Living With Diabetes

Most of you know I have Type-2 diabetes. Well maybe some of you don’t as you have seen me gulp down a slice of chocolate cake like a doomed man one minute before midnight. If you don’t mind, can I say part of that last sentence again slowly? Gulp...down...a...slice...of...chocolate cake…mmmmmmmmmm. Therein may lay one of the causes of my ailment: chocolate cake.

The truth is, diabetes is no fun. The list of things you’re not supposed to eat is long, varied and tasty and the temptations are everywhere. I can’t eat cake, cookies, pie, candy bars, ice cream, popsicles, or Cracker Jacks. I can’t drink soft drinks, most wines, cocktails and beer. Hell, I can’t even drink milk (lactose is a sugar), any kind of juice, and I can't eat most fruit (fructose is a natural sugar but the body can’t tell the difference).

Then there is another list that I am supposed to stay away from, and that is any food with carbohydrates, especially complex carbs. This means I really shouldn’t eat pasta and, if I do, I have to be careful that the tomato sauce is low in sugar. Breads of all sorts, one of my Achilles Heels, are a no-no as is the jam I desire to put on it. Potatoes are high in carbohydrates and so are other starchy vegetables and fun things like the best-tasting peanut butter.

I often feel sorry for myself, especially as I watch those around me ordering desert while I try to drool discretely. But the fact is, I have eaten my lifetime share of sweets and carbs; I have just eaten them faster than most people do – in my case, by age 42. My mom wasn’t exactly a good role model because she had a huge sweet-tooth and, if you can believe this, once a week when we were kids, she fed us donuts for lunch. And not just any kind of donuts, the sweetest, most decadent kind of donuts. Even one of our dogs had diabetes, probably from eating table scraps.

Recently I found out that a good friend of mine has diabetes. He’s coming to grips with it the same way I did eight years ago and I can tell you it’s not fun. Like me, suddenly many of the simple pleasures in life have been grabbed from him and it didn’t happen at an age for us when we’d be accused of being flexible. We’ve had to learn to read those tiny nutritional labels that we never bothered to look at before and get booklets to tell us how many grams of sugar or carbs are in food that can’t be labeled, or factor the approximate evils of restaurant food.

To ensure we’ve been well-behaved on our diet, we’re rewarded with frequent finger pricking and blood-letting to get to know our blood sugar levels. Mostly this is frustrating because we get high readings when we think we’ve been good and low readings following a dinner made solely from pumpkin pie (actually that never happened, I just wish it would). The point is, there are other chemical things happening in our mysterious body that affect our blood sugar including feeling a bit under the weather, lack of exercise or being too hungry (yes, not enough food in the body and the body will store what you do have as sugar for more energy and put out a higher reading).

My advice to my friend is to not worry too much about it. Be a good boy at first and stab your fingers and squeeze out the drop of blood so you can understand the way foods and activity affect blood sugar levels. This will also be a useful exercise in limiting the number of lectures from wives, dieticians and nurses. The pills are better now then they were when I first found out I had diabetes and while they will add a few pounds to the body, your blood sugar will go down and you won’t suffer from days when a single pill can lower your blood sugar to a near-comatose 50. After a while, you will be able to rely on you’re A1-C readings which are a three-month average of your blood sugar and a better indicator of where your stable levels are.

Diabetes is a life-altering disease but very manageable. It’s certainly more manageable the younger we are. I know my friend can’t be as active as he would like, but hopefully he can take 10-minute walks with his wife and then work his way up to daily 30-mintue walks. And, yes, I am aware that she will nag at him for the full 30-minute walk, but that is only because she loves him (I think).