Hiya doc

I went to my scheduled doctor's appointment today.   It's a routine diabetes appointment to see how I'm doing with blood sugars, etc.  Whenever I go to see her, I seem to have a list of honey-do items.  First, my blood sugar has been good and not good.  I have gone in this cycle of  a little high to really high in the morning and then, by the time I have dinner, I'm super low if I have exercised.  And when it's low, I eat glucose or something else to get it up.  My doctor is concerned and said I may need to stop doing Jenny Craig.  She's going to have me work with a diabetes nurse specialist to monitor me and see what we can do to work with it.  I really want to continue because I do like the personal accountability to another person.  If Kaiser (my insurance plan) can offer me something similar for the same price, I would do that with them but I just don't know if that's an option.  I think I'll talk to the specialist about it when we chat.

While with my doctor, I talked to her about two other issues as well - the pain in my leg and G.I. issues I have been having.  In regards to the leg pain, I told her it's been a year and a half and I have been trying to push through the pain but it practically puts me in tears when I'm exercising and it was not better at even my lightest weight.  We reviewed my records and I have had blood work, saw a physical medicine doctor, did physical therapy, got tested with a neurologist, saw a rheumatologist and underwent a year of work with an acupuncturist.  We've obviously tried a lot but I told her it's just awful to live with.  People who see me walking down the hallway at work don't know the pain I go through because I seem to mask it pretty well.  Trust me, though, it's very painful.  So she has advised me to see the physical medicine doctor again to go to the next level.  That might include a MRI or more but that will be up to the physical medicine doctor.

Then, we talked about my G.I. issues.  Without going into too much detail because it's way beyond TMI, I had seen a G.I. specialist a few months ago, almost went into surgery until we found another solution and am still having some issues.  Looking at the notes from that specialist, my doctor told me I now need to go back to her because that original doctor wanted to do a colonoscopy on me if things have not gotten better.  From the people I know who have had it, the worst part of a colonoscopy is the preparation for it because they pretty much knock you out for the procedure but the couple of days beforehand are hard.  Oh joy!

For good measure, my doctor ended the appointment by telling me that I also needed to get my first mammogram.  Talk about feeling completely invaded!!  It actually made me chuckle at the end of the appointment because I'm also still recovering from pink eye.  I looked at the doctor and gave her my best "seriously??" look.  She laughed, too, and apologized.  Oh well.  I will do whatever it is I need to do to feel better and live as healthfully as I possibly can.  I am dealing with issues of whether or not I have caused this and starting to blame myself.  Then I saw the best few minutes on Dr. Oz this afternoon.  I was just switching the channels but they had a woman psychologist talking about how we say awful things to ourselves by calling ourselves fat or berating ourselves in some way.  Here's a link to what she said.  One thing that really jumped out at me is that she said if it's not something you would say to your child or another loved one in your family, then you don't get to say it to yourself.  Period.  I know this takes practice and it will be a habit that's developed over time, but she is one hundred percent right about that.  Why do I get to talk to myself negatively if I don't do it to other people?  Obviously I'm not going to treat other people horribly so that I can treat myself that way, so the change has to be within me.  This is a lifelong journey for me but a huge part of that journey is treating myself better internally.  I'm totally open to that and understand deeply that the change comes from within before it can be fully developed on the outside.  My problem is remembering that in the moment and not after the fact.  I need to work on methods I can use to combat the negative self-talk on the occasions it does come up.