Then, at the age of 34, I was classed as having a severe mental illness. I know I have this label as I caught a glance at the computer screen while seeing my GP and saw that I was on this list. Thus began the gradual falling apart of my body! I had to do a whole battery of blood tests to rule out possible causes of my broken mind and it was discovered that my cholesterol was pretty high (I think it was somewhere near 14 which is not good). Given that there is a family history of heart attacks and strokes on my mother's side, I was put on statins and sent to West Middlesex hospital to see a specialist.
My memory of this time is a bit hazy (probably due to how ill I was mentally) but I remember having to do a rather nasty treadmill test to check my heart. For an asthmatic who is triggered by exercise, this is not a fun test to do but luckily my heart was fine. I also remember seeing a nurse at my GP surgery who handed me leaflets sponsored by Flora and Weetabix which suggested I ate what amounted to cardboard. Why is it that everything that tastes really good is so bad for you? This is one of the crueler facts of life! Needless to say, I never managed to stick that well to the plan. I blame my BPD as one of the features is an inability to follow through with long term plans, well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
I'm not sure if it's because of my asthma but I'm very susceptible to colds and flu. If I'm in the same room as someone with the sniffles it's a sure bet that I will get it in a much fiercer version. In April 2004, I was working on a course with someone who had a virus that made him feel pretty rough and the following week I was hit with the same illness. After a few days, I could barely get out of bed and when it got to the point where everything was starting to grey out, I thought I'd better call an ambulance. I thought I'd go through the usual procedure of being taken to A&E, being nebulised (a high dose of the medication I usually used to help me open my airways), given antibiotics and steroid tablets and then sent home.
At the time, I didn't know how ill I was and kept telling the doctors that I wanted to go home as my natural fear of hospitals was kicking in. In the end, I gave in as they told me it would be a really bad idea to go home in my condition and I ended up being in there for eight days. When I was discharged, I thought, quite rightly, that I'd been pretty much cured (although it took about another month for me to be fully back to my usual level). Unfortunately, I'd come into hospital with one problem and left with two as the daily blood tests I'd been having had picked up that I was anaemic and might have diabetes as my sugar levels had been consistently high.
This was quite a blow for me as I'd been struggling to manage several teaching jobs along with a dark and difficult period for my mental health and I felt I'd finally reached a point where I could put all that behind me and go back to being a normal person doing a normal job. The anaemia turned out to be relatively easy to fix as it most likely had been caused by my addiction to painkillers. The diabetes, however, wasn't nearly so easy.
When I finally managed to get a clinic appointment, I was handed a meter so I could test my blood sugar levels and a dairy, shown how to use them and told to return in a few weeks with the results. A couple of weeks later, I was told I had type 2 diabetes, given some pills and told to come back in a few months. This really knocked me for six even though I'd been given a warning about diabetes several years ago. It was during the time that I'd been doing the asthma clinical trials and they suspected that I might have diabetes. In the run up to doing the test for this, I wrote in a journal I'd been keeping that I really hoped it wasn't diabetes as I didn't think I could cope with it. At the time, I got the all clear and the only advice I was given was to "eat more broccoli". Hmm, something not very effective about that, I think.
There are guidelines outlining what treatment you should expect to receive when you're first diagnosed with diabetes. I know this because I'm the sort of person who has to look up everything I can find out about my conditions and medications. This is probably something that annoys doctors as I'm sure they're not keen on informed patients who can't be fobbed off. One of the things I was supposed to get was a psychological assessment which would have been great as it took me a long time to even acknowledge that I had diabetes and, even now, I still struggle with the concept. Sadly, this never materialised and it quickly became clear that most of the doctors would look at my mental health diagnosis and act on that. They appeared to make the assumption that because I had a mental health team, they would sort out how I was dealing with my diabetes without considering whether or not anyone in that team had any knowledge of the condition. I've also lost count of the number of times a diabetes specialist has treated me as if I haven't got a functioning brain. Don't they realise that mental illness is not the same as a learning disability? A friend of mine has told me to remember that doctors are not infallible but surely they should know that mentally ill people can still be high functioning.
Since my diabetes diagnosis, I've had a number of physical health problems or things that need investigating and, in my mind, these things have increased in number since my mental health diagnosis. At one stage, I was having frequent blood tests and my GP spotted that my white count was far too high in all the tests. This prompted a referral to a hospital specialist and triggered a bad depressive episode for me as no-one had told me anything beyond the fact that my white count was high enough to need urgent investigation. Sometimes, all that information on the internet can be a bad thing as I did my usual investigation and only found bad things. As it turned out, my unusually high white count is probably down to one of the drugs that I use to control my asthma which is not something they tell you about when they say it'll be good for you and keep you well!
Over the last few years, I've found it's often better to not got to my GP with little things that niggle me as he seems to have this knee jerk reaction that ends up with me panicking as I wait for yet another hospital appointment. I've come to this conclusion after thinking I might have cancer in my eye (which was just a mole on my retina) and my mouth (this lump has probably always been there and gets sore if I smoke too much, am stressed or eat too much spicy food). Sadly (or maybe not), I've got a friend who thinks differently and she's always nagging me to get myself checked out.
At the moment, I'm waiting for an appointment to see the eye specialist at the hospital as the pressure in my eyes is too high. No-one has told me how high so, once again, the evil little voice that I sometimes hear is telling me that I'm going to go blind and that my eyes are going to be the first thing that fail because of my diabetes. Part of me thinks that this is poetic justice for missing my last appointment at the eye clinic. I was already a patient there initially to investigate the patch on my retina but I lost faith in them when they denied I had a cataract (which the optician has confirmed three times) besides, how can they expect people to remember appointments when they're 18 months apart and a confirmation letter is never sent out.
I'm pretty sure I won't lose my sight in the immediate future but the internet has already wreaked havoc in my disordered mind and I'm dreading the thought of yet more medication or even laser surgery! In the meantime, I'm battling with my diabetes as the new medication I was put on last week doesn't seem to be keeping my blood sugars in check. I'm a bit undecided about it as the only symptoms I'm getting are being constantly thirsty which means I drink more fluids resulting in needing to pee several times an hour which is a lot better than the frequent stomach upsets that I was getting on my previous drug. Oh well, I guess it means I'll be back at the hospital much sooner than I had hoped. If I keep this up, I'll be entitled to a chair in the waiting room with my name on it!
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