This has been a pretty huge month for me. Lots of changes are afoot. For the last several months I’ve not been feeling very well. I’ve had a horrible time managing my sleep apnea because they haven’t been able to find me a mask that works right on my head. So I’ve been very sleep deprived over the last several months, and it’s had a big impact on my work effectiveness, and with how much I’ve been able to do at home too. I had pretty much stopped doing all side work and all of my personal projects.
More recently though, I started feeling much worse. Especially the last two weeks. In the back of my mind I kept thinking “I’m sick”, but I had still been blaming it on the sleep issues because the symptoms were the same, just worse. I’ll save you the details of the story, but basically I went around to a bunch of specialists for the sleep and apnea related things and they all seemed to run out of ideas and weren’t very interested in helping me more.
So in desperation I went back to my family practice doctor and basically said “I don’t know if you can help me, but I’m desperate here. I’m afraid of losing my job if I don’t get some sleep, and the specialists aren’t helping”. He asked me a number of questions about my symptoms, and then came up with a great plan of attack. He told me to get second opinions from new specialists, and he gave me the referrals I needed to do that, and then he told me that he had some medication for alertness that might help me through work, but that he wanted to get some lab work done before he gave me that to make sure that nothing else was causing my drowsiness.
Before too long the lab results came back, and it turns out that I have diabetes. The additional “sickness” that I’ve been feeling was because my blood sugar was way too high. It’s high enough that I need a pill, but thankfully not high enough to require shots. And since it’s pretty clear in my case that weight is to blame, there’s a very high likelihood that if I lose weight and get in shape that I won’t even need the pills anymore.
So I’ve got a finger sticker now to take my blood sugar, and I’m going to see a dietitian later this month to find out more about what I’m supposed to be eating. But so far the pills are working great, and I am feeling a LOT better.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m a huge foodie and this is going to create fundamental change to my diet. However, I’m determined though to actually make GOOD diabetic food, so I’ll probably be posting recipes on here as I find them.