Alternative Diabetic

No one would choose to have diabetes as their constant companion. Like so many other things we encounter in our lives, however, "there is no way out, there is no way back, there is no other way but through." It is, indeed, a Red Sea place in one's life.

To those of you just facing that place, don't do it alone. There is no medicine, no aid to health like a loving, supportive family.

Don't think it has to be the kind that lives in your house either. There are so many of us affected by this 'companion', that we are everywhere.

Pick up the phone, attend seminars, look around you. The chances are that you know someone else that lives with the same thing that you face every day.

We are, all of us, together in learning and sharing whatever we can with each other. In unity, there is strength to face the common enemy and live joyous lives despite it.

Joyce and Jim Lavene

Approximately 11 million Americans have diabetes but about half of them do not know they are diabetic.
World Book Encyclopedia

Chapter 1

Realization

"What's wrong with Dad?"

It had become a household phrase a little like 'What's for supper?' or 'What's on TV?'

"What is it this time?"

Our son sighed and leaned back against the counter while he ate the last few potato chips in a bag and tried to put it into words.

"We went out to look at those computers today while you were gone and he acted really weird."

His mother glanced up at him. "Define really weird."

He shrugged. "Well, he had to stop a few times on the way to the store to go to the bathroom and get something to drink. He seemed preoccupied or something. Nervous. I don't know."

I came in on the end of that conversation. Just in time to wonder what he was talking about and start to get a little angry.

"Maybe I was just thinking about the money it's costing us to send you to college, besides the computer," I growled at him.

He stared at me for a minute, ate the last of the chips then walked out of the room.

"What's with him?" I asked innocently.

"What's with you?" my wife asked in return. "You've been like a bear all week."

"I don't know," I shrugged. "I thought things were going pretty well. I've got this smoking thing under control. Maybe I get a little irritable from time to time."

"It's not just that," she told me seriously. "It's like he said. Everywhere we go, you have to stop to go to the bathroom." She laughed and turned back to me. "I'm not saying you shouldn't have to go but it seems like a lot. Is something wrong?"

"No," I answered calmly. "I guess it could be my body getting used to not having the nicotine. Maybe it's trying to flush itself out."

She looked at me carefully. "You look tired."

"I am tired. But my system is in the middle of a lot of changes. I did just turn forty and I quit smoking six months ago. But I have been working out and I feel great."

"I guess that's all that matters." She shrugged. "You're probably right. It's probably just your system flushing itself out."

"I'd tell you if I didn't feel right," I told her. The conversation nagged at me for a few days but then I forgot it.

The 'flushing out' process continued until sometimes at night I would have to get up and down five or six times. I know for a lot of people this would be an everyday thing but for me it was annoying and unusual.

In the next two weeks, I quit working out altogether. I was tired all the time and the free weights I had adopted since I had quit smoking became just too much effort.

My wife noticed it and asked again if I thought everything was all right.

"I'm just tired," I told her and turned away, purposely ending the conversation.

I wasn't very good at thinking about being sick or discussing it. I never liked the attention sick people received or accepting that feeling of being pitied. Not that I was sick. There was nothing wrong with me that a few good nights of sleep wouldn't help.

My wife came home from work the next day and found me guzzling water from a water bottle until the entire quart was gone.

"Trouble finding a glass?" she wondered.

"I was too thirsty to take the time," I replied with a smile. "I think I'll make some juice."

"Still thirsty?" she asked.

"Don't start." I shook my head, taking out a container of frozen orange juice. "There's nothing wrong. It's just hot outside and I'm thirsty."

"You know, these are symptoms-"

"If they are," I reminded her briskly, "they're symptoms I've always had, you know that. I've always been a big drinker."

"And not been able to sleep or make it through a store without going to the bathroom," she supplied.

I didn't have an answer to that and wandered away to the utility room to escape.

It was about that time people started noticing that I was losing weight. Guys at work started telling me that working out was paying off. I hadn't told them that I'd stopped a few weeks before. It seemed to me that what I had done was paying off.

Trips to the water fountain and bathroom were becoming amusing even though I never joined in the laughter. One day I would be worried that something was really wrong with me and the next, I would be sure it was only part of a change in my life. Besides, I recall thinking as I tightened my belt up one notch, the weight loss looked good on me. I didn't mind losing a few inches in the waist. The effect of the weight training I had been doing for the six months before that had just started to kick in.

I woke up that night and made my usual trip to the bathroom but I noticed that something else was wrong. My jaw had become slightly swollen and a dull ache had started in a back molar. Just what I needed, I considered, looking at my face in the bathroom mirror, a bad tooth.

I looked at myself more closely, considering the face of a forty-year-old man. The circles under my eyes that I had hoped would clear up when I stopped smoking instead had become more pronounced.

I couldn't help thinking as I stared at my face, that my father had died at thirty-eight and I had outlived him by two years already. He had died in a dark alley, the victim of street violence, just a few weeks before I had turned eighteen.

I couldn't remember him. My mother had divorced him when I was just a baby. I had been going to see him for the first time since their divorce when his family had told me that he had been killed. Was he like me? I wondered, searching that face in the mirror.

"Are you all right?" my wife called from the bedroom.

"Fine," I repeated both to her and myself. I was fine, I told myself, despite everything.

The tooth that had gone bad turned out to be two teeth. I had never had any luck with my teeth, my one blessing that they had always come out easily. When I was sitting in the dentist's chair, I knew it wasn't going to be long before I was looking at false teeth, especially if they kept coming out two at a time.The dentist had no trouble pulling them. My wife paid the bill and drove me home that afternoon in late September.

We stopped at the store and bought some soup since I wasn't supposed to eat solid foods. It was all pretty routine. But for the first time in my life, my mouth became infected. I was in agony for the next few days while the dentist prescribed pain pills and antibiotics, amazed that it had happened when it had never happened before.

Usually a fast healer, a week later, I was still in pain and unable to eat solid foods. My weight dropped dramatically and I really began to worry. But I couldn't bring myself to ask the all-important question; could something serious be wrong with me? Was it just a string of bad luck?

When my mouth finally healed, my wife and I went out for a drive. The leaves were just turning red and gold. The temperatures were beginning to cool down from summer and the sunshine was golden on the road before us. My wife drove us up to the mountains. We'd decided to follow some back roads instead of taking the Interstate. That required using some maps and since she was the pilot, that made me the navigator.

I was looking at the map while she drove, following the tiny curving lines, wondering what was wrong with it. The lines were so faint, almost disappearing into the colors of the map.

"Are we lost?" she asked, smiling across at me.

"I can't find the road," I replied. "This map is just not right."

We stopped for gas and if necessary to buy a new map and while I was in the bathroom, she looked at the map.

"Here's the road," she told me, pointing to it with her finger.

"Where?" I looked again and still didn't see it, squinting my eyes and putting the map closer to my face then further away.

"You can't see it?" she asked in astonishment.

I shivered in the warm breeze and admitted that I couldn't. I couldn't make out those little road lines anymore than I could read the print on the side of the paper. "I've always heard when you turn forty." I shrugged it away. "I guess I need glasses."

She rubbed my shoulder. "Mom says you can get reading glasses from any drugstore. She and Dad both had some before Dad got his permanent glasses."

"I guess that's what I'll do when we get back," I answered, also noticing that I had begun to feel a little nauseous. "I'd better drive."

"We'd better get on the Interstate." She shook her head. "If you can't see the map, I think I'd rather drive."

My wife and I, always talkative, always trying to see who can get in the next word, were quiet on the way home that day.

I was really starting to get scared but I didn't want to admit it. My guiding passion since I had been a small child had always been books and reading. Suddenly realizing that I couldn't read was worse than any torture that could have been devised for me.

We stopped on the way home and I found a pair of reading glasses that helped me to be able to read the fine print on the map. I felt a little better for then until a few weeks later, my vision became worse and I had to go out and get another pair of reading glasses. The second pair were a little stronger and corrected the problem again.

My wife put a name to everything the next day. It was the second week of November. I had continued to lose weight while people complimented me on how good I looked. At work, everything was fine. At home, I had started defending how many soft drinks I consumed as well as how much water and juice.

It seemed to me sometimes that my family had turned against me, trying to make me believe that something was wrong with me while everyone else seemed to think I was doing great. I had stopped smoking, was losing weight, what more could anyone want?

"You have all the symptoms I've ever seen of diabetes," my wife told me as we unpacked groceries and put them away.

"Diabetes!" I scoffed. "That's crazy."

"Excessive thirst, frequent urination, weight loss-"

"I've always had a lot to drink," I defended angrily. "There's nothing wrong with me."

"You just dropped thirty pounds," she charged, "and you haven't changed what you eat."

"It's from working out before," I told her. "Even though I quit, it makes you burn more calories."

"And you don't think you have frequent urination either?"

"I'm older. People change when they get older. Like my eyes and my teeth and my hair," I replied.

"It wouldn't hurt-"

"It doesn't mean I'm sick," I answered her impatiently. The one thing I didn't want to do was talk about any possibility that something could be wrong with me. The only time I faced that was when I was alone at night, lying in bed after another trip to the bathroom and not able to go back to sleep.

"Anyone can become diabetic," she persisted. "I think you should go and be tested."

"I'm not diabetic," I told her as though it was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard.

"Then it won't hurt to be tested," she continued.

"There's no point," I flatly refused. "You're just making a big deal out of nothing."

Thanksgiving came and went that year with no change in my circumstances. I would never go back to the way I was before, I had already prepared myself for that. But that didn't mean anything was really wrong and certainly not that word, diabetic, that kept coming from my wife and children. I started hiding anything that seemed relevant to the situation.

When my eyes became worse again, I got new glasses without saying anything. I noticed at about the same time that sores had begun to become infected on my hands, refusing to heal no matter what I did. I kept it to myself. I finally stopped reading anything that wasn't absolutely necessary because it had become such a chore. Even the computer had become too much effort and I just stopped using it, pretending not to be interested in it. Not realizing that I wasn't fooling anyone and that my family was worried, no matter how much I reassured them.

My wife and I had never faced such silences between us. There was a look in her eyes when she looked at me that made me feel uneasy and I would look away from her before she would have the chance to tell me again that I should see a doctor.

Christmas was coming with its usual preparations but for once I couldn't join in the festivities. I was tired all the time, scared most of it. All the wonderful Christmas food that we always made every year was unappetizing, I felt nauseated most of the time, trying to get by on as little food as I could, making excuses.

One night I got up for what had become my usual round of bathroom visits, sick and tired, and when I came back to bed, my wife was awake.

She put her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder. I could feel her face was wet with tears.

"What's wrong?" I whispered, holding her.

"I had a dream," she told me in a trembling voice.

"Bad dream?"

"It was about you," she confided, her grip tightening. "I dreamed that I saw you, your soul. It was flying through what looked like windows, going faster and faster." She paused for breath.

"Honey-"

"It was like you had lost touch with us all, like you were going on without us and if you kept going that way, you'd just keep going on forever."

We were both quiet for a moment while the cold December rain beat against the window.

"I think if you don't stop and reach back, if you don't do something to reestablish your ties here with us," she drew in a shaky breath, "you're going to die."

I wanted to reassure her again that nothing was wrong but I couldn't find the words. "I'm not going to die."

"I know things have been changing," she continued. "The kids are growing up and life isn't as simple accepting those changes. I know that you hate the idea that you're growing older but you can have a lifetime still in front of you."

I didn't answer, couldn't answer. She was really scared. I was really scared. We didn't talk anymore about it that night. We just held each other for a very long time and I wished that in the morning things would be better.

Of course, they weren't. That evening, we went out to eat and I realized that I couldn't read the two-foot high menu the waiter had put in front of me. It had become obvious to me that I was slowly going blind. My eyes, my precious eye sight was sliding away from me. I looked across the table at my wife and realized that I couldn't see her face. She was barely a few feet away from me, laughing at some joke our son had told, and I couldn't make out her features.

Already the week before, I had become afraid to drive and made the excuse that I wanted to join a car pool to ride to work. I let my wife and son drive everywhere else and while I could see in their faces that they were frightened and sometimes angry, I couldn't make myself admit it and ask for help. I tried my best to figure out a way not to have to ask for help with that menu but there was no use. It was the first time I had ever been at that particular Mexican restaurant and I had no idea what they served.

"The lighting is really bad in here," I finally told my wife. "Does that say something about a burrito?"

She found me a burrito but she was mad. All through the meal, she avoided talking to me again, an easy thing to do since we were with a large group of our family.

Afterwards on the drive home, the entire family was quiet with her anger, sensing a growing conflict between us. My wife wasn't mad often but when she was, everyone knew it. When we got home, the kids scrambled for their rooms and she slammed into ours.

I hesitated for a moment but knew there as no way out of it. Taking a deep breath, I went into our room as well and took off my jacket. "Okay," I started. "I know you're mad."

"Mad?" she questioned. "Mad because you won't take this thing seriously? Or mad because you don't love me or the kids enough to be willing to fight for your life? What you do or don't do affects us all! I want you to be there when I'm old and gray! I don't want to keep looking for our dreams if you aren't going to be there to share them with me."

"It's not-"

"And don't you dare tell me you aren't sick and that there's nothing wrong with you! You can't see, you can't sleep a whole night without getting up. Look at your arms and legs!"

"What?"

She reached over and grabbed my arm. "Your muscles you were so proud of! Your arms feel like marshmallows!"

"That happens when-"

"You can't eat, you don't sleep," she raged. "You're letting yourself go! You have to do something! You have to find something to anchor yourself here before it's too late!"

"All right!" I yelled in return. "All right! Something is wrong. I'll be tested, okay? I love you and I want to live. I'm just not sure what to do."

"We'll find the answer," she told me confidently. "We'll have to know for sure what the problem is but when we do, we'll find the answer."

We are really just an average family with our share of good and bad times. My kids talk on the phone too long and want more allowance than I think they should have every week. We work and we live together, five strong personalities trying to make ends meet and get through life the best we can.

For some people, realization of this sort never happens. It's less dramatic, less life threatening. Diabetes can be a creeping, silent disease that slowly erodes your body, attacking internally with no external clues. They go to the doctor for that yearly physical and are shocked and amazed that the doctor finds they are diabetic. They never felt anything, never guessed that something was wrong with them.

It was hard for me to accept that I could have something so serious wrong with me but I think it might have been harder to accept something that hadn't been so vivid, so graphic. Maybe that's why it happened that way for me. Maybe anything less would have been impossible for me to take as more than a cold. Since it seems that we make definite decisions about how and where our lives will be affected by things that happen to us, this appears to be a likely possibility to me.

While it wasn't easy for me to accept the fact that something was wrong with me, the information was so plain that I didn't have much choice. I talked to a doctor at a local clinic who advised me to stop eating high sugar foods for a few days, give my body a chance to handle what may have been just a sugar overload from the holidays.

I went one step better and stopped eating white sugar in anything. Those few days, I was so scared, it was easy.

We walked on glass around the house, not really looking at each other, not really saying any of the things that we wanted to say. Fear of the unknown is really the greatest fear. By not talking about it, I guess we felt it would go away. I guess we hoped it would, anyway.

My wife and I both come from healthy stock. Mostly the members of our families on both sides have never been sick, dying suddenly with no burdens of thinking about it for very long when it was their time. My children have always been very healthy, usually only seeing the doctor for a sports physical once a year or so.

I could see in their eyes that they didn't know how to take what might be happening. How did it affect them? How would life be different? What would it be like to be around a sick person all the time?

I thought about it in much the same way. What would it be like to be a sick person all the time? If I really was diabetic, how could I bring myself to live that way?

I hoped, I prayed fervently that it wouldn't be true. The doctor had sounded as though it wasn't unusual to have a rise in blood sugar that went away when you stopped the supply. Borderline diabetic, he had called it. Nothing much. Just eat a little differently. No problem.

Without saying anything, trying not to alarm my family anymore than I had to, I bought some simple test strips to home test my urine. My hands shook the first time I did it. I washed them afterwards until they were red from scrubbing. While I did, I kept an eye on the test strip on the sink. Like the at home pregnancy tests I'd heard so much about on TV, the strips were supposed to change color if there was a problem.

My test strip turned green, dark green. I looked at the package for further details and sat down heavily on the side of the bathtub. Green was a danger sign. The darker the green, the more sugar in your urine. I tested twice more that same day, hoping something had been wrong with the strip. All the tests remained the same. I hid the rest of the strips in their box in the bottom of my desk drawer.

I think I knew at that moment that I wasn't going to have a reprieve. The doctor had said to make an appointment with him if the symptoms didn't go away after a few days of not eating sugar. In just those few days, I had lost more weight, my vision hadn't improved, I was still sick. I walked around with what I could only think to call a washed out feeling. Everything was just too much effort. Living had almost become too much effort.

There was nothing else to do but go and face whatever had happened to me. I couldn't help but feel it was just a little unfair. I mean, I had quit smoking, I was really exercising for the first time in my life. Shouldn't I have been healthy, healthier than ever? Instead, it appeared that I had started doing the right things only to have my good health thrown into my face.

It didn't occur to me until much later that part of my problem could have been all those years of abusing my body. I had asked it to maintain a healthy standard while doing the best I could to hinder it. While my wife and I had always been so careful that the kids ate the right things, went to bed early enough for a good night's sleep and took vitamins for prevention, I was smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, pushing myself to stay up until three in the morning writing computer programs and ignoring how important it was to be healthy.

Even when I was sitting in the doctor's office, I couldn't help but dwell on the implications of having somehow become diabetic at that time in my life. I remembered reading a small part in a book a few months before that kept popping into my mind. It was called 'The Magic of Thinking Big' and it basically dealt with solving life's problems by thinking yourself through them. I had read it for it's business message, barely skimming the part about defeating attitudes when there was something personally wrong with you.

The author, David J. Shwartz, said that he had personally experienced having a health problem that he could have used as an excuse not to do well. He was diabetic and said that he was warned, "Diabetes is a physical condition; but the biggest damage results from having a negative attitude toward it. Worry about it and you may have real trouble."

Sitting there in the green and yellow, very clean, antiseptic smelling waiting room, I thought about that part of the book. How I had really just ignored it because, as far as I had known, everything was just fine with my body. I realized that if the tests were positive and I was diabetic that I had probably been diabetic even when I had read those words.

It was a very different feeling just then. I wished I had read that part a little more carefully. Although from where I was sitting at that moment, I didn't see how anyone could have a positive attitude about being diabetic.

My wife had tucked a piece of paper into my pocket before I'd left that morning after she'd read it to me. I touched it as I went into the doctor's office when they called my name.

"Have you come to the red sea place in your life,
Where, in spite of all you can do,
There is no way out, there is no way back,
There is no other way but through?
Then wait on the Lord, with a trust serene,
Till the night of your fear is gone;
He will send the winds, He will heap the floods,
When he says to your soul, "Go on!"
Annie Johnson Flint