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Living in the FUTURE
Jan. 29th, 2010 08:44 amAfter the second and final session of diabetes ed, all I can say is: there's nothing like having a chronic disease to make you happy about not being born into the nostalgic past. This session was focused on nutrition and complications, so you can imagine how cheerful it was. Well, actually I exaggerate a bit - it was kept pretty upbeat, and it was stressed that if you take your meds and actually work on your diet and all it's rare for the scarier complications to appear. But gods above and below, I am so happy I'm born after the days of the invention of insulin and all the nice array of meds available to help treat this stupid disease. Granted, it might have been cool to be born fifty years from now, when if they suspect you might be prone to this disease they unzip you and pop in a fresh new pancreas and voila! No more problems. But barring that, I'm glad it's THE FUTURE and I have doctors who caught this shit early. Forty years ago, it's not likely that I'd have been diagnosed as having the disease until my BG levels had soared to the point where I was feeling truly run-down and my urine was full of sugar, and then there there would not have been all that much they could have done for me.
The nurse made us take an insulin syringe and stick ourselves with it (it goes into the stomach) so we could feel that it didn't really hurt - I expect that's to fend off the idea that going on insulin (which apparently does end up happening to most Type II's about eight years after being diagnosed) is super scary and painful and means you've failed. There was a moment of hesitation for me, even though the needle does indeed look more like a hair than something terrifying and pointy, but indeed - it doesn't feel like much of anything at all.
Then she showed us a scary slide show, and then brought out the rubber food (!) to show us what appropriate portions look like. And then we were loaded down with just-about-to-expire free samples like Splenda with Fiber! and also little "treats" like those Glucerna shakes and bars that they have boxes of from the company (although they don't push them at the ed. classes - they're apparently pricey and not all that useful for most people, but I'll pack a few of the snack bars when I go to Chicago in February). It was all piled into our red and black new St. Elizabeth's Diabetes Center tote bags and off we went, me and the other lady (who is one of about seven people in her immediate family with diabetes - talk about having the cards stacked against you), into the wide scary world full of cherry pie and people who want to feed you doughnuts.
On the other hand, I've managed to hold steady at my weight loss of 13 pounds, and I can now do 20 situps at the gym. So I got that going for me. It's nice to jog up a flight of stairs and not be completely huffing and puffing at the top of it. Even better, it's nice to feel the muscles in my arms, which have always been flabby, starting to firm up.
So. There's that, then.
The nurse made us take an insulin syringe and stick ourselves with it (it goes into the stomach) so we could feel that it didn't really hurt - I expect that's to fend off the idea that going on insulin (which apparently does end up happening to most Type II's about eight years after being diagnosed) is super scary and painful and means you've failed. There was a moment of hesitation for me, even though the needle does indeed look more like a hair than something terrifying and pointy, but indeed - it doesn't feel like much of anything at all.
Then she showed us a scary slide show, and then brought out the rubber food (!) to show us what appropriate portions look like. And then we were loaded down with just-about-to-expire free samples like Splenda with Fiber! and also little "treats" like those Glucerna shakes and bars that they have boxes of from the company (although they don't push them at the ed. classes - they're apparently pricey and not all that useful for most people, but I'll pack a few of the snack bars when I go to Chicago in February). It was all piled into our red and black new St. Elizabeth's Diabetes Center tote bags and off we went, me and the other lady (who is one of about seven people in her immediate family with diabetes - talk about having the cards stacked against you), into the wide scary world full of cherry pie and people who want to feed you doughnuts.
On the other hand, I've managed to hold steady at my weight loss of 13 pounds, and I can now do 20 situps at the gym. So I got that going for me. It's nice to jog up a flight of stairs and not be completely huffing and puffing at the top of it. Even better, it's nice to feel the muscles in my arms, which have always been flabby, starting to firm up.
So. There's that, then.