Thanks!
Well.....the latest part of my experience is that I've just spent three days in hospital for a suspected heart attack on Monday. Got released today with a boatload of drugs (including Amlodipine, Perindopril, Aspirin, Simvastatin, Atenolol and Plavix), but have to go in again on Tuesday for an angiogram and 95%+ likely angioplastly.....
No surprise really....the only reason they caught the diabetes in the first place was that I've been harassing my GP about recurring chest pain on exertion for the last 8 months, and they've been doing blood tests due to that. My GP has said all along that he thought I had some kind of musculo-skeletal pain, and I've been telling him I thought it was coronary heart disease for months. I'm right - but it's not something you really feel good saying "Told you so!" about.
It seems that the biggest contributor has been 25 years of smoking - and while I'll defend people's right to smoke if they want to, it seems to have almost done for me ( I gave up 5 months ago)! Luckily it got caught BEFORE the heart attack stage and after they put the stents in next week, I should be back to full active duty again very quickly. Could have been a different story very easily though.
Anyway.....shedloads of drugs for now, treatment next week. I've already lost over a stone since I got the diabetes diagnoses and switched to an ultra low carb diet.
I had a tough time in the hospital with the dieticians though - when I told them I was diabetic and couldn't eat anything off the menu offerings, they tried to tell me i should be eating lots of carbs! I pulled out my data ( had my laptop with me as I was meant to be on a business trip but ended up in A&E instead) and showed them my food diary and test results and they all shut up and went off to find me some low carb food. BG still all over the place the last few days - up to 13.5 in the mornings as the best I could get was Alpen for breakfast. Lunches were better with cheese/pilchard/ham salads, and dinners were omelettes after I insisted. The NHS soup is just packet sh**t full of flour and hot water though. You'd think "vegetable" or "chicken" soup wouldn't be a carb fest....but it is.
Here's a typical NHS DIABETIC breakfast: Orange juice, breakfast cereal with milk, croissant & jam (or wholemeal roll and jam), and a bag of crisps. Crisps ???
EVERYBODY that was in the cardio ward with me was diabetic. Yet NONE of them had any interest in dietary control. 1 was T1, the other 4 were all T2. I tried preaching, but it was just to the choir....pills and insulin seem to be the preferred approach rather than keeping your BG levels down by diet.