A funny thing happened this week. I turned forty.

Okay, perhaps it wasn't so funny.

The morning of my birthday, I took a long moment in front of my bathroom mirror. My apartment complex management was kind enough to replace the subtle lighting over the mirror that we'd had for two years with new, direct lights that look fancy but which might be more appropriate for an interrogation than the gentle transition from being asleep to facing the reality of my new life as a forty-something. Looking in the mirror, I swear I could hear the faint creaking sound of my bones as they calcified. (READ MORE)

For a variety of reasons that all add up to a perfect storm of unfortunate for yours truly, I have gone off my diabetes medications and shall be off of them for a few days. I ran out of both at the same time, and it happened on a weekend, and a holiday weekend, no less, so there was no one at my doctor's office to call. Furthermore, if I'd been paying attention (and really, why would I? It's only my health we're talking about here), I would have seen that I had no more refills on my prescription, meaning that in order to get more, I would need to make an appointment and go in to see my doctor again, which of course I should have done a few months ago, but my book came out and I've been busy being Mister Fancy Pants, etc. etc. etc., blah blah blah. Really, there are a number of excuses, but they all come down to my own personal dedication to being the very best cautionary tale I can be for the rest of you. No need to thank me, I do it out of love. (READ MORE)

One day. I'll learn to start listening to that voice, the one that occasionally gives me advice, the voice that I largely ignore. It's a tiny little internal voice, coming (I presume) from a tiny little internal smart guy. In my imagination, he dresses much better than I do.

Let's call him... Tiny Rob.

Now, to be fair, Tiny Rob has a pretty spotty record. Sure, he may have been the one who sent me to the doctor five years ago, but he's taken more on-the-job vacations since then than George W. Bush. Tiny Rob has left me to my own devices for months at a stretch, only popping by occasionally to ask, "So, what'd I miss?"

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From time to time, a heated discussion will erupt around the terms and phrases "prediabetes", "borderline diabetes", and "beating diabetes". The basic gist of the debate goes like this:

Someone will post that he was told he has "borderline diabetes" or "prediabetes", or that he had type 2 diabetes, but since he changed his diet, got off his diabetes medications, and has normal lab results, he has reversed or cured his diabetes.

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It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that just because I don't have to take a pill to control my Type 2 diabetes, I'm "cured". After all, that's what so many people in my condition were told, so many times, over the past half-century. Some are still told that today. And given that most of the time, my blood glucose levels stay between 85 and 120, with the occasional high postprandial excursion (which occasionally -- like, when I'm low and having dinner at a restaurant -- will lead to a high fasting reading the next morning), there's nothing to alarm the unsuspecting practitioner that back in 2002, at fifty pounds heavier than I am today, the doctor's meter read 170 mg/dl after a ten-hour fast, with an HbA1c of 7.8. Or in lay terms, "I had diabeetus".

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Several prominent dBloggers have posted this week about issues related to Driving While Low (DWL) and premature death. The subjects of these posts were people with Type 1 diabetes, which is the group with which we normally associate rapid-onset dissociative hypoglycemia. While this sort of hypoglycemia is certainly most common in Type 1 diabetes, it is occasionally seen in insulin-dependent Type 2. Most of the time, these lows would seem to be related to insulin activity peaking early or late -- or at least not in synch with one's food and drink.

Unfortunately, insulin is not always the culprit.

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