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Nov. 19th, 2017 08:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickDear tenant who showed me her half-a-foot (the three largest toes missing) while I was fixing outlets in her apartment the other day:
You may not grasp why your doctors keep taking off parts of your feet, but maybe I can help you with this despite not being a doctor. I fix outlets, not relatively intractable cascades of health problems.
Problem #1 You have Diabetes. Diabetes is a big part of why your dox are cutting off your feet, a little at a time. Diabetes, if not well-managed, makes your blood thick, like syrup. Thick syrup blood has trouble going through teensy little blood vessels far away from your heart. Guess what’s pretty fucking far away from your heart? YOUR FEET. When blood can’t go through teensy little blood vessels far away from your heart, the tissue dies and your toes turn purple-black and then the doctors cut them off. Also, remember, diabetes is a cumulative problem – each time you have sugar out of whack, you take a tiny bit of damage. This damage is not big each time but it happens each time and you can’t reverse it. This small cumulative damage eventually catches up with you, usually in your feet.
Problem #2 You smoke like a fucking chimney. Smoking constricts your small blood vessels, makes them SMALLER, and thus even harder for syrup blood to get through. It also makes you heal slower. I know smoking is hard to quit – I smoked for 20 years and am in the process of losing my teeth to periodontal disease because of it – but I did quit and you should definitely give it a try. It takes most people a couple of tries to quit, so don’t get discouraged. Not smoking would help you keep your feet, or what is left of them.
Problem #3 Your house is a hostile environment for someone with diabetes. Bags and bags of “fun size” candy bars around the place when you LIVE ALONE and HAVE NO GRANDKIDS… I know who’s eating those candy bars and it’s you. Also, the amount of white carbs (bread, potatoes, rice) you eat is kind of appalling. Those things metabolize directly into sugar and fuck with your glucose numbers. The glycemic index is a great tool for helping you manage your sugar and someone should tell you about it. Unfortunately, I am just here to fix the outlets.
Problem #4 Now that you have half a foot, walking is difficult and painful for you. So, the exercise that might help you control your sugar is difficult and painful. Once they take the whole foot (if you do not change your freaking ways, they WILL take the whole foot) exercise will be more difficult and painful for you than it is now, plus also you can struggle with difficulty healing the stump with crappy circulation caused by (a) out of control sugar and (b) smoking. I hope that you can see how this shit is going to spiral out of control. You can see it happen in slow motion to diabetes patients everywhere… they lose a few toes, half a foot, the rest of the foot, the leg to the knee. This course of diabetes is a lot like a SAW movie only in slow motion and without a creepy soundtrack.
Problem #5 Your doctors are LYING TO YOU when they tell you that you can EAT WHATEVER YOU WANT as long as you take your pills & shots. In fact, I don’t think that’s what they are really telling you. I think that’s what you are hearing. Depending on medication to control the significant insults to your blood sugar caused by free-form consumption of fun-size Butterfingers is like using fire extinguishers to put out the fires you keep setting. I mean, yeah, it works, but there's collateral damage every time and instead of buying more fire extinguishers, you should probably just stop setting the fires.
Problem #6 Oxycodone is a narcotic. I don’t know why you don’t think it is, but it totally is. You get it from the pain clinic so that you can tolerate the open sores that aren’t healing on the bottom of what’s left of your foot. Possibly a better course of action would be to do what you can (see above) to get the open sores to heal, but that would take behavioral changes that are difficult. Have another oxy and try not to think about it so much.
You may not grasp why your doctors keep taking off parts of your feet, but maybe I can help you with this despite not being a doctor. I fix outlets, not relatively intractable cascades of health problems.
Problem #1 You have Diabetes. Diabetes is a big part of why your dox are cutting off your feet, a little at a time. Diabetes, if not well-managed, makes your blood thick, like syrup. Thick syrup blood has trouble going through teensy little blood vessels far away from your heart. Guess what’s pretty fucking far away from your heart? YOUR FEET. When blood can’t go through teensy little blood vessels far away from your heart, the tissue dies and your toes turn purple-black and then the doctors cut them off. Also, remember, diabetes is a cumulative problem – each time you have sugar out of whack, you take a tiny bit of damage. This damage is not big each time but it happens each time and you can’t reverse it. This small cumulative damage eventually catches up with you, usually in your feet.
Problem #2 You smoke like a fucking chimney. Smoking constricts your small blood vessels, makes them SMALLER, and thus even harder for syrup blood to get through. It also makes you heal slower. I know smoking is hard to quit – I smoked for 20 years and am in the process of losing my teeth to periodontal disease because of it – but I did quit and you should definitely give it a try. It takes most people a couple of tries to quit, so don’t get discouraged. Not smoking would help you keep your feet, or what is left of them.
Problem #3 Your house is a hostile environment for someone with diabetes. Bags and bags of “fun size” candy bars around the place when you LIVE ALONE and HAVE NO GRANDKIDS… I know who’s eating those candy bars and it’s you. Also, the amount of white carbs (bread, potatoes, rice) you eat is kind of appalling. Those things metabolize directly into sugar and fuck with your glucose numbers. The glycemic index is a great tool for helping you manage your sugar and someone should tell you about it. Unfortunately, I am just here to fix the outlets.
Problem #4 Now that you have half a foot, walking is difficult and painful for you. So, the exercise that might help you control your sugar is difficult and painful. Once they take the whole foot (if you do not change your freaking ways, they WILL take the whole foot) exercise will be more difficult and painful for you than it is now, plus also you can struggle with difficulty healing the stump with crappy circulation caused by (a) out of control sugar and (b) smoking. I hope that you can see how this shit is going to spiral out of control. You can see it happen in slow motion to diabetes patients everywhere… they lose a few toes, half a foot, the rest of the foot, the leg to the knee. This course of diabetes is a lot like a SAW movie only in slow motion and without a creepy soundtrack.
Problem #5 Your doctors are LYING TO YOU when they tell you that you can EAT WHATEVER YOU WANT as long as you take your pills & shots. In fact, I don’t think that’s what they are really telling you. I think that’s what you are hearing. Depending on medication to control the significant insults to your blood sugar caused by free-form consumption of fun-size Butterfingers is like using fire extinguishers to put out the fires you keep setting. I mean, yeah, it works, but there's collateral damage every time and instead of buying more fire extinguishers, you should probably just stop setting the fires.
Problem #6 Oxycodone is a narcotic. I don’t know why you don’t think it is, but it totally is. You get it from the pain clinic so that you can tolerate the open sores that aren’t healing on the bottom of what’s left of your foot. Possibly a better course of action would be to do what you can (see above) to get the open sores to heal, but that would take behavioral changes that are difficult. Have another oxy and try not to think about it so much.
