For years I have been riding on the edge of diabetes. It runs in my family and even my uncle died due to complications from diabetes. As a nurse, I am well versed in the dangers of this disease and that it is much more than just elevated sugars. This disease can take out all of your organs if you don’t be careful, it can give you festering wounds that never heal that eventually mean the removal of body parts. Of all the things I have seen in my nursing career, this has always scared me the most.
In my previous post, I mentioned doing trauma work all year. This came with letting a lot of emotional things go and it found me healing the best way I could, with food. The joy of food has always been my comfort and my enemy. Years after my sexual abuse, like many other girls, I turned to laying on a thick coat of armor in the form of getting fat. If I was unattractive to my attacker, then I would be safe from it ever happening again. But then, as a teenage girl, I also wanted to have boyfriends and feel as if that was something I could achieve. The need for armor and the need to be attractive was a hard battle to wage. I suffered from bulimia for much of my high school life. There was a reason that everyone could always bum a piece of gum off of me. It was what I ate most of the day.
Once the pounds were on, it was hard to get them off. When I lived in Seattle I was able to sort of drop that addiction to food, but really only exchanged it for drugs and alcohol until that became unrealistic as well. Then I got pregnant and got to my heaviest in life and stayed there for a significant amount of time. I developed PCOS and then hypothyroidism. Both of these conditions, I just recently found out, cause insulin resistance. I have lived in Northern climates for much of my life which means I have chronic low vitamin D3. I am generally under low normal or just barely at low normal. Add a Melanoma diagnosis in 2020 and the sun barely touches my skin in the summer if I can help it. Vitamin D deficiency also causes insulin resistance. Now add peri-menopause to my aging party which also causes insulin resistance.
At the beginning of February, my blood work revealed that I am officially in the diabetic range. This was after 6 or 7 months of going to the gym 3-6 times a week, lifting weights, doing cardio etc. But what had not changed was what I was putting in my body. With the stress/boredom of my leadership position, I was eating constantly–McDonald’s was my friend, as was any piece of chocolate on the community table or donuts which are my kryptonite. Not to mention the baking I did at home…cakes, cookies, ice cream, breads. My day was a long train of carbohydrates.
Dieting has been damaging through my life especially after the bulimia. I can get obsessive and very wrapped up in the details of macros and every little calorie. I think being on the spectrum doesn’t help because I can hyper-focus with the best of them. Maybe all of those diets failed because I was trying to get skinny and fit in or be the image of what someone else wanted of me. I rarely did it for any other reason. This time has been different. When I got my blood work back, I was devastated and did start to spiral out of control for the first few days trying to decide what to do. I didn’t want to take the Metformin, but I also knew that I had 4 different diseases coming to battle against me, most of which I had been silently battling since 2004. Twenty years of unchecked insulin resistance. I can only hope that I haven’t done permanent damage to my pancreas so that I don’t find myself in full blown diabetes.
I made the decision for my health that I would take the medication. I would transition out of my leadership position and “just be a nurse” again. I would change my diet. I would continue the exercise and make it my mission to show up for myself. I feel like it isn’t as hard as I thought it would be because the prize at the end of the day is that I could get to live a symptom free life if I play my cards right.
I don’t think this dedication to myself would have been possible without going through the last year dealing with the trauma of sexual abuse, grieving my parent’s deaths (10 years after), and opening myself up to the hearts of other women who were strangers to me and who are now friends. I don’t think I could have this dedication to myself without also understanding that if I don’t, I could lose the most important things to me–the love of my family and life itself. I am not ready to give up on that.
Do I miss all those delicious treats? Of course. Baking is one of my favorite things to do, but this just means that I get to learn how to make things tasty but also very good for me. I’m learning about science and the effects of stress on the body and mind. I’m learning that I am not being punished by not having the sweets and the breads, I’m learning how to exchange them for something else, or have less of it less often. Sometimes when I am tired, it is hard to not want to grab at what is easy, but I keep my eye on the prize…a long, healthy life that I get to spend with friends and family.
Thank you for reading. Be kind to each other and yourself. Read. Write. Paint. Laugh as much as you can. You get this one chance.
Aleathia
Aleathia Drehmer 
Thank you for sharing your story. This is hitting home, because my father checked into the hospital with 450 blood sugar reading last Tuesday. The endocrinologist determined was able to medically confirm that my father has not taken his Metformin for the past three months. Yes, he is 88 and has other issues going on, but still, I am interested in learning what I can about diabetes. All the while, I often wonder if may father’s present could be my future.
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I think if you get a yearly HA1c then this should be able to track it. My grandmother and grandfather had diabetes, but only one of their sons ended up with it. My mother didn’t have diabetes, but I got it. I think it has a lot to do with insulin resistance from other conditions in combination with genetics and lifestyle. I thought I was eating good, but really, I was not. Now I am on a high protein and fiber diet with less than 150 g a carbs a day, exercising daily. Some of these things are inconvenient, but not horrible. I’m sorry to hear about your father, but I wonder why he wasn’t taking the medication? If he is not taking the extended release and not taking the med with food, it will give nausea and diarrhea. I would look in that direction because elderly people often don’t eat much or drink enough and definitely do not want nausea and diarrhea.
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