When we don’t get our blood glucose levels low enough or take the diabetes medicine that our doctors prescribe, they often complain about our noncompliance. Particularly when we follow a very low-carb diet and are unlucky enough to have a nutritionist on our medical team, she is almost certain to give us a hard time.

When doctors and nutritionists do that, they are forgetting their place. The doctor-patient relationship is a status thing. While medical professionals usually earn more money than we do, they work for us. We are the ones who make them well off, if not rich.

We hire our doctors. We can fire them too. Several years ago when Byetta first came on the market, I knew that taking it would help me control my blood glucose and lose weight. The doctor I saw at the time had never heard of Byetta, so he had to read up on it. When he did, he refused to give me a prescription for it because he was sure that I would lose only a few pounds. I fired him and proved him wrong after I hired a compliant doctor. [Read more →]

Few of us can afford the insane cost of health care without health insurance. But in this sinking economy more and more of us have lost that safety net.

The good news is that some strands of the net remain in place. I’m lucky to be old enough to hang on to the biggest one, Medicare.

In November when I had to spend one night in the local hospital, they billed my insurance $2,310 for the room. But that was a minor part of the $11,518 bill. And it didn’t include bills from two doctors.

Because of the deal that my insurance company cut with the hospital, that was a lot less than the room rate and other hospital charges they would have billed me as an uninsured patient. Is that unfair or what! I was lucky that my co-pay was only $450.
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Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

Most of us can still remember those words of admonishment from our mothers years ago. And many of us berate our kids with that phrase now.

When what we do is bad — when we violate the Golden Rule — the innate sense of shame that all normal people have can lead us back to ethical behavior. This normal human emotion can bring us to maturity in our actions.

But many of us are ashamed of who we are or the diseases we have. We feel shame about the physical condition of our bodies.
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Last night I returned from my first long road trip since learning I have diabetes. Trying to eat as well as I could and making time for enough exercise every day were the challenges that I had not addressed before.

On the last leg of my 4,500 mile journey I was musing last night about these challenges and what I had learned about them and myself. I was on the road for 27 days, traveling alone, except for my SUV, my laptop computer, my camera, and other essentials.

Traveling in the off-season gave me tremendous flexibility. Nowhere were the highways or parks crowded, except at the Grand Canyon. I can only imagine with dread what the crowds of summer will be there. Never once did I need to make a motel or restaurant reservation.
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We think about controlling our diabetes with diet and exercise and usually with medication too. Seldom do we even consider the fourth leg.

But a study published in the latest issue of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine and a forthcoming one by a Ph.D. student who just wrote me emphasizes the importance of our emotions for controlling our diabetes. Emotional health and diabetes health are a two-way street — a bidirectional relationship. When our emotional level is positive, we can more easily control our diabetes. And when we control our diabetes, we feel better.
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Many of us who have diabetes are more in tune with our minds than our bodies. We are “not athletic.” Many of us will frankly acknowledge that we are “into our heads.”

Now its clear that we can’t have a good head on our shoulders without having good shoulders and all. Our diabetic body will give us a diabetic mind — if we let it. And when we control our diabetes, not only our bodies but also our brains work better.

A diabetic body has high blood glucose. When we succeed in bringing our blood glucose level down to normal, our bodies aren’t diabetic any more. When our diabetes is controlled, it may not be cured, but it’s certainly in such remission that no tests would show that it’s diabetic.
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Those of us who have diabetes pay a physical cost for it that we know all too well. But many of us aren’t aware of the social cost that we pay for being overweight, which usually accompanies our diabetes.

Fat prejudice is even more subtle than our society’s racial and gender biases and those against and gays and lesbians. Our most recent prejudice, of course, is that against those of the Muslim faith from the Middle East, and that prejudice is anything but subtle. Now, however, social scientists know how to measure fat prejudice.
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A character in a Woody Allen play says, “It’s not that I am afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Until recently those were my sentiments exactly.

But I have just begun to realize how my whole life has revolved around experiencing it. Since death is the final experience, I do want to be there when it happens.

A friend of mine, Jeff, who is working on an advanced degree, interviewed me last month. After reading my online autobiography, he structured the interview around how much my life has changed — how much I have experienced. I’ve always made sure to do interesting things — maybe because I have never thought of myself as being an interesting person.
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Three guys started some of the first diabetes websites at the dawn of the Internet age in 1995. My site, Mendosa.com, came first. But quite soon Dr. Bill Quick started his site, DiabetesMonitor.com, and Jeff Hitchcock started ChildrenWithDiabetes.com.
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