What an annoyance

I saw my family doctor yesterday, to get the long-delayed lab results from my annual physical.  (ClinPath managed to screw up quite thoroughly; they hemolyzed my first sample and ran the wrong test panel on the second because of a typist’s error.  They finally managed to get it right the third time out.)  Most of my results were in normal limits, and my cholesterol numbers were outright fine (159 overall, 122 triglycerides, 46 HDL, 89 LDL).

The two parts that weren’t good are that I’m now clinically diabetic (132 almost-fasting glucose; I’d already taken my morning medications before they drew the sample) and mildly iron-deficient anemic (12.6 hemoglobin, 73.3 MCV, 23.2 MCH, 31.6 MCHC, 26 serum iron).  None of those results are horribly wrong, but they’re not right.  The doctor doesn’t know why the anemia is there since, as he put it, “you don’t have menstrual periods to explain it.”  He wants me to go visit my upper GI specialist, whom I haven’t been to see in several years, to check for a silent ulcer, and I may have to go at last and pick up with the lower GI guy whom I’d dropped for lack of money, and get a colonoscopy done somehow.  In the meantime, he ordered an iron supplement for me in case the problem is poor iron absorption.  He said that iron deficiency could help explain the chronic tiredness of which I’d complained at my physical, too.

Actually, that fitted with something else that happened the other day:  when I went to give blood last, about two weeks ago, the phlebotomist had to centrifuge my blood to check the hemoglobin level instead of using the copper-sulfate solution drop test.  Normally my drop sinks straight down, but not last time.  If I’m a little anemic, that would explain why the sample was marginal and required a second check.  And I hadn’t noticed until I looked last night, but the multi-vitamins I’ve been taking for the past several months don’t contain any iron, although I thought they did; last time I bought a different brand from the one I normally get, and it has a different formulation.  Perhaps just adding the iron supplement back in will straighten matters out.

As far as the diabetes goes, it’s been coming on for a couple of years and I’ve been steadily pretending it wasn’t a problem because the glucose count wasn’t much over 100, but 132 is too far over to ignore.  I’m going to have to figure out how to cut back the starches in my diet (the easiest and best place to cut back for inactive men).  The doctor recommended I buy a copy of Sugar Busters and start following its recommendations.  I suppose I’ll go and see whether I can find a copy at Half Price before I have to grumble and pay list price at Book People.

I was sourly amused at his advice to cut back starches and sugars, as I saw dietary thinking coming full circle.  When I was small, my mother preached that we weren’t to fill up on starches and sweets, because they’d make us fat.  Then dietary thinking changed, and in the ’70s and ’80s we were all told that fats were the enemy and carbohydrates our friends.  Now it seems that Atkins and his ilk and Sugar Busters between them are back to the idea of “filling up on starches and sweets makes you fat.”

The other part of his advice may be even harder to follow:  to take exercise of some kind.  This goes contrary to all my raising and life experience.  You see, I’m a chronic asthmatic.  I have been since I was four.  My lung function is very compromised.  Unmedicated, both my lungs together have just over the capacity of one normal, healthy’s person’s lung, and exercise or exertion are almost guaranteed triggers for me.  Hence, exercise has always been The Enemy.  That’s how I’ve lived my life for more than forty years.

The other part is, even if I could exercise without lung problems, I HATE DOING IT.  I feel about the same as Ferret Steinmetz does:   exercise sucks.  It’s insanely boring, and I am one of the people whose metabolisms know nothing about endorphins or runner’s high and wouldn’t have anything to do with them if it did, so that “lure” is right out.  I detest swimming, I don’t much enjoy dance any more, I’m utterly uncoordinated at individual or team sports and don’t see the point in them anyhow, and my feet won’t hold up for running.  About the only thing I can still do that I might care to do is to walk, but finding time to do it is hard.  L and T are often both gone in the evening, and I can’t hang M on a hook on the wall, so to speak, while I go walk the neighborhood—which is what, if I must walk, I’d rather do.  And I don’t want to take her with me, because M simply will not be quiet.  She babbles incessantly about everything, and that makes me miserable.  I don’t WANT to hear a constant stream of irrelevant chatter.  I want time to be quiet.

I don’t know what I’ll do for exercise, in the end, but I have to find something.  In the meantime, the doctor told me to start doing daily fasting blood-sugar checks, and faxing him the results once a month.  It’s fortunate that L never gave away the glucometer she got when she was pregnant with M.  I put new batteries in it and it worked right off.

My fasting blood sugar this morning was 113.  Just so I remember.

In a black-letter CD, there are no construction-paper powderhorns.  Fnord.