If I had to literalize the metaphor of "opening a new chapter" in my life, my first pick would be something along the lines of "No shit, there I was, surrounded by horny amazons insisting I complete their 'religious' ceremony before collecting my winnings from the high-stakes poker game that followed my successfull United Nations speaking engagement." It absofuckinglutely would not begin with "I remember the day I was diagnosed with diabetes." As chapter openings go, that one just blows.
But alas, in these sort of endeavors it is improbable that I am the sole author of this particular body of work; at the very least the editorial staff has final approval (bitches). Whether I like it or not, Type II Diabetes is the opening to this new chapter and I'm going to have to deal with that, along with all of the carb counting and glucose management horseshit that a reasonably healthy person would have been doing anyway if he had any sense. Stress management, blood pressure, cholesterol - all of that shit that was peripherally important is now dire, because diabetics get twice as fucked three times as fast from those maladies. It is very strange to have those concepts reprioritized overnight, but that's basically what happened. All of those things you've casually done for most of your life, you immediately and permanently stop doing, and that's just how it goes.
And I can't help but feel like an asshole for that; why the fuck couldn't I have stopped all of those bad habits before, motivated by sheer sanity and the hope of a healthier life? Eating sweets and carbs doesn't cause diabetes; it's a pancreatic problem. If you aren't diabetic you can eat pounds of goddamned sugar, and your pancreas will make as much insulin as it needs to make in order to get rid of the excess. Type I diabetics don't make the insulin, and Type II diabetics don't process it correctly, but it isn't like Coca-Cola caused this. More likely a lack of excercise in the last several years, combined with a high carb diet, combined with stress, combined with who-knows-what-else kicked on that genetically predisposed circuit and the old pancreas eventually said "Ah...I see; you're not listening. Try this on for size, dumbass." The Coca-Cola isn't to blame; the idiot who drank two litres of it a day and stopped taking care of himself is to blame. Him, and his traitorous goddamned pancreas.
Although the modern Western term is Greek, Hippocrates didn't write about it. That's the scariest fucking thing I know about diabetes. Hippocrates wrote about tons of things, both obscure and phenomenally mortal...but not about diabetes. He doesn't mention it, not because it didn't happen in the ancient world, but because it was always quickly fatal. He didn't write about it, because there was no point discussing medical treatment for something that was (at the time) medically unreatable. Diabetes was a death sentence in the time of Hippocrates, and that's a sobering thought even if it isn't the same case today. Even a few hundred years later when Aretaeus named the condition diabetes after the way a guy stands to take a piss (seriously, 'one who straddles'), his prognosis for those afflicted was a life "short, disgusting, and painful". Charming.
But modern medicine is not so pessimistic. Excercise, light medication, and an almost monastic devotion to never eating or drinking anything truly tasty again will triumph. I took a hedonistic route in my late teens that lasted until I met my wife, just prior to turning thirty; beyond the other (ahem) "indulgences" along that journey of self-discovery, I managed to eat a variety of truly sinful, delectable dishes from around the world, some of which would make a nutritionist blush like a nun at a strip club. Of sweets, and carbs, and Coca-Colas, and rich French dishes I have had my fair share, and now my appetites have shifted. I want to stick around, and if that means regarding food as a measured, rational pursuit rather than a pleasure of the flesh I can do that. My new hunger is to remain healthy, and to be a very old diabetic someday.
And as far as the title of this chapter of my life is concerned, even my nom de plume, Amamankhet, is a bastard-Egyptian term that should have foreshadowed this - one that I chose at the beginning of that last chapter of being young and somewhat reckless, I might add.
It means "Eater of Life".
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