When I introduced myself, I indicated that I was very reckless with my health as a twentysomething, and that this had something to do with developing diabetes issues as relatively early as I did. Some regulars thought I was being a bit hard on myself in that regard. They could be right about that, because I am certainly no expert in the disease-process of type 2 diabetes. But one thing about which I'm pretty sure, my old bad habits certainly haven't helped my diabetes self-care.
This is especially true with regard to my kidney-health. While blood-sugar control is the paramount issue of being a diabetic of the second type, recent events have taught me that as a diabetic, the most vulnerable organ in your body is probably your kidneys. And my moral Achilles-heal of stimulant-abuse has recently been causing me to experience acute kidney dysfunction. The two stimulants I have tended to abuse are caffeine and pseudoephedrine. In particular, my nightly pseudoephedrine dose has been something that my online research has recently informed me is a common kidney-stresser.
You might be wondering how I could continue to indulge these substances whose synergistic effect is not unlike amphetamines or "speed" and that reek serious havoc on your blood-pressure, which is another issue diabetics need to closely monitor. I was a caffeine-user from the get-go in my late teens, but I added pseudoephedrine to the mix during the period of my life I have come to refer to as my "Kurt Cobain Years". Kurt Cobain was the lead singer of the "grunge" rock-band Nirvana whose issues with low self-esteem and drug-abuse motivated him to take his own life in the early part of 1994. My KCY were a four-year period roughly chronologically centered upon the month of Mr. Cobain's self-inflicted demise. I was in a downhill slide during this period, and it was then that I turned abusing my health into something of a dysfunctional art-form. It was also during this period that I was guzzling entire pitchers of high fructose corn syrup sodapop that I got for free at the restaurant jobs I was working.
As I got older and became less self-destructive, I wanted to give up the sudafed, but being somewhat congestion-prone, I discovered I had become dependent upon it to remain decongested. It wasn't an extreme and serious congestion I would experience without sudafed, but it was usually a light, dryish congestion in one nostril that I would experience at night, and this made it more difficult to get back to sleep. (You would think it would have more readily occured to me that my stimulant-abuse wasn't exactly conducive to getting sleep, but such is the psychology of addiction.) For that reason, I lacked the mettle to toss the sudafed into the dumpster once and for all.
And then starting shortly before the most recent Winter Holidays, I started retaining water. Of course, there was the weight-gain and the blood-pressure that just wouldn't come down, but the scariest symptom was the increased potency of what I have come to call "food-hangovers". I work a second-shift schedule these days, and that schedule determines the my idiosyncratic eating schedule. What that means in particular is that I eat my final meal shortly before retiring for the night. As soon as I started developing other diabetes symptoms, whenever I ate too much and then immediately went to bed (easy to do when diabetes makes you so very tired after work), I would feel a very harshly heavy-bleary-cloudy feeling in my brain all day the next day. It was easy to avoid this problem if I knew what was foolish for me to do with regard to my final-meal-eating/ retiring habits. I now realize that this situation was the result of the kidney-impairment common to all diabetics. This situation became a lot more severe this past December, and it accompanied the water-retention symptoms. I can manage it so that it isn't terribly debilitating, but my poor brain has been feeling rather like it has been "under water" this entire time. And that certainly hasn't helped my caffeine-reduction project either.
So starting today, I am doing what I should have done much earlier and throwing away the pseudoephedrine. If I have to endure some congestion for a while, then I am just going to have to "tough it". And once I am free of the synergistic effect of caffeine and sudafed, I'm hoping that at some point I'll be able to entirely ditch the caffeine too. Another thing I am doing to help my kidneys is reduce my dietary sodium intake by more than two grams.
This is especially true with regard to my kidney-health. While blood-sugar control is the paramount issue of being a diabetic of the second type, recent events have taught me that as a diabetic, the most vulnerable organ in your body is probably your kidneys. And my moral Achilles-heal of stimulant-abuse has recently been causing me to experience acute kidney dysfunction. The two stimulants I have tended to abuse are caffeine and pseudoephedrine. In particular, my nightly pseudoephedrine dose has been something that my online research has recently informed me is a common kidney-stresser.
You might be wondering how I could continue to indulge these substances whose synergistic effect is not unlike amphetamines or "speed" and that reek serious havoc on your blood-pressure, which is another issue diabetics need to closely monitor. I was a caffeine-user from the get-go in my late teens, but I added pseudoephedrine to the mix during the period of my life I have come to refer to as my "Kurt Cobain Years". Kurt Cobain was the lead singer of the "grunge" rock-band Nirvana whose issues with low self-esteem and drug-abuse motivated him to take his own life in the early part of 1994. My KCY were a four-year period roughly chronologically centered upon the month of Mr. Cobain's self-inflicted demise. I was in a downhill slide during this period, and it was then that I turned abusing my health into something of a dysfunctional art-form. It was also during this period that I was guzzling entire pitchers of high fructose corn syrup sodapop that I got for free at the restaurant jobs I was working.
As I got older and became less self-destructive, I wanted to give up the sudafed, but being somewhat congestion-prone, I discovered I had become dependent upon it to remain decongested. It wasn't an extreme and serious congestion I would experience without sudafed, but it was usually a light, dryish congestion in one nostril that I would experience at night, and this made it more difficult to get back to sleep. (You would think it would have more readily occured to me that my stimulant-abuse wasn't exactly conducive to getting sleep, but such is the psychology of addiction.) For that reason, I lacked the mettle to toss the sudafed into the dumpster once and for all.
And then starting shortly before the most recent Winter Holidays, I started retaining water. Of course, there was the weight-gain and the blood-pressure that just wouldn't come down, but the scariest symptom was the increased potency of what I have come to call "food-hangovers". I work a second-shift schedule these days, and that schedule determines the my idiosyncratic eating schedule. What that means in particular is that I eat my final meal shortly before retiring for the night. As soon as I started developing other diabetes symptoms, whenever I ate too much and then immediately went to bed (easy to do when diabetes makes you so very tired after work), I would feel a very harshly heavy-bleary-cloudy feeling in my brain all day the next day. It was easy to avoid this problem if I knew what was foolish for me to do with regard to my final-meal-eating/ retiring habits. I now realize that this situation was the result of the kidney-impairment common to all diabetics. This situation became a lot more severe this past December, and it accompanied the water-retention symptoms. I can manage it so that it isn't terribly debilitating, but my poor brain has been feeling rather like it has been "under water" this entire time. And that certainly hasn't helped my caffeine-reduction project either.
So starting today, I am doing what I should have done much earlier and throwing away the pseudoephedrine. If I have to endure some congestion for a while, then I am just going to have to "tough it". And once I am free of the synergistic effect of caffeine and sudafed, I'm hoping that at some point I'll be able to entirely ditch the caffeine too. Another thing I am doing to help my kidneys is reduce my dietary sodium intake by more than two grams.
