Happy Anniversary To Me!

St. Patrick's Day will never be the same for me again. I had a doctor's appointment that morning last year, because I was having some health issues. What were those issues, well, this is how I summed them up last year on a few posts on Facebook:

I chalked the eye problems up to getting old. The excess peeing up to kind of always having a small bladder, and the weight loss to...well, no, to nothing. That was the one thing that I couldn't figure out. I was eating as bad as I ever had, but still losing weight...why? Well, because I was slowly dying inside...and not in the usual depression-type way, but instead in the literal sense.

I knew that peeing a lot was a big indicator of diabetes, but I always discounted it. Finally, a few days before St. Patrick's, I looked up the symptoms of diabetes on my phone, and my stomach dropped. This is what I saw at this link:

I ticked them off the list, and realized that I most definitely had it.

I scheduled an appointment with my doctor, and discovered that I didn't just have diabetes, I was in a diabetic crisis. They wouldn't let me leave without shooting me up with some insulin.

In the end, I found out that I have type 1 diabetes. I finished up my series of Facebook posts with the announcement:

Usually, people who have that get it much younger, so I guess I can at least be happy that I got to skip out on a lot of years of living with the condition.

I went without sugar completely for probably six months or so. I was a model diabetic. I haven't had to start shooting insulin, because my pancreas apparently hasn't quite given up the ghost yet. So, I'm still chugging along on Metformin, which is actually a type 2 diabetes medicine.

Eventually, I broke down. I'm not as good as I'm supposed to be. It actually worries me a lot. I've got a pretty insatiable sweet tooth, and I haven't been as sedentary as I am now for years. I used to go running all the time and work out at a crossfit gym. Not anymore.

They say that having diabetes shortens a person's life by an average of 20 years. 20 fucking years! Diabetes may actually kill me before that car accident finds me.

After all this time hemming and hawing, I've finally started writing every day. I used to think that eighty years was more or less what I was probably going to live. So, I'm almost exactly halfway there. However, with diabetes, we can cut twenty years off of that, so I don't have a lot of time left anymore. If I want to accomplish anything, I better step it up big time.

But another thing I could do is take extremely good care of myself, so I can have all forty of those years after all, or maybe even more. Right now, I'm being ruled by my appetites, and doing a crappy job with my diabetes. Soon enough, I'm gonna have to have a foot amputated or something. It's time I get my crap together.

I think that next month, I'll stick with 1,000 words a day, and dedicate some time to developing good eating and exercising habits. I think I'll do another post in which I detail those things, but for now, I'm going to just leave it at that. And say, happy anniversary to me. Woohoo!