I'd like to say I didn't know I had type 2 diabetes before I was diagnosed, but I did. Well, I had reasonable cause to believe it was so. What's been more difficult has been just how I was to write about it. It's been nearly six weeks now since it first came to my attention and it's only now that I've figured my way into the maze that is Type 2 Diabetes.
I suppose I ought to say at this point that I'm and Englishman living in France, and was about to find out how different things are here than they were in England. I had already been to the emergency department 6 years previously after a rather silly accident, but as I was about to discover, that's not quite the same as normal, every day doctoring...
My wife and I had been on a diet for about 11 months as part of our 2022 New Year's resolution.
We'd been doing alright as far as the dieting was concerned. The weight was coming off slowly, but consistently ... until it didn't.
Suddenly I lost about 7 pounds (about 3.5 Kg) in one week.
The next week, 4 pounds (about 2 Kg). The following two weeks, I lost 3 lbs each (about 1½ Kgs).
It may not sound like much, but when you consider that I was doing very little exercise, you can see how that would have stood out from the usual one or two pounds (½ to 1 kilo at most per week).
In addition to the sudden weight loss, there was also a considerable thirst that accompanied it and the last straw was waking up and discovering that overnight, my eyesight had changed dramatically and suddenly, even with my glasses, everything was blurred.
That prompted Penny (my wife) to look these symptoms up on the internet.
Now I would be the first to agree that self-diagnosis isn't a good thing, but she had suspicions and wanted a reason for me to go see the doctor. It'd been 6 years since the last time and I only went then because I'd nearly sliced half my thumb off in an accident with a table saw. As far as I was concerned, if there's nothing wrong, don't try and fix it. Plus, since I'd been the last time, the doctor I had had, had retired and I didn't know the new one. Not a particularly valid excuse, I'll grant you, but with the symptoms as they were, I finally backed down and agreed to see him.
We made an appointment and in the mean time, we also looked up getting an eye test.
Not so in France.
Here, you have to see an ophthalmologist first and believe me, it's less easy to get an appointment with one of them than it is to spell ophthalmologist! I could barely see and that was something that needed to be rectified as soon as possible.
After much research on the interweb thingy, we discovered that it was not unusual to find that getting an appointment with these people could take up to 9 months. Bearing in mind that this all happened mid to late November, not being able to have someone test my eyes until July of 2023 was a no go.
Eventually, we found someone and to my utter surprise, got an appointment for the Monday of the following week. You have no idea how the prospect of being able to see again bolstered my sour mood.
You see, I found myself unable to drive anymore, thanks to not being able to see clearly enough and my current glasses were absolutely useless—and I love driving.
Anyway, to the doctors...
When I saw our doctor, he was a long way short of sympathetic. I wasn't expecting a, "There, there," and a hug, but I wasn't expecting the apparent total lack of anything remotely resembling interest either. He took blood pressure, measured me (1.9 metres or 6'2½") and 109.5 Kg or 239 lbs.
I had arrived with a list of symptoms and a spreadsheet print out of how my weight loss had been going, but he ignored all of that. He just said was that I was overweight and needed to lose more. "What do you expect me to do?"
"I know I have to lose weight, but not as a result of diabetes!" I told him, feeling the need to raise my voice significantly.
I was miffed and felt bad about raising my voice, but he didn't seem to be giving me the "bedside manner" I felt I should have expected, or the congratulations for already having stuck to a diet for the better part of a year and having gone from 127 Kg (280 lbs) to 239 lbs or (109 Kg), which in my opinion was quite a bit and should, in my head, have garnered a little more in congratulations than the negative response I received.
He calmed down after I'd put my foot down with a firm hand and wrote me a prescription for a blood test, which we arranged for the next morning, the Thursday. On the Friday morning, we got a text (which we didn't hear arrive) and a phone message on our answer machine upon returning from our shopping trip. We were to see him at his surgery at midday.
We arrived and dutifully sat in the waiting room and when he opened the door to ask us inside, I calmly strode towards him and the closer I got, the more his jaw dropped.
"You're here," he observed.
"Of course. You asked me to come."
"You're standing." More acute observation.
"Yes?" I replied, somewhat confused.
"I was quite expecting to come and collect you from your house and take you to the hospital," he said.
Now, you're probably ahead of the game here and yes, the upshot was that I had Type 2 Diabetes.
I have to confess to feeling a mixture of emotions here. The first was vindication. Despite the apparent lack of interest from my doc at our initial meeting, there really was something wrong, so I felt justified in seeing him.
The second one was shock. I wasn't aware of what being diabetic actually meant. The doctor had said I had to give up sugar and I wasn't sure about that at all! I'd been taking sugar in tea and coffee for as long as I can remember and suddenly to find that whether I liked it or not, that would have to stop was a shocker, never mind the biscuits, cakes, sweets of all shapes and sizes and soft drinks.
The third was confusion, because aside from the prescription and the "No sugar" order from the doc, that was all I'd been given. I was more than a little taken aback that a medical professional would simply send a patient that he'd just diagnosed as a Type 2 diabetic on his way with nothing but a piece of paper for medication etc., was just mind boggling.
But anyway, there I was.
Just to finish, the doctor did mention something about the blood results, the numbers etc., but didn't really go so far as to explain their significance. I didn't find that out until later...
I'm sorry this entry was a bit long, but it's what happened and I figured that it might interest you, dear reader, how I discovered I was a diabetic. I'll try and keep further entries to more bite-size lumps.
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