The Beginning Part One

It all started at the Perth Zoo - who knew visiting the zoo with family and close friends on a beautiful, very warm Spring day would be the start of my diabetes journey.....I was going backwards and forwards to the bathroom (did I say this was scarey because I do not like public conveniences and tend to avoid them at all times, but oh my today was a different story) while walking around the zoo and no one could keep up with the amount I was drinking.......in the afternoon I bailed on the walking and parked my self on a park bench in the shade and layed down with my 1.25 Litre bottle of water and downed that while the others continued and started to wonder why everything was blurry and had a shimmer around it out of my right eye - I put it down to that it was an unusually hot day and I had been really ill about 3 weeks earlier with a nasty ear and sinus infection and some sort of weird virus - residual effect......yeah thats it.....

The week went on and I just didn't improve and by Wednesday at work I just said I can't do this anymore and booked myself some time off to get myself better thinking I let myself get run down........By Friday my face was sore with pressure, my ears hurt and my right eye was really getting worse, my GP put me on more antibiotics saying I had another sinus infection. He gave me a double course of a strong antibiotic and by the following Friday I had no improvement and went back and he sent me to one of the main hospitals emergency departments thinking I needed IV antibiotics as the sinus infection had invaded my eye. I was given all these tests and they didn't think it was an eye infection, they thought I had optical neuralgia and the Neurologist sent me home that night and said to come back on Monday and they would do a neurological test to see if that was it.

I came back and did the test and got a phone call later in the day to come back the following day to see the Neurologist and get the results and it was negative, but he said that he wanted to do an MRI scan just to be sure there was nothing else there but it might take a while to get an appointment (three months in the end). He then noticed that when I was in Emergency that I didn't have the usual standard blood tests and urine tests - why not - I said probably because I was sent everywhere for all these different eye tests, x-rays etc it was missed so he sent me off to get that.

Two days later he called me at home at 8:30 am and said you need to go and see your GP urgently NOW, your blood tests showed something wrong with your glucose levels. So I said sure, but I don't think I will be able to get an appointment because he only works for half a day on Thursday and he said no you don't understand you ring up and say you have to see him immediately. So I rang and got an appointment for 10:30 am and the journey began......