2001-01-07 - 23:59:19

I'm Sorry, Brother Ass

Okay, now we are down to Resolution #1, my health.

You know, the weirdest stuff pops into my head.

In the very early 1980s Marvel Comics produced a couple of comics in co-operation with the Catholic Church, and one of them was a biography of St. Francis of Assisi called "Francis, Brother of the Universe."

It's nearly the end of the story and St. Francis is dying. His body, worn our by all the fasting and penance, is giving out. The saint actually apologizes to his faltering body by saying: "I'm sorry, Brother Ass. I have not treated you well."

"Brother Ass." That's kind of a curious way to think of one's body, but perhaps not an inappropriate one.

I remember someone once making a point about materialism by saying that "the only thing you really own is your body," but eventually everyone has to face the truth: you don't own it, you're really only renting it. In fact, it might be more appropriate to say that it owns you. When you're young, it seems you can do anything but eventually your body teaches you its limits. Sometimes, this lesson can be quite harsh.

My wakeup call occurred in April of 1995 when I discovered that I had Diabetes. I had been abusing my body for years - trying to medicate my depression with massive doses of sugar and fat. My weight had ballooned up to 320 and I was walking around in a high blood sugar haze. I was dying and I didn’t even know it.

I wound up in the hospital, taking my meals through a tube in my arm. I went home ten days later, a much humbler man.

Diabetes is not a fun disease. The problem is that the body can't control its blood sugar levels, so some sort of outside help is needed. I started out injecting insulin, and am now using oral medication.

In a normal person, when blood sugar levels get too high, their pancreas secretes insulin, and so the blood sugar levels go down. However, in a diabetic this process doesn’t work. Either the pancreas can't produce enough insulin to control the blood sugar or for some strange reason the blood is unable to absorb the insulin. From what I understand, medical science is starting to lean toward this last explanation.

Right now it is estimated that there are over 2 million diabetics, many of them undiagnosed, in the United States alone. In fact, the disease is getting so widespread that I've been seeing television commercials for diabetes medicine and supplies.

Why is there this epidemic? Nobody really knows, but the best guess is that it's our diets. We eat too much starch, and eventually people with a genetic predisposition toward diabetes develop the disease.

Diabetes is not a fun disease. It's not just a matter of high blood sugar, but that's bad enough. With my blood sugar out of control I alternately feel foggy or cranky and paranoid. I'm either manic, or exhausted. But wait, there's more!

The consequences of long term bad control are quite ugly. Lots of sensitive body parts don’t like it when the blood sugar is consistently too high. It can damage your extremities - you can lose fingers and toes. You can go blind. You can also damage the nerves in you excretory system, so you can’t tell when you need to go to the bathroom. I'm seeing the messy consequences of this last problem with my father. Lovely.

I know all this, and yet my control is poor. In the first half of 2000 it was better than it had been for years, but in the later half of the year it got bad. I sort of took a vacation from paying close attention to my diabetes, and gradually my blood sugars got worse.

I need to rededicate myself to lowering my blood sugar and reducing my weight. I don't want to end up a blind guy with no feet, sitting in a puddle of his own pee. Yeah, that's a nasty image, but I'll do anything to motivate myself.

I think that a lot of the things people do to fight off aging is pure vanity. All the treatments and surgeries seem like really futile attempts to stave off the inevitable. We all get old, and its not pretty.

But I think a reasonable attempt to try to improve the quality of life further down the road is a good investment of time. Spending an hour every day exercising doesn’t seem such a waste of time if you live two years longer because of it.

"If I'd know that I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself." - Jazz pianist Eubie Blake, on his 100th birthday.