…I don’t think I have very strong feelings, but I do think I would like to see it more of a less of a health thing and more of a lifestyle. I think it might appeal to different groups of people. I mean some people like it to be a health issue. They like it, they like the idea they have a health condition. I would like to see a lot more, a lot more attention given to the prevention of it. How can you, what can you do in your life? I mean thats getting a bit better, but I think it would be really, really good.

I mean at the moment they’re saying, you know, theres an advert in some of the papers saying ‘If you’re Afro-Caribbean, or age such and such or this weight or your waist measures this, go and get a blood test for diabetes, you may be have diabetes. But that’s such a, that is such a negative, it seems to me quite a negative approach. You know, yes, you might need that, but it would be have you thought about changing your eating to include this, or that, sort of being a bit directive, but allowing a choice.

And is there anything that looking back you feel worked particularly well for you?
My GP letting me take control of it or not control of it’ I mean he was’ I mean I said to him in January, ‘I want one last try to get these under control. And he said, ‘Okay, but you’ve said that before. And I said, ‘No, I really mean it this time. I will, and then if I don’t get it under control, I will start insulin. And you can put that on my card, that I will do that. And he let me do that, you know, without, and he hasn’t sort of, he hasn’t pressured me into stuff that I didn’t want to do. It’s been negotiated. The increase of medication has been negotiated.

The, I mean I said to him about the atenolol, coming off the atenolol when my blood pressure went down. And he said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Oh, all right then, well give it a try. So he responds to my requests. And if my bloods continue to stay the same, I shall ask if I can take lower doses of the metformin. And I’m sure hell let me if he thinks that’s okay, as long as I monitor it.

So theres a lot of, I think for me I’m glad theres a lot of self-monitoring. And you have to take responsibility for it yourself because it is a lifelong condition – it’s a 24-hour condition. You can’t just take your medicines in the morning and expect to go through the whole day then just doing what you like.

So I went on for several years just, you know, thinking, ‘Oh, well, one day, one day I’ll take it seriously, one day I’ll take it seriously. And it took me actually three and a half years to take it, to take it seriously. And there were two things really that prompted me to take it seriously. One was I was beginning to get very painful feet. And the other was I went for a retinal screening, I think it’s called retinal screening, for my eye. And the den-, the optician said, ‘Oh, I can see you’ve got diabetes. You’ve got a small aneurysm. And my heart just stopped. It actually, I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness. You know, it’s going to rupture. I’m going to go blind. So he reassured me that it was very small and, but they’d have to keep an eye on my eyes just to make sure that it wasn’t. So I came out of the optician’s determined that I was going to change my lifestyle.

But looking back at your experience of type 2 diabetes so far, is there anything that you feel like you could have done with more support on?

I would have liked to have had evening access to the GP, that would have been… or Saturday morning, that would have made my life much, much better. I had access to dietitians. I’m not, I’m not sure that anything else would have really helped. It was about me not wanting to be helped I think. But just from a physical point of view, certainly having’ I mean you can’t even pick up a prescription at my GP on a Saturday morning, you know. I’ve now got them arranged that they will take them to [supermarket]. They go to [supermarket] and I collect them there. Because [supermarket] pharmacy stays open till 9 or 10 oclock at night. Which is really useful, you know, when you work. So I think that, you know, just that would have made a difference. It would have meant that I wasn’t so worried about the effect on my working life. I think that would have, would have eased that pressure, yes.

So I read up a lot about low GI index foods and really realised that actually that was the kind of food that I liked eating. I actually like wholemeal bread, I like soups, I like pulses, I like healthy food. I don’t like a lot of sauces and things. And actually what I needed to do was to develop a lifestyle that would allow me to do that.

So the first day I did it, I amassed all this information and I got the right things. And the very next day my bloods dropped from 13 to 8, just literally overnight. And I thought ‘It works – it actually works. And then over the next I suppose two weeks it went down to about 5.5. And it now sort of goes between 5.1 and 7 depending on how good I am with the diet. And I talk about it as a diet, it’s actually a healthy way of life. I don’t feel as if I’ve had to give up a lot, because I still have the odd chocolate, the odd bar of chocolate, piece of cake, but in a much more planned way.

So I find that like today, I go to college on a Tuesday evening, and the food, it’s a small college, very very good food. And they always do afternoon tea with home-made cakes, and I allow myself a piece of cake on a Tuesday. But I will not have had a lot of food before I went. And when we have the main meal later on in the evening I will just balance it. Just about, you know, not having too many what I used to call the foods that are really, are comfort foods for me, like bread and potatoes and cakes, chocolate. So I think it was because it worked so quickly that it you know, encouraged me to go on.

I also knew I had to lose weight. And I realised that there isn’t a correlation between where my blood sugar levels are and weight loss. So although I had dropped from 13 to 5 in two weeks, I actually hadn’t lost any weight. And I really sort of thought, ‘Now why, what am I doing, why am I not? I’m not eating any processed foods; I’m eating fruit and veg and, you know, everything in its right quan-. And then I realised that I was eating too much. It was the quantity. It’s not actually what you eat so much, for me – I obviously can’t speak for everybody else – but for me it’s not what I eat, it’s how much. It’s the quantity. And so I cut my portions down, not ridiculously, but just cut them down, and I started to lose weight. And I have in the last six months lost over two stone in weight. So that’s coming, that’s another benefit as well. Although weight loss wasn’t a priority for me, it’s actually quite nice and it’s made me fitter.

I have a glucose monitor machine. And you get, you have little lancets, like little needles. And you turn the machine on, it whizzes round, and a little strip comes out the end. You prick your finger with the lancet. You put the machine with the little thing that comes out the bottom on to the blood. It soaks up a bit of blood, takes about two seconds. It then does something in its machine and a reading comes out. So it’s very simple.

But I think the cylinders for the little tabs are probably not cheap. Well, I know they’re not because I’ve bought some. But I think it’s my way of, that’s my way of keeping my sugars down, my sugar levels down, is to do it every day. I mean maybe it will come a time when I don’t feel I have to. But it’s working at the moment and that’s okay. And I don’t mind the needle, I don’t mind the pinprick every morning, you know. That’s fine.

Do you use a different finger every time?

Yes. And, but even so they do start to get (looking at fingers), because I don’t, I mean I don’t know what people, I’ve not really examined what people do who are on insulin and have to check their bloods four times a day. Presumably theres, they use different parts of their bodies or something, I don’t know. But, no, that, that seems to work for me at the moment.

Okay, I’ll start what I think of as the, the very beginning. It was four years ago that I was diagnosed. I’d just met my 50th year and I’d completed an Open University degree and my daughter had finished college and I was just thinking, ‘Great, I can start, you know, I can start the new decade. Okay. And during the, just before my birthday I was beginning to feel very, very thirsty. And my father was diabetic. In the back of my mind I thought, ‘Oh, no, I’m, I’m diabetic. And I, refused to do it, to believe it until my thirst became overwhelming. I would have a pint of water at least before I left in the morning, and an hour and a bit later when I got off the train at Marylebone I’d have to have a, at least two Cokes. I was craving for Coke to, just to assuage the thirst to get me to the office, where I’d be, drink again. And I went to my doctor’s.

I have high blood pressure. Anyway, and I went to my doctor. And as I was leaving the appointment, I said, ‘Oh, by the way, I seem to be very thirsty. Do you think there, do you think there might be a problem? You know, should I have a test?’ And he said, ‘You might be diabetic. You know, how long has this been going on?’ etc, etc. Anyway I had the test, and I got a phone call from the, from the nurse saying, ‘Would I please go immediately because it was, it was high. It was something, I think it was 19. It wasn’t, I mean I didn’t think it was sort of like outrageously high. I’ve heard of people being much higher. So I thought, ‘Oh, well, it’s, okay. It’s not a bad diabetes’ knowing really nothing about it.

Anyway I had got it into my head that I really didn’t want to be diabetic. I didn’t want to have a chronic illness. You know, discovering that I could get my medications free didn’t really highlight for me just how, how serious a condition it is. So I went on for several years just, you know, thinking, ‘Oh, well, one day, one day I’ll take it seriously, one day I’ll take it seriously. And it took me actually three and a half years to take it seriously. And there were two things really that, prompted me. Are you all right with that? [noise outside] that prompted me to take it seriously. One was I was beginning to get very painful feet.

And the other was I went for a retinal screening, I think it’s called retinal screening, for my eye. And the den-, the, the optician said, ‘Oh, I can see you’ve got diabetes. You’ve got a small aneurysm. And my heart just stopped. It actually, I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness. You know, it’s going to rupture. I’m going to go blind. So he reassured me that it was very small and, but they’d have to keep an eye on my eyes just to make sure that it wasn’t. So I came out of the, I came out of the optician’s determined that I was going to change my lifestyle.

I’d been very, it was very silly really, because I kept making excuses. I was working in London, and I ate a lot of processed food. I ate a lot of prepared food or I, you know, I don’t often get on the train until half past six, seven oclock at night, and I was starving. And I’d have, I’d have a baguette or, or something. I’d always have, and I’d have some chocolate. And I did find that actually, just before I was diagnosed, I could eat three or four bars of chocolate in one go. I just felt the need to eat that kind of sweet thing. So it was, it was… My lifestyle did not lend itself to being diabetic.