Running For My Life

Around 10 years ago, I would wake up to an intense pain in my feet that felt like needles stabbing at my feet. The first few times I’d look around my bed and check if there was something sharp in my bed causing the sensations. I was also losing weight at a high rate without noticing the change. Something was going on with me but being at the center of it all, I didn’t realize it. I guess I was my own worst enemy.

Around my birthday, I started looking up the symptoms. and it was either diabetes or pancreatic cancer. Going by the family history my dad grabbed a blood glucose meter to test my blood sugar levels. The reading was in the 400s and normal is around one hundred. Two days later, I found myself at a doctor’s office where they determined that I am a diabetic.

My first thoughts were my life was over, I’d never enjoy anything again. The few family members that I knew living with diabetes were not living their best lives and had other health issues. One lost a leg to amputation and the other was experiencing kidney failure. My mom then told me one of her brothers was also a diabetic and you would not realize it seeing him. Talking to my uncle Alfred, I gained insight into what to avoid and where to start the process to regain my health. Like avoiding corn until my medication started working.

When I started my medication, my energy levels plummeted, my sister’s dog would see me laying on the couch and would stay there to make sure I was okay. Moving around was hard and walking was unbearable. My dad told me at some point that I could lay there and hurt or force myself to keep moving. I was already down from 180lbs to around 130lbs and felt incredibly weak. I forced myself to walk and accidentally discovered that running hurt much less than walking. I started running after my niece would leave on the school bus, I’d go for a run.

My sister decided she wanted to run a 5K for her 40^th birthday that upcoming summer and asked if I would train with her. I agreed to get her ready to run a race on her birthday which fell on a Saturday in Santa Monica to Venice Beach and back.

Training went smoothly we would run in the mornings on the days she worked from our parents’ house and in the evenings when she had to go to her office. I was working on my degree then and could run nearly anytime even while taking 18 unit terms. With all that time I saw a commercial for a product that claimed to help treat diabetic foot pain. As soon as I had the chance, I checked the local pharmacies and Wal-Mart and found a tube of Zostrix Diabetic Foot Pain Relief Cream. One morning after my niece left to school, I decided to try it to see if it helped before a run with my sister while my parents went for a walk. Everything went well through the run, we finished the run after catching up to our parents about 3/4ths of a mile from their house, and that’s where the magic happened. Suddenly the active ingredient of the cream kicked in, capsaicin which is derived from hot peppers, and the main ingredient of pepper spray. I borrowed the key from my parents and took off at a full sprint to their house to seek relief from the burning sensation I was feeling. I might have set a few personal records getting to the house to deal with my hot feet. When I opened the door, I ran to the tube turned on the water and soaked my feet to get the oily cream off. As soon as relief came after that first use, I have yet to experience the stabbing pain ever again. I still have the tube in my desk and even pulled it out to show my mom when I told her the story of my feet when she was telling me about my father’s foot pain. He just had swelling and not neuropathy, but I have it just in case it ever hurts again.

As for the race, we showed up early that Saturday morning, and while checking in my sister mentioned it was her birthday, and they said that if she would have said something they would have given her a free race entry which we thought would have been odd but we lined up just southeast of the pier, and awaited the start. We took off at a good pace the run on the path near the beach was beautiful until we approached Venice Beach and the turnaround point. At that point there were homeless people that decided to actively participate in the race by trying to trip us and spit at us. One of them even took off with the marker for the turnaround point so we ran an extra 100 meters or so. At some point my sister and I thought we were going to fight our way back to the finish line. Upon making it to the finish line, we received our medals and went and ate breakfast then made it back to our parents’ house and celebrated her birthday.

Some of the early lessons I learned that were useful working to get my condition under control:

Get a food scale, you can still enjoy many of the foods you love but control the portions. If you do eat something sweet use a smaller plate/bowl so the portion looks bigger.

If you can’t cook use websites like NutritionIX, they have one of the best nutrition databases of restaurant menus. Their app will also help put together meals so you can go in and know what to eat and how to stay within your goals.

A blood glucose meter is a tool but should not be an absolute judge of how you’re progressing. It should be used to adjust to get you back to where you need to be.

As for having family or friends diagnosed with a medical condition some things to avoid doing:

There was a time when I went to lunch with my sister and my mom, I was still down around 130 lbs. and my sister said: “You look terrible, you need to gain weight”. I had to tell her that I had more important things to worry about like getting my health back. When a person is going through something the last thing they need is to feel even more self-conscious about themselves when they’re already trying to get back to normal.

When giving a gift don’t give them a gift that will negatively impact their condition. My sister gave me a gift card for IHOP which had almost nothing that was within my nutritional limits. I ended up taking my parents to eat even though they hate IHOP, and the one near them was notorious for poor service. So yeah, it’s like offering an alcoholic in remission a bottle of liquor, just don’t do it.