I’ve been thinking about life and death and all that falls between the two a lot lately.  My mind is pretty well occupied living in the gloom of writing new stories and songs and it always kind of throws the floodgates wide open.

I’m still making progress at the gym and I’m liking what I see in the mirror more and more when I take the time to evaluate.  Aside from the battle-scars, my body is starting to look like it should belong to someone younger than I am.

In spite of that, I keep thinking about this whole diabetes thing.  I’m still off my meds and when I check my blood it’s pretty much like clockwork.  I range between 80-95.  My doc said I only need to do yearly visits from here out.  Aside from the diet and lifestyle changes, it’s almost as though it’s a non-entity thus far.

But then I really think about it.  Like, I have a terminal disease.

When I was growing up HIV/AIDS was all over the place.  People were terrified and it changed the social landscape of the country pretty significantly.  As a child growing up in Utah I was taught that the only solution was total abstinence, which is a rant for some other day.  I got a bit older and became fascinated by the musical Rent.  Not only did I consider myself a struggling/tormented artist, a musician and wanna-be filmmaker (hey, look at me now, old me), but I was drawn in by the drama that AIDS played in the story.  Characters had pagers set to go off when it was time to take AZT, friends disappeared, decayed, gave up, etc.  I tried to fathom what that would be like.  How does one live when they know they’ve been handed a mid-to-long term death sentence.  I mean, sure we’re all going to die, and I’ve always been pretty morbid and/or blase about life in general, but Rent made me think about being given a timeline.  Here’s your life.  You go to a meeting with your doc.  Now your life is going to end at some point within 10-15 years (at the time I believe the average was 8-10, with a few rare cases pushing 20+ with HIV only).

And now here’s me.  With the beetis, which is so common it seems like just about everybody has it and which, unless it presents severely acute symptoms, doesn’t really register as overtly as, say, a runny nose, or a broken limb.

Here’s the harsh truth, though:  Even though I bust my ass at the gym and I’m crazy-strict about my diet and plan to keep that going as long as I’m able, that timeline is now in place.  Assuming my heart doesn’t kill me, which it may very well do, I can expect at some point to lose appendages, toes, feet, legs, etc.  I can expect to lose my vision.  I can expect further heart problems caused by the constant flux of my blood sugars.  Ultimately, I can expect that my cause of death will probably directly be linked to diabetes.

It seems so distant and weird, and it’s not something that you can just discuss with people, really, but it’s on my mind a lot.  Not only did I almost die that year and a half ago, but I walked away with a timer running.  It could be decades or it could be tomorrow, but unless modern medicine comes up with some crazy miraculous discovery, vets and processes it quickly, and releases it affordably I am, essentially, a dead man walking.