Postcard from the edge and back

After some gentle encouragement from Deirdre (see photograph), I have finally decided to step up to the plate and add another post to the blog.

Things have changed for me a lot in the eighteen months since I last wrote on here - or rather, they've come full circle. I was bouncing along quite happily in 2009 until, in mid-June, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. After that, it felt like I effectively ceased to exist for a few months.

From July until September, my blood sugars were regularly over 30mmoh/l (a lot of the time, my testing kit gave up and just said "HI" - which is fine as a friendly greeting, but useless as a diagnostic tool) and I had all the classic symptoms: tiredness, thirst and perma-weeing. By November though, thanks to the wonder that is Metformin 500mg and some informed dietary choices (brown rice and pasta and no chocolate or orange juice at all for three months), I was beginning to get some equilibrium back. Just in time, in fact, for me to then get Swine Flu just after Hallowe'en.

Now, I know what you're thinking - "swine flu"? He means "man flu"! And yes, swine flu was a hypochondriac's dream last year; and I'm not 100% sure that I definitely had it. But what I did have floored me for over a month, deeply concerned my GP, and involved Tamiflu tablets being delivered to our doorstep late at night from a hospital van, while the driver phoned us up and said "Don't come out until I've driven away!" (Thankfully, when I did venture out to pick up my pills, no red cross had actually been painted on the front door - but it was a bloody scary experience!) So I'll have none of your "man flu" nonsense, thank you very much!

As you can imagine, I started 2010 feeling like a dishrag that had been rung out and hung out on the line in a force nine gale. I was diagnosed as anaemic for a while too, and was guzzling iron tablets (mmm ... they taste of keys ... ) for about three months to try and get some equilibrium back in the bloods. But thankfully, by mid-summer, it seemed as if my health problems (or at least the ones that aren't underlying) were finally ironing themselves out. A week's family holiday in Tuscany was a bit of a shock to the system - trailing slowly around with my DVT-caused limp, 27 stones in weight, guzzling water tablets all day, hating the heat, and feeling like a burden to Deirdre and the rest of her family - but it also proved to be (hopefully) a springboard to better days.

I have started looking to the future, rather than just the underside of my duvet - and it is (just slightly) starting to look brighter. I've embarked upon a creative writing evening class at Strathclyde University and (as of August 2010) rejoined Weightwatchers.

I was actually intending this post to be a description of today's meeting. Last week I didn't go, following a bad case of gout, but the week before I weighed 27 stones on the nose. Today, I weigh 26 stones 8: a drop of 6 pounds. One more pound and I would have got another silver star (although sadly my first one was wiped out by me putting on three and a half pounds the following week!)

But, I think I should leave Weightwatchers for next week. I go regularly every Wednesday morning (I am the only man in a group of twenty women, which to be honest suits me fine) and will hope to report back every Wednesday afternoon from now. Expect full transcripts of discussions on the different ways to cook vegetables, held in community halls in faded Clyde coast seaside towns at ten o'clock on a weekday morning!

Isn't that, alone, worth coming back for?

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