Or, from your point of view, My Left Foot. (Really should see that flick some day.)

I called up and made an appointment to see my GP after therapy on Thursday, and here is why.

Recently, I have noticed that my right foot gets really, really cold. Not just cold like anyone’s feet might get cold in the winter. Cold like it has been wrapped in a bag full of ice water cold.

And for a while, I didn’t think much of it and more or less ignored it. It has been happening for two weeks or so, but it was only recently that it got bad enough that it forced me to really notices it and think about it and take it seriously.

After all, the first rule of Diabetes Club is that you have to tell your doctor right away if there is anything at all wrong with you feet, even if it seems like it’s just a minor thing or that it it likely to go away on its own.

But just to be sure, I Googled “diabetes cold feet” last night, and sure enough, having cold feet when you are diabetic can be the sign of some pretty bad things.

One in vascular insufficiency, otherwise known as “poor circulation”. That is pretty bad. It means that my foot is not getting enough blood to keep itself warm and hence it gets cold easily. That is definitely something to watch out for, because if it got bad enough, I would be risking having my foot become paralyzed or even having it go necrotic and have the parts of it which are currently cold die, and contract gangrene, which could kill me or if I am lucky, merely cost me the foot. Yikes.

But another possibility is something called DPN, or Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy, and for some reason that worries me even more. (Maybe it just sounds scarier, I dunno.)

That involves diabetes making the nerves in your extremities (also know as your hands and feet) die off, and that can also lead to paralysis and all the other bad stuff.

And of course, it could, in theory, be both. It is not hard to imagine how insufficient blood supply might lead to nerve damage or even vice versa, in theory.

So I am feeling kind of shaken up. Shit’s getting real, y’all, and it has me a little freaked out. For a long time, my high blood sugar was more of a theoretical than an actual problem. I knew it was true and I knew it was a problem, and I have been testing and injecting insulin for a couple of months now, but deep down, I am just as much a dumb animal as anyone else, and so if it was not causing me pain, I was not going to take it seriously.

After all, it is hard to take a number on a screen too seriously if you don’t feel sick. It is not rational and it is certainly not smart, but none of us are perfectly rational and smart people do a lot of the same dumb things everyone else does, especially when it comes to health.

So this is a sobering event. For a long time now, I have been complaining that my hands and feet got cold easily, but I just shrugged and said “Must be poor circulation” and went on with my life as if that was all the answer (and more importantly, action) that was needed.

But if your circulation is bad enough that your hands and feet get cold all the time, that suggests said rather important body parts are not getting enough blood and might well be slowly dying.

I understand why my mind developed this unhealthy ability to just gloss over things and keep going. It was as a response to the terrible crippling hypochondria I had in my early 20’s. I had to learn to ignore the ups and downs of what went on inside me and hold fast to the idea that unless I was in a lot of pain, I should assume I am perfectly healthy and need not worry.

And that, more or less, got me this far. I do not freak out over every little ache and pain and twitch any more, and I have a very firm grip on my hypochondria and it does not plague me at all any more.

But I went too far in the other direction. Now that I am a middle aged diabetic fat guy, I need to pay more attention to the little things so I stand some sort of chance of dealing with them before they become bigger, nastier things.

Like, for instance, dealing with this foot thing while I still have a foot.

So props to me for dealing with it, and not just freaking out and burying it in my mind and forgetting about it after lamely slapping some thing rationalization as to why it is “no big deal” on it.

I suppose the worst thing that could happen is that my doctor tells me that it is nothing to worry about and gives me the impression that I should not even have brought it to his attention.

Admittedly, my doctor is a sensitive fellow and so if I got that impression, it would probably be mostly from my own hyper sensitive neuroses rather than from the man himself.

In a way, I wish I could see my GP right before my therapy rather than right after it. Then I could talk to my therapist about what goes down there. But instead, there will be literally the maximum amount of time there possibly could be between the two events.

Oh well, I will just talk to my therapist about my worries and fears and doubts, and then go off to do something about them.

Ironically, I got my first healthy blood sugar reading today.

Having the cow gone makes it so much easier to shut the barn door…