Sometimes being an adult is amazing.
I mean it. Sometimes it's a business dinner and drinks on one of your favorite patios to celebrate a successful collaboration. Once in awhile it's waking up to someone bringing you coffee and making pancakes while wearing your bathrobe. One of the amazing things I still haven't gotten over is not having to do homework when I get home (post-graduate disorder anyone?).
Sometimes being an adult is terrible.
Of course it is. Sometimes it's standing in the kitchen at 2:00am taking a break from a work project to eat peanut butter out of the jar because you've been too busy to shop. Once in awhile it's waking up to find a note that says "I'm sorry, I just can't." One of the terrible things I still haven't gotten over is how many people have claims on your time.
About a year ago, being an adult suddenly got really, really terrible.
I was still reeling from the emotional shitstorm that was the 2012 when a friend announced that they had recently been diagnosed with Type II diabetes. I was having an extremely difficult time managing my obsessive-compulsive disorder and immediately upon hearing that she had diabetes I decided that I had diabetes (and high cholesterol and heart disease and and and). I immediately made an appointment with my doctor to go in and have a full physical and get all of these things checked.
Before I continue, let me be clear about one thing. These concerns, while certainly amplified and made worse by the OCD, were not entirely unfounded. I have a family history that includes high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, various forms of cancer, and mental illness. Our genes are a mess. Armed with the knowledge that I was taking proactive steps to manage my health, I went into my doctor feeling empowered.
I'll never forget the phone call from my doctor. I could hear her flipping through my chart.
"Yeah, your LDL and HDL levels look good, so do your triglycerides. Your pap was normal, your breast exam was normal, your other tests were all negative."
I breathed a silent sigh of relief. It appeared the issue was, as it always seemed to be, my over-active amygdala freaking everything else out. I was all right. I was better than all right. I was healthy. I started to say my adieus when she paused.
"Oh."
Oh followed by a long stretch of silence is never something you want to hear from your doctor.
"What?"
"Well. Kel. Your fasting blood glucose is . . . elevated."
"What do you mean "elevated?""
"I mean it's not diabetic, but given your family history it gives some cause for concern."
We then have a long conversation about what cause for concern means. Essentially it boiled down to the following: either make some significant lifestyle changes or be diabetic in ten years. Possibly.
Normally when I have a bugaboo about diseases, it's a bugaboo about a disease. Measles. Ebola. TB. Something that is deathy and feels like it comes from a science-fiction novel or is antibiotic resistant.
With the exception of diabetes.
I watched my grandfather deteriorate slowly from Type II diabetes and it was horrible. I refused to conceive of a future that required insulin shots and compression socks for anything other than a distance race. I insisted that my doctor give me information on how I could address the issue of an elevated blood glucose.
What it boiled down to was "move more, eat less, eat selectively."
At this point in my life I was already running three days a week, averaging between nine and fifteen miles weekly. Getting told I needed to move more was like a punch in the gut. And while my food consumption had never been, you know, the best, I had never thought I ate a particularly trashy diet.
But, with the specter of shots and socks constantly in front of me, I upped my workouts from 30 minutes to 60, and then again to 90. I walked to and from the gym. I religiously accounted for every single calorie I put into my body. I taught myself to eat fruit when I'm hungry and that dinner can, on some days, just be vegetables.
It was amazing.
I'm serious. It was like one of those before-and-after weight loss reality shows, the ones where the contestant realizes how much their life sucks because they can't do what they want. I was scared. It worked. I dropped thirty pounds in a year. I biked 150 miles across the state of Minnesota. I ran through two Polar Vortexes and dropped a minute off of my mile times. I'm to the point now where a seven mile run is no longer a thing, it's just a run.
Yesterday I was sitting with a new doctor doing the whole "getting to know you thing." I made a comment that I'm turning 30 in September and she asked how I was planning to celebrate and before I knew it we were talking about 30x30 and I was telling her that one of the goals I had was to bring my blood glucose levels down to a normal range.
"Well."
Well followed by a long pause is never something you want to hear from your doctor.
"What?"
"I mean, you're doing everything right. It sounds like you've made some progress, but the thing is, sometimes genetics just gets you in the end. So I don't want you to get too down on yourself if today's labs don't come out the way you want them to."
I was a little devastated (have I mentioned that I believe with the right data and the right work ethic I can actually achieve just about anything?) and I didn't want hear that all of my hard work may have been for naught. She gave me the normal "It won't have been for nothing, these kinds of changes are amazing" speech, but I wasn't really listening. As we wrap up she shakes me hand and says "You should have your results on the website tomorrow."
Imagine the nail-bite-y 24 hours I've had.
When the email popped up today that my results were available I broke off the conversation I was having with my coworker and raced outside to check them on my phone. I was preparing for the worst, incredibly upset that I was going to have to report failure not just on the 30x30 front but on the "I'm a healthy-able-to-take-care-of-myself" grown-up front as well. By the time I had clicked through to the website I was shaking.
Normal.
Just . . . normal. Not bad. Not good. Just right where they were supposed to be.
The note that accompanied them was "These are good, but you need to keep up the work you've been doing to get them like this." It hit me that over the past year I've been treating these changes in my life as a means to an end. That some day I'd be able to go back to not tracking everything I eat and scaling back my running and biking miles, getting something less than 300 minutes of exercise every week. I suppose I still could, but the problem is that doing so makes it all the easier for genetics to get me in the end.
It was terrible, the sudden realization that I'll have to be vigilant about the bits of my genes that are trying to kill me faster than I had planned.
While I was standing outside shaking my mobile buzzed with a text. "Hey, there's this adventure race I want to do, will you do it with me?" I recalled the seven and a quarter miles Andy and I ran last night and how it wasn't a thing, just a run. I started laughing when I remembered our bike ride from hell last summer and considered the prospect of coaching someone through a half in D.C. next spring.
It was amazing, the sudden realization that I am a different person than I was a year ago. That I am stronger, faster, and better because I have to be vigilant about the bits of my genes that are trying to kill me faster than I had planned.
Sometimes adulthood is amazing and terrible all at the same time.
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