The Signs and Symptoms of Diabetes

There are many a diabetes diagnosis story out on the internet but this one is mine. My name is Petra and I was diagnosed on 14 January 2019. However, I’ve known all my life that the family curse was a possibility so none of this was a surprise.

What was a surprise was that I was never diagnosed with pre-diabetes, I was never diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, I had been eating a keto diet for almost 9 years and I’ve always been a gym rat and a fairly active person.

Genetics was really the only factor for diabetes because nearly EVERYONE on my father’s side of the family was diagnosed Type 2 in their late 20’s or early 30’s. Somehow I made it to 40 years and 1.5 months.

What Were My Diabetic Symptoms

Thirst

Dry mouth

Excessive peeing

Extreme weight loss

Keto breath

Keto pee

Legs cramping (from peeing out the electrolytes)

Yeast infection that wasn’t going away

Dandruff problem went into overdrive (i.e. fungus)

Blurry Vision

Like many diabetics before me, about 2 months before my diabetes diagnosis I became incredibly thirsty. I felt like there wasn’t enough water on earth to hydrate me. I’d drink a full 8oz and be thirsty again 5 minutes later. All this drinking led to a lot of peeing. A LOT. I felt like my whole world was drinking and peeing. At some point I even thought about moving my desk into the bathroom so I could work from the toilet.

By the end of November, cotton mouth became a god awful reality. No amount of liquid, mouth wash, or brushing my teeth could get rid of the dry feeling on my tongue and inside of my mouth. This only drove me to drink even more to try to get rid of that awful feeling.

I was also losing weight at a pretty rapid rate, about 2lbs a week. Here’s the thing though, I never put two and two together that these 3 things was diabetes coming on. Why didn’t I realize my blood sugar was going sky high? I was recovering from liposuction!

Brief Intro to Why I Had Liposuction

In addition to diabetes I have another condition called lipedema. I’m not going to go into it here, but if you’d like to learn more about my lipedema struggles you can go over to my other blog What is Lipedema? I will mention that the only way you can lose this particular fat is via liposuction and when you have a lot of liters removed you’re thirstier than normal. Also, as the swelling goes down some weight loss is expected.

So I’m sure you can see how I missed the symptoms. Especially when I had lost around 4kg at this point. I had 3 liters of diseased fat removed in this surgery so I expected about 3kg of weight loss, give or take. However, as I lost more and more weight, something niggled in the back of my mind and I made a mental note to keep an eye on it.

Then of course, from the point of surgery in October until the end of December, I was eating like crap. For almost 9 years I’d been eating keto but at the point of surgery (a few months before actually) I had kind of had it with dieting most of my adult life and said fuck it. So I was eating anything and everything. Mind, I always watched my portions even if the food was crap. Though there was a day at the end of November, maybe early December, that I started smelling keto pee.

Keto Pee When You’re NOT on the Keto Diet is Bad

Something in my mind was screaming “you’re not on keto? wth is this?” but I just took my electrolytes that I normally took on keto and trucked on with life. It never occurred to me that I was at the point of diabetic ketoacidosis. Especially since I never made it to the emergency room. I can only thank doing keto all these years to train me in managing my electrolytes and the fact I’ve always been a huge water drinker for that.

Then by the end of December when I had lost 11kg, I told my husband when we got back to the Netherlands (we were in the states for Christmas visiting my folks) I needed to make an appointment to get my blood checked. We’re all, it’s probably just symptoms from the 8th of 8 liposuction procedures, but you know check just in case.

Right before we flew home, I got a pretty bad yeast infection. My heart was sinking because I knew THAT wasn’t going to be from the surgery and that was a sign of diabetes as well. The doctor appointment was already made for the 2nd week of January but on the 7th I woke up with blurry vision. My GP had me go get my blood drawn, gave me antibiotics for the yeast infection, and gave me some eye drops since my eyes were really dry. I’d get called in for my results the following week.

The “Yup I’m Diabetic Now” Point

At 7am Monday morning my GP was calling me telling me I needed to come in immediately because my fasting blood glucose was 18.9 mmol/L. That’s about 341 mg/dL. That’s the day that my life changed and I was diabetic.

Unlike my dad’s side of the family, I made it to 40 years, 1 month and a handful of days so that’s something.

Move on to part 2 of my diabetes diagnosis story.