Sugar? No thanks! I'm sweet enough
/If you follow me on social media, you’ve seen #EatLikeVig for many years. What you haven’t seen is #EatLikeVig lately. There are a few basic tenets to what qualifies for inclusion. It must be delicious. It’s likely unhealthy. If your taste buds support it, but your doctor doesn’t - tag it. Meat, cheese, carbs. Basically a full blooded Italian cliche.
As it turns out, the doc wins and the taste buds lose. I found this out the hard way. In January of 2019, I was kicking off my business travel with our company wide sales kickoff in luxurious Tampa, Florida. Arrived on Sunday and found the first Instagram worthy burger and beer.
Monday I attended all the sessions while feeling progressively worse and skipped the team dinner. Tuesday morning I went downstair and was greeted by a horrified co-worker, who so lovingly told me I looked terrible. We found my boss, boss’ boss, and co-founder to say I wasn’t feeling well and wanted to lie down. Before I could tell them, the mimicked the horrified look I saw moments earlier. So I went to lie down. I moved my Wednesday 5pm flight to Wednesday 8am because it was clear I had a date with a doctor. I stayed in bed for the next 24 hours.
I arrived home and went directly to the doctor who told me it sounded like a blood sugar thing. I said it did seem low and I had been craving sugar. So we checked it. The meter came back with a clear reading that determined next steps - ERROR.
Quick digression to discuss blood glucose facts
Normal - 70-130
Let’s think about this - 250ish
We need a plan today - 500ish
Coma - 1100ish
ERROR means it’s higher than the primary care physician’s in-house retail meter can read. (HINT: It’s above 500). To the ER we went early Wednesday afternoon where their high grade equipment told us it was 850. I was in a state called Diabetic Ketoacidosis (DKA) with a side order of pancreatitis. I thought “I shouldn’t have anything with a leading adjective of “diabetic” because, quite simply, I don’t have diabetes. Or… I hadn’t had diabetes.
First things first. Let’s get the sugar levels down and avoid death. Then we can think through next steps. Between Wednesday afternoon and Saturday afternoon, when I finally went home, we figured a few things out.
My pancreas quit without the courtesy of 2 weeks notice
Flying in DKA and surviving is more luck than anything
There’s such a thing as Type 1.5 diabetic
I now had that thing
Odds are high that it’s irreversible (unlike Type 2)
So what happens next? I quit sugar. I mostly quit carbs. I realized that Diet Coke is an abomination. Multiple times a day a spring loaded lancet abuses my fingertips. I Google everything I eat and count up the carbs, do some quick calculations, put back most of the food I prefer to eat, and devour the rest. Then inject myself with insulin and curse at my now defunct pancreas. The needle hurts and the insulin stings, but the good news is that it’s only for the rest of my life.
The greatest challenge is probably avoiding preaching to the general public about how awful their food choices are because I’ve now memorized the carb count of every food on the planet.
You should know that the food industry has done a good job of alternatively sweetening things. They’ve found talented food chemists, dietitians, and chefs. The beverage industry, apparently, has not.
There have been other wild wins and fails along the way and the challenges never stop. Rerouting your thought process of what to eat, when to eat, where to eat, who to tell about this, how much to say, what should you substitute vs just give up, and more is a tricky, tricky process. I’ll tell you all about it as time goes on and share some recipes as I find new ways to live with this. I’m open to suggestions if anyone has them.
In the meantime, when you see me walking around with my fanny pack just remember it’s filled with insulin and sharp objects, not 1980’s memorabilia.