I discovered yesterday that there's an enormous difference between staring at your mortality in the form of diabetes and in the form of debilitating pain that could quite possibly lead to a pretty poor quality of life.

Diabetes is manageable. A high is treatable. A low is annoying, and treatable. Diabetes is a hassle but it's livable. As I type this post I'm dealing with a 57 mg/dL post dinner reading that's giving me the shakes. It pisses me off and leaves me dying for a cure, but in the day to day scheme of things diabetes is -- or can be -- a blip on the radar.

The kind of back pain I've described here (and here), the kind of back pain that leaves me unable to go to work, unable to walk from bed to the bathroom or to care for my children or barely care for myself is the kind of future that stared at me yesterday when I finally went to see an orthopedic surgeon about my back problems.

He told me he didn't see any evidence of a problem with my sacro joint, which is what had been previously diagnosed. He did see a collapse between my #1 and #5 lumbar (I think he said "collapse" but the more I talk about it the more I can't really remember the exact word he used). The sudden stabbing pain I feel is my muscles overcompensating for this collapse. He wrote the problem area down for me because I couldn't remember what he said: lumboscral joint.

"Essentially," he said, "you're developing spinal arthritis."

"Oh. OK. So what can I do..."

"It's like gray hair," he said. "There's nothing you can do to prevent the progression of it."

"Oh. So when I'm 65..."

"When you start having more problems -- like pain down your legs -- and when the physical therapy doesn't work any more, that's when you'll need to see a surgeon," he said.

He offered to write me a prescription for physical therapy, but when I told him that I remembered many of the exercises from my very first bout with this he said I could manage it myself at home. And he suggested taking up pilates and/or yoga.

I've said it numerous times before -- I know that I'll live out my days with diabetes. And while that's really a gigantic pain in the ass, at least my quality of life will be on the plus side. When I'm 65 No. 1 will be 40, No. 2 will be 37 and No. 3 will be 35. Every day life with diabetes most likely won't keep me from being an active senior citizen. But being confined to bed or the couch because of a flair up of spinal arthritis will.

There's a gigantic difference here, and that was made abundantly clear to me yesterday as I left the doctor's office.