Wednesday, August 22, 2007

What happened to my immortality? Give it back, you bastards...!

Been away in Scotland for a week, hence the lack of anything said.

Had another blood test before I went, got the results yesterday. Fasting blood sugar was lower than last time, but some other result (you can see how excited I am by this whole thing) was still borderline. Also, my cholesterol was a bit high – not massive, but high all the same. Hardly surprising, I suppose for someone who lives on red meat…

So now I’m on pills. And I’m on pills for the rest of my life… WTF, how the fuck did that happen? I am supposed to be immortal. Other people are supposed to be ill and I am supposed to be indestructible and live for ever.

I never go to the Doctors. I have never had a day off sick in my life. I have missed a day in the office owing to food-poisoning and the resultant desire to be close to certain facilities, but I still worked from home.

I am disgustingly healthy. I don’t do being ill.

Yeah, right. Not no more, sunshine. Live with it.

Actually, no, don’t “live with it”. That is a sort of quitter-ish attitude. I’ve got to live with the (pretty obvious, anyway, when I come to think of it) fact that I am not immortal, but I don’t have to live with the idea that diabetes is something that I can do nothing about.

I can and will change my lifestyle yet further to ensure that it makes the minimum amount of difference to the life that I want to lead.

Some of the “I must change my lifestyle” is altruism, but some of it is also fear. I have a known a number of people in older age who have lost toes, legs and their lives because they didn’t look after their diabetes properly. That really doesn’t appeal to me. I’d rather lose out on a few treats now than my toes in 10 years time. That would really suck.

Learning to ride a horse with only one leg in my fifties would be by no means impossible, but all-in-all, I’d rather pass on the necessity altogether.

Scotland was good. I ate too much, drank too much and smoked a shit-load of cigarettes. All of these things are soon going to be denied to me. Alas and alack. Well, not denied, necessarily, but seriously restricted, so at the moment I am making whoopee before the dietician and the Diabetes Nurse get their hands on me (curse you, September 3rd!!).

This weekend is the last battle re-enactment of the season, to I will probably have my last gaspers there. I already started moderating my drinking seriously at the last one two weeks ago, because I was finding that it played havoc with my energy levels.

It’s quite odd to discover that you can have a good time without getting pissed. Not that I ever get completely hammered – well, not very often at all – but getting pleasantly pissed has been a part of a jovial social occasion for the last 25 years.

Still won’t be able to dance though. The only way that I could ever get round to dancing was by getting pretty wrecked, so it looks like dancing will now be off the menu for ever. That’s going to take come coming to terms with….

Ok, I’ve come to terms with it now. No more dancing, ever. That’s cool. Every cloud has a silver lining.

So, bugger all exercise, bugger all self control and bugger all something else (I just felt that the structure of the sentence required a third “bugger all”) until September 3rd. Then reality and responsibility kicks in.

(Well, ok, you know as well as I do that I’m going to fall by the wayside on occasion as much as the next man, but I shall try to be responsible and sensible, and, in all likelihood, something else ending in –ible, too.)

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