Been to see the nurse after a four week wait. Can’t help me apart from give me tablets. Doesn’t want me to lose any weight. I was 11.5 then metformin so down to 8.0 before dinner then 9.9 is this normal?
She can’t understand why I have it. Just found out tonight that my grandfather had pancreatic cancer so maybe I should be tested
Hey again Arber,
Metformin doesn't impact bloodsugars directly like that, so it's what you ate that's important to know. If you were 8.0 and 9.9 two hours after first bite, then that was a good meal. Your bloodsugars are still a tad high, but if you eat low carb, those numbers will come down gradually. Metformin alone won't do much about that, sadly. It slows down glucose production your liver's putting out, (putting a break on liver dumps) and suppresses apetite, but that's about it. Doesn't do much of anything about the carbs you eat. I'm a little concerned about your nurse not understanding why you have T2. Like I said, 10% of those diagnosed with it, aren't the morbidly obese stereotype. I know someone who was diagnosed around the same time I was, and she was downright skinny. If where was a breeze, she'd blow away. Her numbers were so high though, they skipped the pills and went straight for insulin; her HbA1c was about 25 higher than mine at diagnosis. So it does happen. The thing is, fat can be compact and stick to a certain area. It's called TOFI (yes, an actual medical term), short for Thin Outisde, Fat Inside: you can't tell the liver and pancreas are smothered in fat because the fatcells are packed on there really tightly, you can't see it on the outside, but they do hinder pancreatic and liverfunction. An ultrasound or MRI would probably reveal the same is going on for you. (Tests they also happen to do to check for cancer, so two birds, one stone.) Have you been checked for Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease? When your bloods are checked for T2, usually they include liver and kidneyfunction too, besides cholesterol (and bloodpressure), to check for metabolic syndrome, as T2 rarely comes alone. It tends to bring friends to the party. So you might want to ask for those results. (Actually, always ask for results. I have mine printed out from the get-go, otherwise you don't know whether progress is being made.)
Did you eat a lot of fruit, or things sweetened with fructose? Because the liver tends to store fructose directly into its own cells, (rather than spreading it out evenly throughout the body) creating fatty tissue you really don't need and can't see/feel yourself. Just an idea that's less scary than cancer. Just to illustrate, like I said, I was big when diagnosed... But the fat cells on my liver were so extremely dense compared to the "normal" fatty tissue around it, the doctor was fairly certain my entire liver was cancerous and I was going to die shortly. I had an ultrasound, MRI and CTscan to see what was going on there, and it took all those tests to find out all they were looking at was fat! Still undesirable of course, but it wasn't going to kill me in a matter of weeks. Which was nice to know.
I know you're scared, and with cancer in the family that doesn't get any better, so maybe getting tested will put your mind at ease. But I do recommend getting hold of your testresults and educating yourself on diabetes T2 and what you can do about it yourself, because I fear your nurse is going to be rather useless. The moment someone says "I don't know why you have this", all they end up going is treating the symptoms, not the cause, because they don't know what it is. And you really want to treat the cause.
Take a deep breath, and start reading up in books like Dr. Jason Fung's. Those will explain in great detail what is happening in your body, and why.
It'll be okay.
Jo
Wasn't "overweight" before, but was in the size 8/10 range and not the 6/8 range. I inadvertently lost weight when cutting carbs out - be careful you don't cut food out too, which I think I did.
