What brought me back to blogging in 2022 was my annual diabetic eye exam. Interestingly – today, what brought me back to blogging is my annual diabetic eye exam.

I just finished re-reading my post from September of 2022. I’m a little impressed at how composed I seem in my writing. At the time, I was so pissed off and so worried about the health of my eyes. Last year when I left the optometrists’ office, I was devastated. I felt defeated, too. I felt, well, scared. I don’t feel that way right now.

This years’ eye exam was two weeks ago, and she told me that my eyes looked “about the same” as last year. As I mentioned in my previous post about eye exams, this feels like such a subjective statement. She has images from the year prior that she was comparing my eyes to. She also is not the optometrist that did my exam last year. I take all of this with a grain of salt, and I pull back to a big-picture view and find gratitude that the health of my eyes has not worsened.

This year I don’t feel so downtrodden over the results. Surprisingly, I didn’t experience anxiety going into the exam, and shortly after leaving, the findings kind of floated out of my mind. This is probably because I was driving on the freeway with dilated pupils, gripping the steering wheel, not going the speed of traffic and praying I’d find my way home.

I’ve tried to not put too much emphasis on the minor decline in my eyesight. I am trying to remind myself that, at 36, I’m pretty damn healthy. I have also tried to come to terms with the fact that diabetes is a progressive disease. The optometrist told me that most people with well controlled diabetes start to see signs of retinopathy at about the ten year mark. I haven’t fact checked her, but I’m taking what she said as truth, and it makes me feel pretty proud of myself. All things considered, I’m winning at eye health. I also have found that humor helps me to cope with the progressive nature of the disease. I told two of my coworkers about my exam, and within about ten minutes, the two of them were cracking jokes at my “eye-a-betes”. It makes me chuckle even now.

I think my take home message this go round is just that – diabetes is progressive. With the most perfect A1c and time in range, with rare hypoglycemia, with an excellent diet, with consistent and varied exercise, with adequate sleep, with management of diabetes related anxiety – you are still going to see effects of diabetes. Clinically speaking, it’s a progressive disease. This is how I think of it: a person without diabetes runs an A1c of 5.7% or less. Those of us with the betes, they want us at 7% or less. So, that’s a 1.3% difference in A1c, which is pretty significant. So, even though the science tells us that, for those of us with diabetes, it’s not necessarily better or safer to run at 5.7% or less (the risk of and adverse effects of hypoglycemia are the reason here), we are still running a higher risk of complications because our blood sugar isn’t low enough, even though it’s right where it needs to be. If that makes any sense at all. Our blood sugar still just isn’t that of a non-diabetic. That’s how I rationalize and become comfortable with diabetes as a progressive disease. Type one and type two are really similar here in how they progress and manifest in the body.

I’m getting older; every year that passes, that’s another year with diabetes. All things considered, I’m on the right track to living a long and healthy life. Today, for me, that’s enough.