CHANGING HABITS

It seems like a thousand years ago that I was first diagnosed with diabetes. I know that it wasn’t because B-O-B does not spell Methuselah. It was closer to 16 years ago, when, after some routine blood work, I was told that the doctor wanted me to see an endocrinologist because he suspected diabetes. I went to see the endoc and, sure enough, his suspicions were confirmed. I was a Type 2 diabetic and I had some serious changes to make. I walked out of his office a little slower, head down, not wanting eye contact with anyone, and sat in my car without starting it for what seemed top be an hour. What did this mean? I didn’t know very much about diabetes other than stories I had been told by friends whose grandparents had lost a foot or needed a kidney transplant or died because of complications from it. Naïve is a kind word to describe how much I knew. I saw this as a death sentence and, in a moment of self indulgence, I cried. Why me? I was never overweight, I was not a junk food glutton and nobody in my family was diabetic. Why me? I cried some more. A number of years earlier, when my first wife and I had divorced, I remember thinking about the choices I had to make. Did I go to a bar, get drunk and cry in my proverbial beer or did I turn the car in another direction, go to the gym, get in shape and start dating again? I contemplated that choice for about 10 minutes before I found myself throwing out what became my last pack of cigarettes, “pumping iron” and getting ready for a date. It wasn’t long before I found my true soul mate - the woman I have now been married to for 18 years. This was no different. I had to make some hard choices. I went home and told my wife, through the tears, that I was diabetic. She had just returned to our home in Dallas after flying to Chicago to give her brother a kidney, so, her initial response was, “Ouch, this hurts,” but, being the bastion of strength that she has always been, within moments, she was getting proactive about my situation. My wife grew up in an African-American family and community that deep fried a lot of food, so it was only natural that we ate foods that were prepared in the “Fry Daddy.” I grew up in a Jewish-American family where the foods contained a lot of salt, which I had backed off from years earlier because I didn’t want “the gout.” The “Fry Daddy” was the first thing to go. She threw it in the trash and started to researched menus where it wasn’t necessary to fry everything in gallons of oil. We would fight this thing together. We found recipes that were amazingly more delicious than fried or salty foods and so began our culinary journey. It didn’t take long before I dropped what little extra weight I had and she found herself having to buy smaller clothing. Within about 6 months, I had come off all diabetes meds and was feeling terrific. We have never gone back to our old ways. We continue to eat the right things, cooked the right way. I take Metformin again, but, only because I had a bit of a setback during a recent move and the “stress” caused the numbers to get a bit out of whack. But our proactivity as regards diabetes has simply become our way of life; our comfort zone. Just the other night, while eating dinner, my wife made me realize that my diabetes has been a blessing for our entire family. We have been eating healthy for so long now that my 17 year old daughter just can’t eat junk food or drink soda. She doesn’t like candy and prefers to “snack” on fruits and vegetables. For her, it is just the way things are. This was nothing that she had to “learn the hard way.” I still, however, wondered how I could possibly be diabetic with no weight problems and no genetic disposition. We may, however, have found the answer. When I was forced out of a job I had been doing for 25 years, I lost my insurance and had to start getting my medical treatment at the VA. I went into the service in 1966 and was sent to Vietnam in 1968, where I spent nearly 2 years, landing back in San Francisco in January of 1970. While there, I handled huge drums of chemicals that were to be sprayed over the Vietnamese country side for defoliation purposes. They gave the chemicals names of colors. The orange drums were dubbed - Agent Orange. I was informed, by the VA, that exposure to Agent Orange has been known to cause a number of problems and that Type 2 diabetes was recognized as one of them. I have no complaints about being diabetic. It has caused me, and consequently, all of those around me, to eat, think and act healthy. I have walked two of my daughters down the aisle. I have two more daughters and two granddaughters and I plan to be there for them as well. I wrote a bumper sticker a while back, that says - “Eat Like a Diabetic and You’ll Never Become One.”