Faith

Over the years I've observed that people tend to have one of three attitudes towards diabetes complications:

- Fatalistic. The complications will happen to me. I cannot prevent them. I'm doooomed...

-Messianic. The complications will not happen to ME because I know the secret of diabetes control! And therefore I will never have any complications.

-Oblivious comes in three flavors:
Type Young Oblivious- kids who are not really aware of complications.
Type Two Oblivious - adults who see diabetes as a really minor medical issue of no real significance (a subset of type 2 diabetics, mostly)
Type Cure Oblivious- people who believe that a cure for diabetes will render complications moot point soon enough that they won't matter for us. Just hold on to your health for five more years and you're good.

In real life, none of us knows our future, but uncertainty is difficult to live with, hence our tendency to assume the best or worst.

Those who have read my blog much probably know that I lean towards being fatalistic regarding my future. I have spent a lot of blog space expounding on studies showing high complication rates for diabetics with fairly good blood sugar control, talking about the difficulty in getting that fairly good blood sugar control, agonizing over whether various extra health problems are related to diabetes, and being generally pessimistic about the whole thing.

Yesterday my mother and I went to my bank and I cashed in my savings bonds and my mother wrote me a check and at home I signed a paper saying she was loaning me money (for tax purposes- without it she'd get charged gift tax) that I am supposed to pay back over ten years (I intend to pay it back in half that time) and I kept thinking about the leap of faith I am taking, and the leap of faith that I am asking others to make for me:
Faith that I will be in good enough health to work for another ten years to repay a loan.
Faith that I will stay in good enough health to take care of children all the way through to adulthood.
Faith that I will be able to climb the stairs to the condo for long enough to repay the investment.

I am humbled.
I am grateful.
I am scared.