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Honey Syphon: Typical me, I can never do anything the right way round. Most people don't know they have diabetes; they may go to the doctor because of the symptoms without knowing what is causing them; or it may be discovered due to a routine blood test. From reading and talking to people it's clear a lot of people, when diagnosed, go into some state of denial, of not wanting to have anything to do with such a serious, life-changing thing. I did it differently. I had the symptoms but I didn't go to the doctor to find out what was wrong. At first I ignored them. Then I started to wonder, what could be the cause of this? Then I put together odd things I had read and heard, including an ad campaign by the British Diabetic Association (DBA), and started to wonder if that was what I had. Finding out that thrush was a symptom was a big clue - yes, by now I was starting to feel a bit like a detective pieces together the parts of the puzzle of The Mystery Of The Strange Symptoms. So I did some investigating, including poking around on the web, and on the DBA's web site I found a list of the symptoms of diabetes and one by one I went down the list checking them off. I was convinced. This must be what was wrong with me. So of course I rushed off to the doctor to get things sorted out... Did I buggery! I went into denial, like most people do, only I did it before getting any official diagnosis. Why? Because I knew from the stuff I had read on the web that diabetes meant a big change in lifestyle. I liked my lifestyle, unhealthy though it was, and didn't want to alter it one bit thank you very much. So I stupidly decided that until such time as a doctor made it official, I could ignore it. And I did, for about 6 months. What finally made me do something was that I started to feel more and more unwell. That fatigue got worse until it was really affecting my work. I was completely unable to do anything creative, and since part of my work is writing technical manuals that was a bit of a problem. I only did about 2 hours work a day. Since I work from home I didn't have a pointy-haired boss breathing down my neck asking why, but the business was starting to suffer from my lack of oomph. The constant pissing got to be a real bore. The final straw was when I almost wet myself because I couldn't get to a toilet fast enough. Very humiliating, something one doesn't expect to happen after the age of 6, not until one gets to be old and incontinent, anyway. So, time to wake up, face up to it, and get it sorted. Off to the doctor I went. |
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