2016-12-18

Boiling a frog, and old age

We know the story of boiling a frog - you start with cold water and gradually make it warmer, that way the frog does not notice and jump out. [who would do that?!]

Well, I have noticed that getting old is like that. Several times now I have discovered a change in my life that only strikes me when fixed. Being diagnosed diabetic was scary as only when I was on medication did I realise how much all the symptoms crept up on me over the year before. These are symptoms I knew to look for and had drummed in to me by my mother since I was a child, and still they eluded me. Mostly tired and thirsty. I had got used to taking a glass of water to bed - which stopped being necessary as soon as I was on medication. Now I am on insulin, and my diabetes is well under control, or so I thought. Indeed, the annual reviews and HbA1c tests are all good.

The latest example is one where, over time, I have realised that whilst generally feeling reasonably heathy, I was going to bed tired sooner, and feeling much more apathetic and doing less work. If I was up at 9pm there was a joke in my family that it was past my bed time. That should have been a clue. I would sleep for like 9 hours a night, and not do a lot of work during the day.

Then I was put on indapamide as my blood pressure was getting higher, as I blogged recently. The 2.5mg dose was too high and I felt like crap, but now on 1.25mg, I feel better. I realise that since I started on the indapamide I am feeling "better". Over the last few weeks I have designed, coded, and deployed the whole 2FA systems for A&A (four separate systems), whilst also coding a load of other stuff including a Monzo API library and a few other things - documenting it all, and testing it all.

To my surprise, I look back at last week, and realise a couple of days ago I was up at 5:30 am and working solidly until 11:30 at night with no problem, only to be up at 6:30 the next day. I am finding I am bored just watching TV or going to bed, and instead am doing stuff. All last night I was designing in my head new code for a feature on the FireBrick which I ended up getting up and documenting first thing this morning. I feel like I have my mojo back.

The issue is not, as I see it, the blood pressure, which is what the indapamide is for, but it has changed the way my diabetes is working - I am having to take more insulin, about twice what I was, but I am much more stable now. It will be interesting to see my HbA1c in a few weeks time. Indapamide is not listed as a treatment in any way for diabetes, just that it can impact blood glucose levels. What is encouraging is that, having mentioned on a recent blog, I am not alone. Others with diabetes found they were "revived" (which I feel is a really good description) once on indapamide. So maybe it should be a diabetes related treatment?

Now I wonder what the next thing will be - something that will creep up on me over many months before I realise.

3 comments:

  1. Getting up at 05:30 and working through to 23:30 is not normal. I couldn't do that when I was 18. It sounds to me as if you're overdoing it and are likel to burn out.

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  2. I found snoring was another indicator of the "tired" symptoms. It still is, although now I know that I have to take some kind of action when I do. My diabetes is relatively well controlled after 30 odd years but it is the other stuff around it that changes. Blood pressure was a key thing for me, and it is still not as well controlled as I would like. The best thing for me was being able to talk at least once a year to a pharmacist who understood the drug interactions. Just had this year's review and it really helps. I don't know if NHS England offers these reviews, but it should. Another great service is the online "MyDiabetesMyWay" site, which gives access to medication records targets and diagnoses. It is nice to rediscover your mojo at my age (62).

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  3. Is any of your code open source? I'd love to read some source code of yours ever since FireBrick came out.

    ReplyDelete

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