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.

Your bathroom counter says a lot about you if you're paying attention, and on the morning of my fortieth birthday, I was all ears. The thing that had jumped out at me on the morning of my birthday as I looked around were the pill bottles. It's not as bad as it looks; I tend to not throw them away very often, so many of them were empty, but still. All the diabetes meds I'd taken over the past two years while my doctor tried to determine a good regimen for me were there.

There was the Actos (which made me as fat as a new puppy during our brief relationship), the Phentermine (which made me jumpy but delightfully skinny until my body figured out that I was tricking it and refatted me with a vengeance), the Glimepiride (with all sorts of warnings about the dangers of sudden low blood sugar, which sounded like a fun new problem to me), and the ever present Metformin (pills roughly the size of batteries which affect my body in extreme ways, the details of which I will spare you except to say "not a party"). Taken at a single glance, the little gathering of orange bottles did not tell a story of youth and vigor.

And yet, these are meds that were largely unavailable to my father, who died almost twenty years ago after his own poorly treated diabetes finally caught up with him. He was diagnosed at a much younger age than me, but he never took his beedies seriously and it got him in the end. It's a different world for diabetics now, one in which turning forty with a counter full of pill bottles is hardly the stuff of which dreams are made, but is nevertheless indicative of a battle being fought more effectively and with more options than ever before.

I do miss my old bathroom lights, though. The understood. They got me.