The symptoms, the diagnoses and managing diabetes.

Fast food, sweets, soda, you name it I ate it. For the first 38 years of my life I consumed enough sugar for 10 people and then it happened. I knew something was wrong but I could not figure out what was happening.

I was tired all the time and so dehydrated I constantly felt like I had walked for days through the desert with nothing to drink. I was tired and just wanted to sleep. My vision got blurred and I mean so blurred I could not make out facial features on people standing in front of me. Luckily for me my sister worked in the medical field and happened to be talking to a nurse about me one day and told her of my symptoms. The nurse looked at her and said "Tell him to get to a doctor right now, he has diabetes. Sure enough I went to the doctor and explained how I had been feeling.

The first thing the doctor did was take a blood sugar. My glucose level was 480 and so the fun began. The doctor gave me a test meter, some lancets and test strips, showed me how to use them and directed me to start testing four times a day immediately and write down my test results in a notebook.

We started off on Metformin two times a day and made immediate changes to my diet. I tested when I woke in the morning, two hours after each meal and right before bed. Slowly over the next two weeks we modified the pills and adjusted my diet until my glucose levels started to level off in the proper range.

So started my experience with managing diabetes. It is an education of a lifetime and one that determines the course of the rest of my life. You earn what you can eat and when to eat it. How to pay attention to what your body is telling you because it will let you know what is going on all the time.

The interesting thing with people managing diabetes is you learn to become very in tune with your body and you notice things that most people would not even notice. The slightest shaking of the hands or being more tired than you normally would for no apparent reason. Managing diabetes requires a life long commitment and ultimate it determines how long that life time will last.

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