Kristen Chua
Hagiperos
Health and Wellness
10 December 2018
Inevitable Diabetes (Type 2)
Type 2 diabetes is a chronic disease that affects the way a person takes in sugar or glucose (Mayo Clinic). Your pancreas produces a hormone called insulin to regulate the amount of glucose that is taken into the body; however in this disease, there is not enough insulin to be produced to keep your blood sugar at normal levels.
Type 2 diabetes can affect you physically by feeling more hungry, excessive thirst, excessive urination, fatigued, weight loss, can cause damage to some organs in your body such as your eyes, kidneys, and skin and can also affect your ability to heal wounds and infections. It also impacts your life emotionally and mentally by causing you to experience depression, anger, discouragement and stress. This disease alters your social and environmental health by feeling like diabetes is running your life. You tend to lose connection with your loved ones and you are not as motivated to do hobbies or activities. It also will change you spiritually by losing an understanding on what the purpose of life is and wanting to give up on life at times.
According to Cardio Smart, neighborhood access to healthy foods and physical activity have an impact on the risk for type 2 diabetes. “Type 2 diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States in 2015 with a total of 252,806 death certificates listing diabetes as an underlying contributing cause of death. It is also found that 84.1 million Americans ages 18 and older had prediabetes.” (American Diabetes Association).
Type 2 diabetes can impact your physical life greatly when it is not prevented. Since your pancreas is not able to produce the required amount of insulin your body needs, your glucose levels will rise while your body cells are deprived of much-needed energy which leads you to a wide variety of problems that can affect nearly every major body system. According to Healthline, it can affect your “endocrine, excretory and urinary systems, circulatory system, integumentary system, central nervous system and reproduction system.” High blood sugar is like glass in the blood vessels. It damages the interior walls of blood vessels, causing them to narrow and leads to a decrease in blood flow. The tiniest blood vessels that are affected by this disease are those in the eyes, kidneys and our lower and upper extremities.
By not taking care of our bodies, we are not fulfilling what God wants us to do, which is to live as images of God and to do the daily tasks that have been brought onto us in everyday life. In order to maintain glucose levels with a narrow range, our body goes through a regulatory process wherein insulin and glucagon hormones are secreted from the pancreas (Endocrineweb). Overtime, this disease can become untreated because it worsens.
Through proper management, we can help prevent or delay the onset of long-term complications of diabetes (Everyday Health). This disease can be medically managed by medical doctors prescribing oral medications such as Metformin, Sulfonylureas and taking Insulin therapy as indicated. The lifestyle changes that we can use for diabetic management include eating healthfully, aiming for a healthy weight, checking your blood sugar regularly and staying active. It is recommended that diabetics should eat small portions six times a day rather than eating three large meals in a day. This prevents the pancreas from being overworked and promotes steady blood sugar levels. Engaging in aerobic activities and resistance training helps improve your insulin efficiency. Although type 2 diabetes is a lifetime disease, there are numerous ways to prevent or delay this disease from happening to you.
In addition, type 2 diabetes can take a toll on your emotional and mental health. According to Everyday Health, people living with type 2 diabetes do not want to talk about their disease, they can’t sleep properly, wanting to commit suicide, feeling fatigue all the time, and are not taking care of themselves. Experiencing depression and anxiety can lead to many health problems. Depression is a medical disease that affects how you function at work or at home and anxiety is how your body reacts to stress- a factor that we experience in everyday life- which causes your blood sugar levels to increase and it can lure you into drugs and alcohol use. This disease also affects your brain by damaging its white matter, the part of the brain where nerves communicate to each other. In order to treat these diseases, you need to talk to medical professionals such as psychiatrists, psychologists and professional counselors who can talk to you about going into psychotherapy or taking their recommended medications. The negative feelings that a type 2 diabetic undergoes makes a prodigious impact on your health.
Other aspects of your health that can be affected by type 2 diabetes is how you interact with people and the best environment you need to be in. When you hang out with friends, you will have to be mindful of injections, the foods you eat, and your consumption of alcohol and drugs because if not, the disease will worsen. Some people take injections for insulin and need to take specific medications daily no matter what the circumstances are. It is hard to carry on with life without society being opinionated about your business and not minding their own. You will need to limit the amount of food you eat at specific times of the day such as eating small portions 6 times a day instead of 3 large meals like what people without this disease would eat. High consumptions of alcohol and drugs will increase your blood sugar levels and your goal is to get it at a normal range.
Diabetics can be very sensitive to what others say as well as how this affects their daily routines. Peer pressure affects diabetics because it can lead to bad decisions and feelings of stress and anxiety, which is not ideal. Instead, surround yourself with positive people who will support you and will take care of you so that you will be mindful of your priorities as you deal with this lifetime disease. Being surrounded by a positive and encouraging environment will increase your chances in delaying the long term complications of the disease.
The last dimension of our health that we do not notice but is as equally important as the others is our spiritual health. There are days when one is just extremely angry about what somebody said about them; they feel hurt and it affects their whole day but can get over it eventually. For diabetics, it is a whole different story. When something terrible happens, it impacts how they think about themselves and it can lead them to think of ways to commit suicide or homicide. It defeats the whole purpose of what God wants us to do. God intended for us to face these challenges in order to learn and challenge ourselves to become better. In Ephesians 5:15-18, the author says, “So be careful, then, how you live -not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit,” This emphasizes the point that God made our paths to eternal life with him filled with obstacles in order to learn to overcome them through the Holy Spirit. When we let drugs, alcohol and negativity affect us, it entices us to move to the darkness, full of fear, doubt and temptations that are against God’s wishes. It is challenging to try to look on the positive side of situations that impact you the most; however this is why you have a support group. Talk to the ones you love or a medical professional and they will help you get through this. Having a positive outlook on life will lead you closer to what God thinks about life and leads you to get back up and move on.
Many people suffer from this lifetime disease, including this 52 year old white woman named Elaine who was able to manage her diabetes. She was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at the age of 48. She has a family history of diabetes, which includes her paternal side of the family. The onset of the symptoms of her diabetes started about 16 years ago. Whenever she takes sugar in the morning, she would experience the symptoms two or three hours later. However during annual or scheduled diagnostic tests, she would always fast and it would never get detected. This affected her physical health because she is feeling the symptoms of diabetes such as excessive thirst and presence of sugar in her urine. This is now affecting her kidneys because they are not able to filter properly. Along the way, she became frustrated because she wanted to understand what was going on with her body, but nobody was able to explain this concept to her. Emotionally, she felt confused with the whole situation and she started to be distant with family and friends. She did not want to mention the disease to anybody. This is how her emotional health was affected by the disease. It came to a point when she was driven to find the answers for herself. She was independent from her doctors and went to other resources to figure out what was going on with her. This is how she was mentally challenged by this disease.
Elaine, a type 2 diabetic was able to research on her own how to prevent extensive severity of this disease. Here are her three action-based strategies she implemented in her daily routine. The first strategy was to listen to what the doctors recommended for her to do. She took a 500 mg metformin pill everyday and tested her blood sugar levels seven times a day. In her second appointment, her blood sugar levels have not been regulated yet. She was furious about the results she got in her blood test and was prescribed two more pills besides metformin: one was to protect her kidneys while the other was to regulate cholesterol. She wanted to stop taking metformin with knowledge that it damages your kidneys and so she carried out her second action plan which was to find out what causes her blood sugar to rise and found that she needed to lose weight in order for more beta cells to be replicated in the pancreas. According to her research, beta cells are replicated in the pancreas and are needed in order to release insulin and insulin is needed to regulate glucose and to burn fat. It also mentioned that by having a single digit percentage of body fat, beta cells start replicating again. She stopped taking oral medications and started to go on a diet with no grains, sugars or potatoes for six months. During this course, she started going through ketosis, her blood sugar was stabilizing and she burned 10 pounds. The third action-based plan that she did was that she exercised when her blood sugar was high. She did this in order to burn glycogen in her body to return her blood sugar back to a normal range. On her third doctor appointment, her hemoglobin A1C went down by 0.4 to 4.6, she lost 35 pounds and was able to be more open to her friends and family.