You may be at risk for diabetes if...

Anyone else here bristle when you are presented with these statements?

I mean, no $4!†, Sherlock. I have diabetes. I am no longer at risk for the condition, it exists in me.

So why does my lab's A1c, if it exceeds 5.8, say "You are at risk for diabetes" rather than "You are within guidelines for someone with diabetes"? Did my diabetes suddenly go away just because I don't need to take pills or shots to control it?

Now, I know I'd be really peeved if I didn't have diabetes and a 5.8 A1c read, "You have excellent control of your diabetes" -- but come on, some contextual information, please -- or better yet, placing 5.8 in the "higher than reference normal" category and letting my doctor do the talking.

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If you expect to hear it, then should it really be that bad?

Yes and no. 

Today's endo appointment wasn't as bad as I thought it would be in terms of feeling like I was getting raked over the coals. First, the good news: the thyroid nodule hasn't grown and I don't need to follow up on it until March 2012. Like K said when they first discovered it, I've probably had it forever. And nodules are apparently pretty common.

So the bad news: cholesterol is up, thyroid out of whack for the first time in ages, A1C up. Everything is up except my mood.

I think I generally take this kind of news in stride during the appointment. It's typically hours later when I realize what I went through. And that's when I start kicking myself and hating diabetes and thinking about how nice it would be to not have to think about all this stuff all the time.

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There's nothing quite like getting raked over the coals at your endo's office first thing in the morning.

It's a necessary evil. It's actually good for everyone with diabetes to check in with their endo -- or whomever is their primary diabetes caregiver -- several times a year. So I'm not saying I don't want to go. All I'm saying is that it's no fun to hear about what a crappy job you're doing being the manager of your pancreas.

I think it's been about fourish months since I last saw K, the nurse practitioner at my endo's office. Last week I had an ultrasound on the thyroid nodule that was discovered last year. So tomorrow's appointment will be to go over the results of the ultrasound, to go over results from routine blood work I had several weeks ago, to get my A1C and to check over my general diabetes care.

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I remember some pretty awful endo visits when Charlie was younger. While we liked Charlie’s previous doctor quite a bit, the visits were often very stressful and frustrating.

Looking back, I think we spent the first two or even three years after diagnosis, very frustrated. Not that we completely do now, but it took us a very long time to get a feel for this disease - to figure out how it ticks. The frustration was compounded by the fact that we lost faith in the doctors’ ability to help us.

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Maybe I should have been pleased with the A1c of 7.8. It’s not so far from his best ever.

Neh. Not so much. I accepted the news apathetically, as if just informed by the waitress that they didn’t have Coke, just Pepsi.

Whatever.

For the amount of work that goes into managing this damn disease, 7.8 just doesn’t cut it for me. We/he deserve better.

We returned to CHOP to review the data from the first few weeks of continuous glucose monitoring. On the computer monitor, we could see the moments in which the jagged blue line (indicating the sensor) seemingly fell off the screen and disappeared.

"Ah, that was when Charlie decided he needed a break from it."

"Oh, that’s when the sensor came out."

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::knock knock::

"Hey! You said you had some wellness numbers you wanted to show me," I said to A on Monday around lunchtime.

"Oh you're so good to remember!" she said.

A had stopped me in the parking lot Thursday afternoon after she returned from our annual conference. She had been to the wellness booth where they drew an unbelievable amount of blood to test cholesterol, glucose, A1C, etc. She couldn't remember exactly the name of the test she wanted to talk to me about but knew it was something like hemoglobin.

"I'll bring the paperwork on Monday and we can discuss it," she said as she got into her car.

I had forgotten, actually, that we were going to talk about it. I'm not sure what triggered the memory; maybe it was because I was walking across the parking lot.

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