This Diabetes Thing

So in the course of surgery and recovery and so on, I developed something called hyponatremia. That is, the sodium content in my blood is too low. Now, I dunno about you, but only very rarely have I ever heard anyone say, "He/she doesn't have enough salt." I mean that is not normally a problem. And the first thing my doc in the hospital said was that they were gonna have a kidney specialist come check me out because this is usually a kidney failure issue.

Well, good news. It isn't. My kidneys are fine. The hyponatremia seems to be some combination of genetics and the meds I take for bipolar disorder. Some other family members have also had this. I can't do anything about either issue, so I just kinda have to live with it. I take salt tablets twice a day (it's like swallowing a teaspoon of salt in the form of a tablet) and I have to drink a lot of Gatorade. I have always hated Gatorade and having to drink it every day has not helped matters. Luckily there are Nuun and Skratch, which at least aren't sweet and are available at Amazon. But, and here's the thing: I CAN HAVE ALL THE CHEETOS I WANT. FOREVER. You gotta look at the positive with this sort of stuff.

Speaking of things health related, the other day I ate something that made my blood sugar go way, way up. I have a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) so it tells me this stuff. And I mean, the mature and logical response probably should have been "Okay, don't eat that again, duly noted." Instead I felt guilty. Like how dare I eat something that shoots up my blood sugar. (I might add, what shoots up your blood sugar is very individual and is often a matter of trial and error. For example, half a banana shoots up my blood sugar. A piece of toast with jam on it does not. No, that makes no sense. For someone else it might be the opposite. Like I said, trial and error.)

Anyway, I'm trying to figure out why I felt, of all things, guilty and I think it's diet culture, folks. What's that? Well, that's when people say stuff like "Oh, I really shouldn't" when they have dessert with dinner or, worse, get mad at their significant other and say, "Why did you let me eat that?" Whether they're trying to lose weight or not. Which, I know, is just part of our cultural repartee, but think about it for a second; what are they saying, actually? We're so conditioned to believe that enjoying a food (or enjoying anything, really, like marijuana, or sex, or a beer after work) is a bad thing that we do this to ourselves as readily as the 75-billion-a-year diet industry does it to us. I mean, it could be that Puritan work ethic thing, but I really believe the diet industry has monetized that and is just running it for all it's worth. After all, would people go back and shell out money for weight loss programs that don't work, time and time again, if there wasn't some aspect of religion involved? Would they have life-altering, invasive abdominal surgery or take medications that make them constantly sick? Even if it's "I believe against all logic that this is what I need to do", which, incidentally, is the very definition of religion.

When I first got diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), I didn't tell anybody except my wife for quite a while because I was convinced everybody was going to say, "There, see? Serves you right." Like people deserve to have a potentially fatal medical condition because they, I dunno, take away school lunches from hungry kids or molest children or serially kill people or, in my case, are fat. I realize that's crazy, and T2D, despite what you may have heard, is not even caused by being fat; fat or skinny, you have to have the genetic marker or you will never get it no matter what you eat. (Tho, if you do have said marker, when it shows up in your life may have something to do with what you eat and how fat you are. Like, does it show up at 40 or 50. Research is ongoing.) But there's diet culture again. Actually authoritative culture generally. "You should shut up and do everything we say because it's what's good for you." This idea took a body blow after the Black Death, when the Church, for all its supposed power, could do nothing to stop the dying. But obviously it is still around.

 

Nobody said it. Most people were kind of, "Eh." Which, I guess, is the right response, more or less? I mean, if you said "I have arthritis" or "I have hypertension" or "I have Osgood Schlatter disease" nobody would freak out. Or maybe people just expect I have T2D because I'm, you know, fat. I just expected much more drama. The actual drama ensued after the diagnosis during the happy-go-lucky months that followed, during which we tried to come up with a medication combination that actually worked and also didn't kill me. For some reason, all new medications go directly to my stomach, and if there's even a 1% chance a medication can cause nausea and vomiting, it will. (And some meds that have never caused nausea and vomiting in anyone ever still cause them in, uh, me.) Then of course there was the whole thing with one of the Ozempic-type drugs blocking all my mental health meds, and flying out the metaphorical windshield at 95 mph, and having to take a week off work and so forth and so on. But that's behind us, I hope, and I'm taking two meds that seem to be working fine. My CGM tells me I'm within the desired range about 90% of the time and my A1C is happy.

I gotta tell ya, compared to bipolar disorder and ADHD, T2D is a walk in the park. I mean, yeah, I don't eat rice anymore, but I never liked it anyway and I'm fine with opting out of it forever. My favorite Chinese food place just gives you more vegetables if you say "no rice." Which, you have to admit, is just heartbreaking. Otherwise I really have not changed very much. Except for breakfasts. I used to have peanut butter toast and half a banana for breakfast. And I do still do that sometimes, but mostly I have eggs or chicken fingers. Not nearly as much fun, but if you start out the day with your blood sugar way high, you're gonna spend the rest of the day trying to get it back down. It's easier to just not get that high in the first place.

If T2D makes me feel bad at all, it's when my blood sugar is falling off a cliff. (T2D, in case you did not know this, is when the natural process by which your pancreas secretes insulin to digest your food gets subverted somehow. Either you're not secreting enough insulin, or what you're secreting is not any good, or the pancreas gets the timing wrong, or sometimes all three.) There's a brief time period between the falling-off of blood sugar and the moment your liver realizes things are awry and dumps some more sugar into your bloodstream. You can also eat something, which helps too. But that falling-off is horrible. I get sick to my stomach, I break out in a sweat, I feel shaky, I can't walk right. A few ginger candies fixes it right up, but I can't get them into my system fast enough.

Bipolar disorder, though. Bipolar disorder makes me feel bad every single day. Yes, the meds help a lot. But I'm still either up or down. Being down is, of course, not fun. But sometimes being up is not fun either. Sometimes being up is being jittery and anxious and not able to sit still. Other times being up means I feel like doing stuff I can't actually do, like, I dunno, climbing Mount Everest or hiking the Amazon or quitting my job, driving to Bonham, Texas and opening a Chinese restaurant. (That was something I became obsessed with for a couple of weeks back about a year ago. There are no Chinese restaurants in Bonham. A person could make a fortune opening a Chinese restaurant there. Not, by the way, that I know how to cook or know anything about Chinese food or how to run a restaurant.) So I have to sit there and talk myself out of doing things that should be completely unnatural in the first place. I don't know if you've ever had to do that, so take my word for it that it's a huge drain on mental energy. I mean, yes, I'm doing better than a lot of people, and I haven't had to call in sick to work to lie in bed and stare at the wall for a long time. But still. It is always there. It does not go away.

Then there's ADHD. It's called "attention deficit" but it's really "attention instability." I can, when conditions are right, focus deeply on something that has lots of tiny details for several hours at a time. That's how I make beaded jewelry. But, I never know when conditions will be right or, indeed, what "right" even looks like. Other times I can't focus on anything for more than about ten seconds. I mean, I definitely have good and bad days. I even have lists of stuff to do at work for good and bad days. On bad days, I may spend eight hours reading mail from the Federal Courts. Which, don't get me wrong, needs to be done. It's just that there are, you know, 200 other things that also need my attention that are getting ignored while I'm having a bad day. Plus, there's nothing like getting to the end of a day and feeling like you wasted your employer's time and money and didn't get enough done. (Which, given my wonky personality, I might feel regardless, but trust me, having ADHD does not help.)

T2D, though. Take meds. Watch carbs. Eat good food. Keep an eye on the blood glucose monitor. Send numbers to doctor once a month. I mean, unless I'm shooting above 200 all the time for no apparent reason, T2D is easy. I mean, for now, anyway. I could always develop a bunch of complications later and have both my legs amputated or, I dunno, drop dead, but I think that's a remote possibility. Which, I mean, just goes to show something or other. I guess the lesson here is that anybody you know might have a disabling condition. And maybe they've told you and maybe they haven't, and maybe for them it's the worst thing ever or maybe it's not. But regardless, the experience of having a condition or a disability is just really, really individual. You have been warned.