When it became clear my health was on me
Back in 2022, when I was first diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, it forced an entirely new way of living. I had always heard about diabetes, but I never really understood what it entailed—the complications, the long tail, the things that quietly add up over time. I knew people who had suffered badly from it. Some didn’t make it. That alone was enough to push me to start paying attention.
I began digging into what I was feeling physically and how it connected to the diagnosis. I changed how I ate. I changed how I moved. And because I was living abroad, managing medication and regular blood work became part of the routine. Every six months, new labs. New numbers. New data.
At first, the blood work was just something to check off. But over time, I started to study it—what each marker meant, what was “in range,” what should be in range, and how different panels interacted with each other. I stopped looking at the numbers in isolation and started looking at them as a system. That mattered to me. Context mattered.
By early 2024, I had been on medication for about two years. In that time, I had armed myself with information and taken control of what I could control: what I put in my mouth, how I moved my body, and how closely I watched the numbers. I was finger-pricking daily, tracking how food pushed my blood sugar up and how long it took to come back down. I wasn’t guessing anymore. I was learning my body.
I was also preparing for a three-month trip to Malaysia and needed a fresh prescription—enough medication to cover the time away. That meant another round of blood work. In Europe, labs move fast. I had the results the next day.
At first glance, nothing looked terrible. Everything was technically within range. But compared to my previous labs, a few values were higher than before. Not alarming—but different. So I did what I had trained myself to do: I looked backward. I thought about the previous three months. What I had eaten. How I had moved. And I could see it clearly—I had subtly, almost unconsciously, let a few things slide. Nothing dramatic. Just enough.
I had felt like I was moving in the right direction, so I took my eye off the ball. The numbers told a different story.
I scheduled a call with my physician, someone I had been seeing for about a year and trusted. I assumed he’d glance at the labs, maybe ask a few questions. Instead, he focused on one conclusion: my kidneys were “having a hard time,” and he wanted to increase my medication dosage.
What struck me wasn’t the suggestion—it was how quickly he arrived at it.
He didn’t ask if I had changed anything. He didn’t ask about diet or activity. He didn’t ask whether there was a reason the numbers might be temporarily elevated. Everything was still in range, yet the solution was immediate escalation.
Because I understood the labs, that moment landed hard. I remember thinking: Why would you adjust medication without first talking to me about behavior—especially when behavior is the one thing I can actually change?
That was the tipping point.
I ended up getting the three-month supply of medication before my trip. But more importantly, I was left with a sinking feeling I couldn’t ignore—that once again, I was largely alone in this process. That even in Europe, even with a doctor I respected, the feedback loop was narrow. Reactive. One-dimensional.
I realized then that I couldn’t rely on a single source of input for my metabolic recovery. Not fully. And that recognition became the next challenge I had to take on in this journey: building my own framework, my own checks and balances, instead of handing the steering wheel over completely.
That moment didn’t change everything overnight.
But it clarified
something I couldn’t unsee.
