With a little help from Achewood.
This week has been filled with unexpected drama. Around a fortnight ago, I took some routine blood tests without inquiring whether fasting was required. It was; I hadn’t; my post-breakfast glucose came back high. A phone call from the GP’s nurse sent me into a spin, despite the knowledge that I hadn’t done the test properly. The phone call struck me as the equivalent of this.
Wednesday morning I spent doing the dreaded Glucose Tolerance Test, where fasting bloods are taken, then one drinks a bottle of soft drink containing 75 milligrams of glucose (an eight-year-old’s dream breakfast, as I said to the phlebotomist) then two more bloods are taken at hourly intervals. Mopey and lethargic, my concentration was shot, and I was dismayed to peruse the freakish-illnesses sections of several major women’s magazines while I waited. With twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go to wait for the test results, I walked about with my own sword of Damocles.
You can imagine the rest — and my office-mates and union colleagues correctly predicted the results — when the data came back the next day. I don’t have diabetes; I don’t have insulin resistance. I am fine glucose-wise. But damn if I won’t be checking exactly what I have to do for any future blood-tests, routine or not. Life is perilous enough as it is without having to rehearse a long decline unnecessarily.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I went yesterdag (as a recruited volunteer in a survey of the national health) for various tests, among them blood.
It was the countess who noticed on the eve of the event that the letter stated the necessity of turning up “sober”, with only water and tea permitted after midnight, otherwise I might easily have been sharing your boat.
On the other hand I did learn that my blood pressure and pulse are pathologically normal on the pathologically rare dags that I don’t spike myself with espresso on waking.
Ha. That makes me laugh. Not at you, mind you. But rather at me. My problem is that I am by far the worst type of hypochondriac: one who’s actually got a few real world problems too. Hypochondria long preceded the actual issues, and my inner hypochondriac has been wrong about almost every health issue it ever thought I had. But you can imagine how greatly it’s voice has been amplified in recent years by actually being right a couple of times. So now I have at least two oh-my-god I’ve got diabetes moments a week…
Anyhow, I’m certainly glad you don’t have the illness. But I can empathise with the worrying.
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