Lucky To Be Alive

Hello, friends,

Life changed for me forever on Thursday evening, February 7th. For the first time since I was diagnosed with diabetes in October, 2015, I searched for my tester kit which I'd bought and never used. I couldn't find it. Two days earlier, my chiropractor had urged me to prick my finger and at least find out the ballpark of my blood-sugar level. I was scared to prick my own finger. I was scared I'd find the tester kit. Then, I was scared when I didn't find it.

I went to the supermarket pharmacy and bought a new kit. This time, I was serious. The chiropractor's story of his friend who'd had a totally unexpected blood-sugar level of 600 mg/dL had sunk into my thick head. Now, it was urgent.

I'd eaten popcorn and a corn muffin with coffee, and I'd begun to feel a sickly, feverish-like ringing in the ears, a spacey feeling -- not good. This was not the ideal time to practice learning to prick myself, but it was now or never. After pricking myself about 11 times at all different pressures in all different places, I finally drew a proper-sized sample of blood and applied it correctly to the side of the testing strip. "... 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ..." the machine counted down. There it was, my blood-sugar bombshell:

500 mg/dL.

This was at least one hour after my corn muffin. What had the reading been before that? And that was a snack -- not a full serving of any of my favorite culprit foods -- many of them much worse and/or far more sugary than popcorn and a corn muffin. How many days and nights had my blood sugar reached 500 -- or more? Combine that with the grueling thirst, the gallons of fluid so often expelled ...

That number explained most things. I was lucky to be alive. My chiropractor's advice, urging me to self-test, may have saved my life. Tonight, I checked for ketones. Thankfully, none.

I've gotten my blood-sugar level down into the 200s and 300s, alternating, since Thursday night. I've begun walking. I've learned that my blood sugar seems to have done best, Thursday night through today, with a bean-and-onion mix. I've learned that the caffeine in coffee spikes my blood sugar. I've learned that decaf coffee is not only not entirely worthless, but also that a chemical-free brand of decaf coffee can confer the same protective benefits as regular coffee.

I'd started to feel really bad after drinking my usual cups of regular coffee. The magic was gone. In its place, my body felt dirty and depleted after a few sips of it. Most brands started to taste bad to me. My body was giving me all of these clues -- these biologically valid pieces of information.

Today, I'm no longer thirsty. Now, whatever water I can pour back into this body can begin to restore a real metabolic fluid balance ... which, according to my own theory [The Water Principle ©], might assist the mending of the whole diabetic picture through the kidneys onward and upward.

As for my pancreas, I would prefer to coax it back into functioning at optimal level rather than patronizing and consoling it with diabetes drugs which will just enable me to eat poorly and burn it out.

If it turns out that I need insulin, of course I would take it. So far, however, I've not been producing ketones ... so I believe there is hope for my pancreas to recover whatever function it has lost through glucose receptors being blocked by excess fats. I'm not a good candidate for palliative blood sugar medication, as my chemical sensitivity and otherwise low blood pressure can predispose me to hypoglycemic episodes and cardiac arrhythmias.

My task is to get this blood-sugar level lower, lower, and lower. Given that it's been only one full day of my working at this, the progress made thus far gives me great hope.

The other good news is that you haven't missed a single thing of my "journey of managing diabetes" since my post of October 6, 2015, because I hadn't done a thing about it.

Whether or not I was ready for it, my "journey of managing diabetes" has now begun. I'll keep you posted.

Cheers!

~ Carolyn 

When I sat down to write my first novel, a "novel" view of diabetes emerged, instead:

The Water Principle ©

The teacher, diabetes, imparted lessons she could not have learnt any other way.

For decades, she had depended upon what she’d always considered to be the “cooling” property of chocolate after lunch and dinner. Although she could not have enunciated it at the time, she’d had a “thirst” for the refreshment of chocolate as though it were a badly needed glass of water after the exhausting, internally “sweaty” labor of chewing and digesting a meal.

Indeed, the chocolate and other sugars seemed to have usurped the place of water in her life for over five decades, until water, itself, protested the reversal. In the woman’s fifty-second year, water rose up to demand an immediate accounting of all the water not ingested which needed to be in order to match the glut of sugars left over from chocolate and company. Water made its voice heard via a thirst of such sudden and crippling intensity, the woman could barely speak until delivered bottle upon bottle of water.

This raging thirst would repeat itself upon the woman’s every ingestion of sugar and gluten. Some sugars and some gluten products induced more thirst than others, but the new pattern was set: The woman now needed to imbibe as much water as she’d once “needed” to ingest chocolate. The lessons of diabetes had begun. Through her pancreas and kidneys, the woman’s diabetes seized command of her body to speak to it.

Diabetes taught her body the difference between slightly sweet and far too sweet. Chocolate candy bars and chocolate ice cream became distasteful to her, the chocolate sensation now overwhelming, sometimes even sickening. There were many hours and days when the water she’d gulped down to relieve the insane thirst seemed to leave her body by a half-gallon or more at a time.

Was diabetes all about low water intake, in the first place? Did the bodies of some people mistake thirst for a chocolate-and-other-sugar craving? Was it the usurpation of water by chocolate and other sugars which eventually dehydrated and deregulated the kidneys, upsetting, in turn, the fine balance of sugars and insulin otherwise maintained by the pancreas? Did diabetes manifest itself, therefore, first through the kidneys and, secondarily, through the pancreas?

Should the primary treatment of diabetes be switched from the pancreas and blood sugar to the kidneys, perhaps with periods of fasting and reduced food ingestion, overall, accompanied by remedial water intake?


December 2, 2018. © 2018 Carolyn Cucinotta-Marra. All rights reserved.