease its effects, treatment and impact, and have so far managed to retreat from a near Type I pancreatic response to very nearly a non-diabetic response using extreme tactics and in the face of almost universal official disapproval.
The journey has been worth it so far but the cost was higher than expected and the currency was of an unexpected type.
The truth behind it would fill a medium sized book, not that many would believe it. The book may be written anyway. It is predicted it will not be a best seller.
The author finds that their fear of those nasty waypoints is a motivational tool, even at the expense of spoiling their view and colouring the experience from time to time. To lose that fear or even to become comfortable with it is to give in and listen to those seductive inner whispers and become the Fatalist again.
Whatever keeps you away from becoming the Fatalist, go with it. I would advise against becoming like me, a total Activist.
So to finish off, if your question might be as to whether long life AND good health are worth the daily struggle no matter what even in the face of fear uncertainty and doubt.
The author says hell yes.
