Living with it.

As I've mentioned, I'm diabetic. Type II, to be specific - previously known as Adult Onset Diabetes. What it really means is that my body doesn't process sugars in my blood the way it ought to. Left unchecked, this can lead to all sorts of gory consequences and ultimately, death. With control, this can lead to all sorts of gory consequences, and ulitmately, death. The difference is the gory consequences can be prolonged or avoided altogether, and death can be staved off for awhile.

The stress of managing this can be overwhelming. There's the blood and urine tests by the lab, the home blood glucose tests, the doctor visits where you just know he's going to tell you that your foot, leg, toes, fingers are going to have to go, or that sexual function for you is now but a dream. There's the numb feet, the lack of balance, the loss of dexterity (incredibly frustrating for a guitarist). There's the worry that the disease will progress to Type I, which means all of the above plus the added fun of more closely watching the blood sugar and shooting insulin, a whole new level of managing the disease (I don't know how they do it). There's the constant worry about everything I eat - what's this going to do to me. Every single day there's something you read that makes you think you're doing it all wrong.

And that's just me whining, really. People live, and live well, with diabetes every day.

Everything I WANT TO BE says I should say 'To HELL with all that crap, fight this thing!' Yet, I seem to be unable to dredge up any enthusiasm to do just that. I was relieved when I went to the doctor this week and was told that my numbers were looking good and trending in the right direction. I was like, "great - thanks for the good news, can I go home now?" Why am I not elated? Why didn't I ask about my numb feet? My sore hands, the loss of dexterity? How can I just not care on one hand, and yet be scared to hear the answers to the questions I should ask?

After all that, there's the reality that I created this problem for myself. I'm very overweight, "morbidly obese" according the BMI scale. How's that for a motivating term? For me, it's not so much. I spent many years of my life in physically demanding jobs, then sat behind a desk for many more years. I drank gallons of soda, and ate whatever I wanted in whatever quantity I wanted. Then one day, I was fat. I ignored it then, but did pay a little close attention to what I ate, and my weight stabilized, in fact it hasn't changed but a couple of pounds for at least 5 years. For most of those years, I never saw a doctor, unless I was sick or injured, which didn't happen often. Then, when I was about to turn 40, I thought that I really ought to get a checkup. I learned then that I was diabetic and that my thyroid hormone was very low, which means lowered metabolism, complicating the weight thing.

Sometimes, I wonder if I should just stop and let the disease take its course - and hope for Jesus to come back before it gets there.

Grumpy Gus

Part of my job is being available 24/7 in case something bad happens with one of our systems. Something bad happened tonight at about 1:00AM and I'm still up nearly 2 hours later because I've not yet come down from the adrenaline rush. I'm not really happy about it.

We use a monitoring software system called Nagios that keeps an eye on critical services and servers, and then lets us know via email and text message if something breaks. I have my phone set to a really loud and annoying ring tone to ensure I wake up if there's a problem. This also means my wife, dog, and cat are on call with me as they wake up when the blasted thing goes off, too. Sometimes, my wife is never able to go back to sleep. She doesn't say anything, but she does let me know when she can't go back to sleep.

I'm pretty grumpy about the whole thing tonight. Got paged, got up and went to the bathroom and while I was in there, the phone kept going off. Turned out our sysadmin happened to be up and tried to rectify the problem, but our datacenter vendor didn't have him as 'authorized', so he was sending more messages trying to get me up.

When I realized he was sending the messages, I bit his head off.

Not good.

I was able to get tonight's problem taken care of, but at what expense? I've potentially alienated an employee, my wife is annoyed and up, and here I sit almost 2 hours later - still wired from the event. With my poor health, this kind of emotional stress and lack of sleep is quite literally killing me.

My boss has titled his blog "Life and Liveliness" with this description:

Life and Liveliness is a concept taken from Scott Peck's book 'People of the Lie'. The basic idea is that everything we do, say or take part in either adds life and liveliness or takes it away. A life that is enjoyed, is full of liveliness. It's just a question of choosing to get there.

I can't say that these experiences add life and liveliness - in fact I can say without question that they take it away.

It's time to choose correctly for a change.

Diabetes

I'm a Type II Diabetic. I'm mostly in control of things, but sometimes not. I'm also overweight, which is certainly affecting my body's ability to take care of itself - and may well have been the main cause of my contracting the disease.

I don't like to talk about it much, and I try to push it out of my mind usually. It frightens me, and that gets worse if I think about it too much.

I remember when I was diagnosed - the doc explained all the complications, including heart problems, kidney problems, neuropathy... I didn't sleep for 4 days straight. I would wake my wife in the middle of the night and ask her to listen to my chest to see if my heart was still beating. I ended up in the hospital for a couple of days because of the stress - doing all sorts of cardiac tests. Everything came back saying my heart is in fine shape. But I always wonder, still.

Every time my feet tingle, I wonder how long it will be before I'll be facing amputation.


Am I be irrational?

Perhaps.