Worthy opponent

I’ve mentioned Thomas Cole’s series The Voyage of Life in a previous post, I don’t remember which one, but I think about these paintings often. 2022 and 2023 felt like the “Manhood” painting in the series for me, and I’m hoping in 2024 I am carried into a more peaceful, calm place as portrayed in “Old Age.” When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, I think I was more in the “Youth” stage of the series, confident in my ability to thrive despite this illness.

I’ve listened to Tony Robbins mention the “worthy opponent” in your life. This illness, this multi-tentacled monster that I fight every day of my life, is just plain winning some days. Insulin seems to behave differently every single day. What one day will stabilize me will cause me to crash into the 40s almost instantaneously the next. I never know where I’m going to go and I’ve been watching my numbers like a hawk in order to maintain some semblance of homeostasis and it is exhausting. There’s this Robert Frost poem called A Question and it goes: A voice said, Look me in the stars and tell me truly, men of earth, If all the soul and body scars, Were not too much to pay for birth. 

With so many people becoming pre and fully diabetic, I do think about this poem from time to time. I hate pondering the suffering and sadness. Again with the multi-tentacled monster: I read a paper last year published in The Lancet that said by 2030, cancer will be the leading cause of death among people with diabetes, surpassing cardiovascular disease. Medscape just sent a post to my email yesterday stating that newly diagnosed cancer is at an all time high. There’s also the startling rise in Alzheimer’s disease, often called Type 3 diabetes in medical literature, to consider as well. In 2020, rates of early onset Alzheimer’s and dementia were found to have increased by 373% in 30-44 year olds in just four years (2013 to 2017). The increase was 311% for 45-54 year olds and 143% for 55-64 year olds. A quote from John Dwyer, the president of the Global Alzheimer’s Platform Foundation for the Blue Cross Blue Shield press release regarding these statistics: “Research has shown that Alzheimer’s disease starts in the brain years before clinical symptoms become apparent. This report shows that people as young as 30 have outward symptoms. We need more research to stop Alzheimer’s disease progression in people of all ages.”