Just  began to recover from a shocking week.  I learned that my favorite pop singer, Gerry Rafferty, famous for “Baker Street,” is near death and I learned on the very same day that I could well be headed in that very same direction.

Now I’m in recovery and only pray that Gerry may well be too.

I’m a type two diabetic who has lived eleven years with the disease and none of its side effects.  I also believed that because of the way I ate and exercised that my glucose levels would never climb. I was wrong. 

Gerry Rafferty drank heavily all his adult life and no doubt he believed that if nothing happened to him from the drink by middle age, he was home free.  Now he’s sixty three and his kidneys have failed.  He may have other organ failure of which I would not be surprised, or he may even be lucky enough to get  a kidney transplant if he swears to stop drinking. That seems to be an unlikely choice on his part.

Other than my sluggish pancreas, my other organs are fine. But on that day, last Monday, that sad day that I heard about Gerry, I found out from a routine blood test that my glucose levels far exceeded anything that appeared normal.  And I could have had a sugar crisis and potentially gone into coma.

Wow.  Healthy me.  On the verge of a serious blow to my existence.  Scary stuff.

So I went to the endocrinologist that my primary doctor recommended and she tested me further to see the extent of my “disaster.”  Surprisingly, it was only the verge of disaster.  I escaped catastrophe by a few numbers on the A1C test (the gold standard test for diabetes) and the high sugar glucometer readings.

You see, the reason this is all such a big deal is that I never saw myself getting older and developing health problems. Not me. That has happened to everyone else I know but me. That’s what I believed. Now I’m part of the pack; getting older, not looking older, but being told my body that I am older and not as robust as I thought. 

Gerry Rafferty, didn’t believe his body would betray him either, but his kidneys are shot and my pancreas will get better. And the reason I will be fine is that there are new drugs that make type two diabetics look and feel well almost immediately. In fact, my doctor said that within two to three months she expects the condition to go into a stage of dormancy. 

That’s because I am taking an injectible drug called Victoza, that is NOT insulin,.  It requires virtually no pre-preparation, except to install a very fine needle set up into a reusable pen and then…a gathering of a roll of abdominal fat and a shot of the stuff in that roll.  No pain, no weight gain, no fear.

So for at least the short term and perhaps longer, I have become one of Gerry’s famous songs, “Stuck in the Middle With You.”  Only in my case, I’m stuck in the middle every morning by me. 

Lucky woman; I think.