My First Day with Diabetes

So yesterday was my first day being diagnosed as a Diabetic Type 2.

And I'm as ignorant of all the facts as anyone else who does NOT have diabetes. I have started monitoring my sugar intake and have changed my eating habits drastically.

I want to go thru my symptoms for those of you who might be wondering if they have it or are feeling it.

Going back 3 months, I started noticing tingly legs and my calves kept cramping up.

Then I started feeling lazy, but I put that down to just being stressed out.
I didn't want to walk my dog. Taking the stairs winded me. Both at work and at my apartment.

After that I began noticing that my moods were swinging all over the place. In other words I was very emotional. I couldn't watch certain commercials without getting angry, and other ones made me feel like crying.

All of this is very unusual for me, but once again, I thought it was stress and or melancholy.

Then the Major Symptoms started hitting me:

I couldn't get out of bed on the weekends. I was sleeping like 8 hours during the day and even longer at night.

I was constantly "voiding", or as we call it, I was pissing every 2 hours at night and every 1 hour during the day.

All of a sudden I was thirsty all the time. And I don't mean a little thirsty. I mean I could drink a 32 ounce gatorade in one gulp and still want to wash it down with some water.

And I lost about 15lbs in 4 weeks. (which I thought was kind of cool, until I realized it was all my water weight)

I was HUNGRY all the time, since I wasn't processing protein or something correctly.

Then came some weird smell. THIS IS IMPORTANT. I started smelling an alcohol smell everywhere I went. It smelled kind of like rotting grapes, but with a more chemical smell to it.
Actually, it was the GIGANTIC amounts of blood sugar in my system that I was smelling. When the blood sugar was too high that was the only thing I could smell.

WORST AND SCARIEST OF ALL, I was losing my vision. It started out with getting dry eyes. I would be rubbing them constantly and sometimes I had to wear sunglasses inside because my computer monitor was blurring in front of my eyes.
Suddenly I couldn't see people's faces 20 feet in front of me. I could see the body, but I couldn't make out details like eyes, noses, mouth, etc;

SO WHAT THE HELL DID I DO?

Well, I'm one of the Millions of Uninsured Americans you hear about all the time on TV. (Except I've never taken a dime of unemployment, welfare or financial assistance from the government)

So I started looking at Homeopathic remedies first, since that was all I could afford:
Cinnamon Tea: Boil cinnamon sticks in a pot, add a small amount of honey and lemon for flavor. Supposed to lower your blood sugar levels. I felt immediately better after the first pot of tea my baby sister made for me.
Echinacea Tea: Boil the manzanilla tea. Supposed to lower my stress levels and blood pressure.
Walking: Since I didn't have the energy to run or lift weights, I began walking my dog for a mile every morning. When I felt funky I would add ankle-weights, but it was always slow and steady pace.
Mouthwash: Many people don't associate a clean mouth with a clean bill of health, but it's true. The more dirty or rotten your mouth feels, the more unhealthy you are likely to be. This one made me start feeling better in 1 day.
Eyedrops: This is for the dry eyes, which is probably associated with my dry mouth and my constant thirst, but whatever. I used the Moistuirizing Eye Drops, not the "get the red out" drops.
Multi-Vitamin: This should go without saying, but a lot of guys (and gals) my age don't realize they are my age until weird things start happening to their bodies. Long hair from; eyebrows, nose, ear, and any other random spots on your body are some signs your getting older.
Change diet: This was the hardest because had to remove all the stuff I love. Got rid of RC Cola. No more pancakes or Flour Tortillas. Bye Bye white bread, Hello whole-wheat bread. See ya later Lucky Charms, how ya doing oatmeal...
Basically I got rid of all sweets, removed enriched flour, bought Sugar-Free fruit juice, and cut back drastically on fruit.

Then I got lucky in a way, because my girlfriend has been diabetic since she was a child, so she recognized the symptoms right away and was the first to suggest I might be diabetic.

But still, my Machismo got in the way of taking the time to make an appointment and get checked out. Then I made the excuse of how expensive it was going to be. (Which it is, but the city is constantly offering free screenings, just the timing is always wrong)

Finally, after getting a scare where I almost passed out and had to lay down to get over it I decided to make an appointment.

After some research on the internet, I located the Texas Diabetes Institute. They were offering free screening in order to find participants for a 3 year study on Diabetes.

They were looking for people who had only recently begun showing symptoms and had never before been diagnosed with diabetes.

Well that was easy for me, because I didn't believe in going to the doctors office unless a bone was broken or blood was gushing out of my orifices so there was NO WAY I had been diagnosed earlier.

So I found out I was diabetic. As a matter of fact, after they realized my blood sugar lever was at 476 after fasting for 10 hours, I thought they were gonna rush me to emergency room.
Just to give you an idea, a healthy blood sugar level is mid-80's.
High Blood Sugar level is 180.
Diabetic Blood Sugar level is over 220.
I was in the "HOW THE HELL IS HE STILL ALIVE" range most of the time.

I have been accepted into the study, which is great because they are paying for all my treatment and tests.

But this is only the beginning of the journey. Hope to see ya'll around when I'm in my 90's.

In my job, I am often required to deal with the rudest, dumbest and craftiest liars on the planet. They don't consist of most of my day, but enough of my week to give me a headache.

Today I had a young woman tell me she made her payment online, because she was not informed by her AGENT (not me), that she was set up on automatic withdrawals from her checking account.

I told her it was no big deal and it happens to anyone, but if in the future she would rather make her payments online, we could remove the EFT discount.
She said no, but that we should really make it clear that she was set up on the EFT program.

I informed her it is usually written on her invoice. She said it wasn't there. (and here is where the problems began...)

So I pull up the last bill we sent her and read it verbatim.

I wasn't doing it to be rude, I was just not sure of what READING-Level she left school at.

Was it rude of me? I don't think so. I read the letter verbatim, I didn't add any words or remove any sentence.

But I came across as SNOTTY. In actuality, I was being very patient and accomodating, since she didn't have a copy of the bill in front of her.

In my opinion, the problem began when she realized SHE HAD MISREAD the invoice, but was not willing to admit it to me or herself.

She preferred to shift the blame to a third-party who didn't give a ssshit if she nows how to read or not.

I only called to let her know something she overlooked. But now I'm "snotty" for educating her dumas.

touche Vieja, you may be right.