I got the bad news in my doctor’s exam room. I sat on a chair by the examining table. He perched on a rolling stool looking down at my bloodwork. He was younger than I was with dark hair and the pale skin of someone who worked long hours and didn’t get out much in the Phoenix sun.
“I know why you’ve been feeling so tired lately,” he said. “You’re prediabetic.”
I tried to register the words. My first reaction was shock. The next was denial. How could I be prediabetic? My dad was diabetic, but that was because he never exercised. He had always had at least two jobs and barely had time to work, eat, sleep and raise four kids. Exercise was not something that I ever saw either of my parents do. I, on the other hand, had been exercising my entire life.
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Your blood sugar level is higher than normal. It isn’t enough to be diabetic, but without changes to your diet and lifestyle, you’ll become diabetic. You need to lose weight and exercise more.”
“I already exercise,” I protested. “I ride my mountain bike two or three times a week. I’ve been doing it for more than twenty years. I swim laps and walk at least twenty minutes every day.”
He glanced again at my chart. “Your body mass index is twenty-four. Do you know what that means?”
“I know the term, but I don’t know what makes a good number or a bad one.”
“It’s a measure of body fat based on your height and weight. BMI can be used to screen for weight problems that may lead to issues such as cancer, heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure and diabetes. Your number is twenty-four.”
“Is that bad?”
“It means you’re obese.”
“What? I’m not obese!” I had sunk so deeply into denial I felt like I was in the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
“On your inpatient form, you wrote that you weighed one hundred and seventy-six pounds. When was the last time you weighed yourself?”
“Your nurse weighed me a few minutes ago.”
“But when was the last time you looked at your weight?”
I thought back. It had been awhile.
“I don’t know.”
“You weigh one hundred and ninety-two pounds. That’s sixteen pounds more than you thought you weighed, and thirty pounds more than you should weigh for someone of your height. How many servings of sugar and carbohydrates do you eat each day?”
I tried to shift gears. It wasn’t easy. How had I gained that much weight?
“I don’t know. I don’t keep track. For breakfast I usually eat whatever cold cereal the kids eat. For lunch I go out with my friends at work. We do Chinese on Tuesdays. Today was Mexican. Thursday is a three-meat trio deep dish pizza. On Friday we eat In-N-Out. We have a routine.”
“What about dinner?”
“We try and eat as a family. A couple of times a week we go to McDonalds so the kids can run around.”
“What about vegetables?”
“I order a vegetable with lunch when I can. I get a lettuce salad with my pizza. The Chinese place comes with hot and sour soup. Do chips and salsa qualify as a vegetable?” The joke fell flat.
“How much candy and soda do you eat?”
“The break room at my job has free soda and snacks. I get something a couple of times a day.”
He watched me, and I wondered if he could read my mind. While technically true, I wasn’t telling him everything. I snacked a lot. My buddy had a candy jar on top of his filing cabinet that I raided. One of the buyers for my company frequently met with vendors who brought donuts that were put out for everyone to eat. My favorite candy was Snickers Almond Bars. Whenever they went on sale at my local CVS, I would stock up and work my way through them until they went on sale again.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m an engineer.”
“You spend most of your day in front of a computer?”
I felt like I was being interrogated. “Yes,” I ground out.
I didn’t know what to say. Everyone gained weight at my job. My best friend had developed diabetes years ago and was on Metformin. My boss, who was my age, had had a heart attack and nearly died. He had taken a leave of absence to reduce the stress in his life, and only came back to work after they had threatened to lay him off.
The doctor made another note in my chart and leaned back on his stool so it creaked.
“I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you already exercise. Most people don’t exercise even after they have been diagnosed. The bad news is that it’s a miracle that you haven’t developed diabetes years ago. If you don’t change your diet, all the sugar and processed carbs will kill you.”
“Isn’t that a bit melodramatic?”
“Diabetes is a disease brought on by bad choices. It can lead to heart disease, cancer, stroke, and a host of other problems such a dementia. It will shorten your life by years or even decades. Good choices can slow it or even stop it. It’s up to you.”
Stunned
Holding a list of helpful websites, ranging from that of the American Diabetes Association to the Mayo Clinic’s FAQ sheet on diabetes, I left his office and stumbled through the Phoenix fall heat to my car. I cranked my car’s air conditioning and numbly headed out into rush-hour traffic.
I didn’t want to be like my father. He had been diagnosed years before and had been on insulin injections for a long time. The last time I had talked with him, he’d complained about his feet, poor circulation and neuropathy being a common problem with diabetics.
I picked up my five-year-old from after-school care and went home. My wife asked me how my doctor appointment had gone. Without meeting her gaze, I mumbled that it had been fine, and changed the subject.
The Cycle of Emotion
That night, after everyone was in bed, I snuck into my office to do some research. There are five stages that people go through after being diagnosed with a life-threatening disease. There’s shock, denial, anger, fear, and, finally, acceptance. In the space of one day, I had gone from shock to denial to anger, and now I was deep in the fear category. I loved my family. I loved life. I didn’t want my time cut short.
I found an online BMI calculator, and the numbers confirmed what the doctor had told me. I was obese. I weighed thirty pounds more than I should for my height. Worst of all, even though my father had diabetes, I hadn’t ever really thought about why he had it.
Diabetes is caused by elevated levels of sugar in the blood. I was soon to learn more than I wanted to know.
What Causes Diabetes?
Sugar in the blood comes from sucrose (white sugar from the sugar cane plant) and glucose (carbohydrates). Carbohydrates are absorbed into the blood and are turned into glucose. Glucose is used to power everything from the heart to the brain. If there is more sucrose and glucose in the blood than what is needed, the excess is stored in the cells as fat. Too much fat leads to obesity, and obesity leads to all the nasty diseases the doctor had warned me about.
There are two different types of carbohydrates. Non-processed carbohydrates are good for us and include the entire grain, such as whole wheat flour and brown rice. Processed carbohydrates are carbohydrates made from grains that have had the nutritious germ and bran removed. This includes white rice or anything made with enriched, bleached flour.
Processed Carbs Are Everywhere
Processed foods are everywhere. Walk into any grocery store, and we are assaulted by delicious, addictive, unhealthy, sugary foods. Entire aisles at the grocery store are devoted to soda, chips, cookies, ice cream, and candy. As a society, we have demanded food that tastes good above all else, and the food companies have responded by giving us exactly what we want.
Americans eat nine times more sugar now than we did fifty years ago. Ingesting all that junk ends up on our waists, thighs, and protruding stomachs. For years, like most people, I had been on a see-food diet. I would see ice cream or cookies or candy, and I would eat it. That’s why I had gained so much weight. Obesity has become a worldwide epidemic.
I stared at my computer screen as I cycled through one piece of bad news after another wondering what I could do. The vast majority of diets fail, even for people who desperately need to alter what they eat. Losing weight is the most common New Year’s Resolution and often the first resolution shoved aside.
I turned off my computer, went back to bed, and stared up at the ceiling fan as it did lazy circles in the dark. In one day, I had gone through shock, denial, anger and fear. Lying there, I decided that I wasn’t going to go willingly into the final stage of acceptance.
My final stage would be un-acceptance.
The Purging
The next morning, hours before everyone else got up, I went on a search and destroy mission in the house. I took all the cookies, sugary cereals, candy, chips, soda and dumped it all into the trash. I then got in my car, drove to the grocery store, and went shopping. It was 5 AM, and the sun hadn’t risen above the horizon. The roads were mostly empty.
I ignored all the bakery and impulse items by the store’s front door and marched resolutely for the produce area. The information I had gotten from the web said I should buy vegetables with lots of different colors. I load the cart with baby spinach, zucchini squash, radishes, tomatoes, onions and peppers. Then, I picked out four new kinds of salad dressings to try. If I was going to eat more salad then I wanted, then I needed dressing to help me choke it down.
My last stop was the breakfast cereal aisle. I examined labels until I found whole grain cereal my kids would eat.
Craving
I took my items to the checkout. The clerk stood by her cash register drinking a large Starbucks latte. It smelled wonderful. Even from the other side of the counter, I could make out the dizzyingly rich scent of chocolate and whipped cream. I swiped my credit card and automatically started to make plans to buy a latte on the way home.
A mental battle broke out. I knew I shouldn’t drink all that sugar, but, so help me, I wanted it and I wanted it so badly that saliva flooded my mouth. Was this what smokers went through when they tried to quit? I hadn’t even officially started my diet, and already I was going through withdrawal.
But then I thought about my dad and his problems with his feet. Did I want to end up hobbling around or worse? Amputation of limbs is common in diabetics. Is that what I wanted?
I grabbed my purchases and fled. Once I was out of the store, I drew in the clean morning air and used my phone to look up the amount of sugar in a large Starbucks Latte. I stared at the number in stunned surprise. Nearly half of the recommended daily allowance of sugar was in that single cup! How many sugary drinks had I consumed over the years? Hundreds? Thousands? How had that happened?
The answer, unfortunately, was simple. I, like most people, had no idea how poisonous sugar is. All my life I have heard about how bad artificial sweeteners are. They were rumored to cause cancer in rats. But what about sugar? Nobody talks about how it causes heart disease and cancer, the two biggest killers in the United States. I knew sugar caused diabetes, but, until yesterday, diabetes hadn’t concerned me. That was a problem for obese, sedentary adults whose idea of exercise was retrieving the television remote from the couch.
Getting the Family Onboard
I stowed my food in my car, ignored the Starbucks on the corner, and went home. My wife staggered out of bed into the kitchen in her nightgown, stared blearily at me cutting up vegetables, and demanded to know what I was doing. I told her I was making a salad. Her mouth opened, but she didn’t say anything, and finally just shuffled back into the bedroom. Maybe she thought she was dreaming.
I chopped everything up into a big bowl. Once I was finished, I got the kids up to go to school. They were not happy to find that their favorite cereals had been thrown out. I poured Cheerios into their bowls and gave each a Greek Yogurt. My daughter wanted toast so I made two pieces out of whole wheat bread. She glowered but ate it.
I got the kids off to school, kissed my wife goodbye, and drove to work. At lunchtime, instead of eating pizza with the lunch crowd, I went to a nearby Greek restaurant and ordered their chicken kabob plate with a double salad instead of the rice. The food was delicious and infinitely better than the pizza. I wolfed it down and ordered a pound of chicken to go.
Dinner at home was the Greek chicken, steamed broccoli with parmesan cheese and almond chips, and a spinach feta salad. My wife gave me a surprised look, but happily herded everyone to the table. The kids didn’t want to eat the salad. I insisted that they try the new salad dressings I’d bought. Eventually, they found something they liked.
After dinner, I cleaned up as fast as I could, got the kids ready for bed hours earlier than normal, and asked my wife if I could ride my bike. She agreed and I went to Apache Wash Trailhead in North Phoenix.
Moving It Up a Notch
Some people like to jog, others like to work out at the gym, and then there are mountain bikers who think it is fun to ride bikes up and down mountains through rocks. Phoenix is a great place to go mountain biking. It is much more mountainous than most people realize, and there are hundreds of trails within a half hour of where I lived. Best of all, I can bike year-round without having to deal with ice and snow.
With a family at home, I usually didn’t have time to ride very long, but since the kids were already in their pajama, I did a longer, harder trail that traversed three mountains. It was late October, and the temperature was in the upper eighties.
I rode the trail, pushing myself as hard as I could. The sun set before I had reached the final mountain. I turned on my helmet light and went up the last mountain and looped back along the base of the mountain to the parking lot. I was tired, sore, and covered in sweat, but I felt great. I hadn’t done a trail that long since my daughter had been born nine years before.
Since I had thrown out my sugary Gatorade, I drank water as I drove home. I put the kids to bed, took a shower and went to sleep two hours earlier than normal. My wife gave me a searching look as I pulled up the sheet. I was acting strange. She knew something was up.
The Benefits of Rising Early
The next morning, I got up at 4 AM, ate a quick breakfast of oatmeal, a banana, Greek yogurt, two glasses of water, a Costco multivitamin, and headed for the Granite Mountain Trailhead in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. I got there before dawn and rode into an area north of the mountain that isn’t well traveled. I saw two hawks, an owl sitting on a Saguaro cactus, and surprised a small herd of javelina that bolted away.
Halfway through the ride, just as I reached Cholla Mountain, the sun finally came up. It was a beautiful morning. The light had turned the mountain gold, and I took a moment to notice just how stunning the desert was.
Acknowledging the Truth
I got home just as my wife was getting into the shower. She asked me where I had been, and I told her I had been out riding.
“Again? You just went last night.”
I tried to tell her about my visit to the doctor and found myself choking up. She saw me struggling and stiffened, suspicion flashing in her blue eyes.
“Is something going on?” she demanded.
“My checkup at the doctor didn’t go very well,” I said, the words tumbling out of my mouth. “I’m prediabetic. I’m sorry.”
She gaped at me for a second, mind turning, before she wordlessly gave me a hug.
“What are you going to do? Are you going to have to take Metformin?”
“The doctor gave me a prescription, but I would rather make changes to my diet first. I need to eat better and exercise more. If I don’t, diabetes will kill me.”
The New Routine
I got the kids off to school then went to work. At lunchtime, I told the lunch crowd no thanks to hamburgers and headed to a restaurant for blackened chicken and a spring-mix salad. The pulled pork looked good so I ordered a pound to go.
I left work a half hour early and stopped at our subdivision’s community center. I swam laps, then took a quick shower and raced over to pick up my five-year-old from after school care before they closed at 6:30.
We had the pulled pork and salad for dinner. I helped the kids with homework and got them ready for bed. The next morning, Saturday, I rose before dawn again and did two steep, black-diamond-rated trails in the Dreamy Draw Recreation Area. Later that day, the kids wanted to go swimming at the pool so we went down as a family. My wife and I alternated swimming laps so the youngest wouldn’t drown. After we finished, we went out to an early dinner of Thai food. Instead of rice, I had them do extra vegetables.
Trying to Be Creative
A week quickly went by. Every day I tried to do something to exercise. Sometimes, I walked on the treadmill while watching Netflix. Other times, I left work a few minutes early and swam laps. In the evenings or early in the morning before dawn I went for a hike or rode my bike. I stopped buying candy bars and stayed away from the break room. I started going into my office through a different door, one that would keep me away from the donuts.
I had read that a lot of people get depressed and give up trying to lose weight. If weight loss isn’t rapid, the scale can be a downer. I specifically stayed away from weighing myself. But after a week and a half, I got out of the shower and dripping wet, stepped on the scale. I didn’t want to look at the number. Even though I was having a lot more fun than I had been before my doctor’s visit, I was worried that nothing would show. I would be like most people diagnosed with diabetes. Giving up after a bad weigh-in, they keep gaining weight and their health continues to decline.
I peeked down between my toes like I was watching a horror movie.
I had lost six pounds.
Forgetting to put on my bathrobe, I let out a whoop and ran through the house to tell my wife. She was happy for me, but I could also tell that she was starting to get resentful. While I had been riding my bike and playing racquetball, she had been stuck at home watching kids. I had tried to exercise as much as I could before she woke up, but it still left her alone. If she wasn’t supportive of my changes, the new routine wasn’t going to work.
Compromise
I took the hint, unloaded the dishwasher and picked up the house without being asked. When I was done, I corralled the kids to the kitchen table and helped them with their homework. Later that day, I went to Costco and bought a robotic vacuum. Our cleaning lady comes twice a month, and it always caused a lot of strife since we had to pick up the house before she could clean. If the robot could handle the floors, it would free me to do other things.
Another week went by. I stayed away from the junk and tried to do something physical every day. It wasn’t easy. Everywhere I went, there were cookies and donuts. Worse, exercising with three kids at home while trying to keep my wife happy was more difficult than the exercise itself. No wonder people gave up!
I finally stepped on the scale again. I had lost five more pounds. In three weeks, I had achieved one third of my goal.
The Holidays Were a Killer
October turned into November and the holidays arrived. The good news is that I didn’t fall off the wagon. The bad news is that I drove it off a cliff.
My nine-year-old daughter made pumpkin pie, so I had two slices. One of our dinner guests brought a cheesecake, so I felt obligated to eat some. My wife’s sweet potato pie is absolutely amazing, so I had two large helpings. The kids made my favorite kind of sugar cookies, and I couldn’t stay away.
But the worst things were the French Macaroons. I had never eaten one ,and the first evil cookie led to a second, and so on, until I had porked my way through most of the box.
I had read that being on a diet is like learning to ride a bike. If I fell off, I needed to get right back on. Everyone fails sometime. The important thing is to learn from the experience and keep going. So that night, after all the guests had gone home, I turned on the TV and watched football games while I walked on the treadmill. The calories I burned weren’t even close to the number of calories I had consumed, but it was a start. The next morning, I checked my weight and knew why the day after Thanksgiving was called Black Friday. I headed for the treadmill again, and then rode my bike in the afternoon. I had lost ground, but if I watched what I ate and stayed active, I would be okay.
Falling Off the Wagon
November changed to December. Christmas is even worse than Thanksgiving for dieting. Well-meaning friends and neighbors give cookies, cakes, and decorated baskets of candy canes. My family and I spent Christmas in New England with my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law knows what treats I like, so she stocked up before I got there. I couldn’t throw the food away without offending her. Being out of my routine left plenty of time for me to get into trouble.
Worst of all, it was difficult to stay active. There wasn’t much to do in a retirement community with three small kids in the middle of winter. I tried to make the best of a bad situation. I shoveled the snow off her driveway every day. I dragged the kids out for walks. I slogged through bad weather, the wind turning my face so cold I felt like my skin would crack.
On Christmas day, my wife proudly presented me with my stocking.
“Look what Santa left you!” she said grinning as the kids ripped open their presents.
I looked inside. My heart fell. It was full of my favorite chocolate truffles.
I dutifully ate one then another then started stuffing the smoothly delicious poison into my mouth. That’s when I realized that Christmas wasn’t about Santa Claus. It was about Santa Claws.
Mike vs. Truffles
Sugar is a raw, insidious, addictive need. Sugar grabs hold of your soul and doesn’t let go. Enough is never enough. Its holiday crack, er, cheer wrapped up in a gaily decorated foil ball.
I lost count of how many of those little foil-wrapped bits of heaven I ate. It was Christmas. I had been good for three months. I told myself that one week wasn’t going to kill me. Live a little, right? But for me it wasn’t living a little. It was living a lot, and I knew it when I found myself sneaking chocolate out of the kid’s stockings and then asking my wife if her mother had any more. Sugar is an addictive chemical and, just like meth or opioids or nicotine, once it gets its Santa Claws into you, it doesn’t let go.
It was an enormous relief to finally go home to Phoenix where we shovel sunshine instead of snow. I waited a week then nervously checked my scale. I hadn’t lost any more weight, but I hadn’t gained any either. Considering all the sugar cookies and chocolate and huddling inside out of the frigid New England winter, I called that a huge win.
For New Years’, my resolution was to continue what I had been doing, and I gratefully slipped back into my routine. January is the coldest month of the year, and it became harder to exercise outdoors early in the morning. Phoenix is a great place to spend the winter, but that doesn’t mean it is warm and wonderful all the time. The temperature frequently drops into the thirties.
Motivation
One morning after a storm had come through, I went riding. I got out of my vehicle before dawn, and the freezing wind hit me. I started to ask myself difficult questions. What would I rather be doing? Riding up some cold mountain in utter darkness or be at home in a soft bed lying next to my warm wife?
Motivation is a huge thing for anyone on a diet. It isn’t enough that I needed to lose weight. I had to want to lose weight or life would get in the way and derail the best of intentions. Gritting my teeth, I turned on my light, got on my bike and vowed to ride the rest of the winter when the sun was up.
January gave way to February. After four months, my rate of weight loss slowed down. By the end of February, I had lost twenty pounds, but the easiest weight had been worked off. When I first started, I’d lost about five pounds a week. The rate of weight loss slowly diminished to two pounds a week and then two pounds a month.
To compensate, I started adding more distance and tried to work harder. I swam longer and increased my speed on the treadmill. I added more mountains when I rode my trails. I started thinking about joining a racquetball league.
Having a Partner Onboard
But the biggest change happened with my wife. After she saw how much weight I had lost and how easy it was, she started getting up every morning to go swimming. Swimming isn’t a good exercise to lose weight because most people can’t swim long enough to elevate their heartrate to burn calories. But swimming is an excellent way to tone and build muscle. Also, like most women, my wife had spent most of her adult life dieting, so watching what she ate didn’t make much difference. But the exercise did. One morning as she was blow drying her hair, I noticed how much more muscular her skin had gotten. I went over to show her my feelings on the matter.
“Back!” she said, pointing her hair dryer at me like a gun. “I’m armed!”
Having two of us exercising meant more coordination of schedules and debates about who should be able to work out while the other one stayed home.
“You don’t need to ride your bike every day,” she told me once. “Just walk on the treadmill so you can help out with the kids.”
Defeating that argument required trickery, and I knew the exact card to play. One Saturday morning, I sidled up to her in the kitchen as she was cleaning up after breakfast.
“Hey, honey,” I purred in her ear. “Want to tell the kids that we’re going to take a nap?”
She glanced irritably at the clock on the microwave. “It’s ten-thirty in the morning! Everyone’s up and I have things to do! Find something else to entertain yourself!”
“Well,” I said. “I could play basketball with my friends.”
Worked every time.
The Unexpected Joys
The days slowly grew longer. The temperature climbed. In April, Phoenix had its first one-hundred-degree day. May arrived and then June. Exercising outdoors in the summer can be difficult and even dangerous. People frequently die from heatstroke. The best way to beat the heat is obvious: do it early in the morning or in the evening.
As soon as the sun drops, all the desert wildlife comes out. One night while riding in the Hawe’s Recreation Area, I came upon some wild horses by the Verdi River. Another early evening on South Mountain, I accidentally ran over a Gila Monster. I was going downhill and came around a corner, and it was sitting in the middle of the trail. I stopped and went back to look at it. Curved teeth flashing in warning, it hissed at me like an angry teapot. I took its picture and left. No harm, no foul.
I saw lots of coyotes. They’re smart enough not to tangle with an adult human, but hearing and seeing an entire pack of them surrounding me in the dark really made me understand how a rabbit feels.
One night I got caught out in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. A police helicopter swooped out of the sky, stopped above me, and turned on its blinding spotlight.
“The preserve is closed and you are trespassing!” the pilot boomed over the helicopter’s loudspeaker as I cowered below. “Proceed immediately to the trailhead where you will be met by an officer and issued a ticket!”
July turned into August and then into September. It had been eleven months since I had seen the doctor. Lots of changes had happened. I had lost thirty-two pounds and four inches while adding a lot of muscle. I was in the best shape of my life. My back felt a lot better since I was carrying around less weight. Eating better meant I wasn’t getting as sick from all the viruses my five-year-old brought home from school. The house was much cleaner, everyone ate healthier, and we went to bed earlier. My clothing had long since stopped fitting me, and the replacements were getting loose. The weight of my cell phone threatened to pull down my pants.
The Transformation
One day I walked into parent teacher conferences and one of the other parents saw me. I hadn’t seen him in months, and he gaped at me. He told me I looked like a completely different person. He asked me what I had done.
“I cut out the junk and try to have fun every day.”
He looked surprised. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. It isn’t hard.”
He shook his head. I get that a lot. People don’t believe me.
I visited my doctor. He sat down on the same stool in the same exam room and went over my labs.
“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” he said. “Your blood sugar levels are great.”
“What is my BMI?” I asked.
“Nine.”
“That’s good?”
“The only time I’ve seen it that low is with varsity athletes. What did you do?”
“Exactly what you told me to. Your advice changed my life. Thank you.”
He smiled, shook my hand, and called me one of his success stories.
When I got home, I told my wife the good news and said I wanted to do something special to celebrate. She rolled her eyes.
“Not that,” I said. “I want to go to Moab, Utah over fall break.”
“Why do you want to go there?”
“Moab is Mecca for mountain bikers. People come from all over the world to bike there. I want to do the Whole Enchilada. We can see Arches National Park and Canyonlands and do some Jeep tours.”
“You want to go to Moab to eat an enchilada?”
“It’s the name of three bike trails. If you do them all, you’ve done the Whole Enchilada.”
“Oh.”
We rented a house in Moab and I invited my extended family to join us. When it finally got time to leave, we packed the car, loaded up my mountain bike, yelled at the kids to use the restroom one final time, and headed north. I was no longer prediabetic, but the vulnerability still lurked in my cells. I would need to watch what I ate for the rest of my life, but that was okay. Even if I got into trouble, I now knew how to get myself out of it. Like my doctor had told me the year before, diabetes is a disease of bad choices. Fortunately, the opposite is also true.
My wife squeezed my hand and smiled. I suddenly realized that being diagnosed with diabetes wasn’t one of the worst things that had happened to me.
It was one of the best.
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