Part One | Part TwoBy: Jean Johnson for Wounds1
Tara Sullivan is all scrappy Irish at 5’1” and the high side of 150 pounds. In her irreverent words, “a little fat lady – too much sail for such a small craft.” Intellectually she knew she needed to do something, but her emotions reared their heads like the blue meanies from the Beatle’s Yellow Submarine.
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Managing diabetes is extremely important to fight against its severe complications
Heart Disease and Stroke
High Blood Pressure
Blindness
Kidney Disease
Nervous System Damage
Amputations
Dental Disease
Pregnancy Complications
Sexual Dysfunction
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“It’s a typical reaction – to just not want to know about it. My husband wanted me to get involved with it because if you actively engage yourself with any condition, there’s a lot you can do – and that’s particularly true with diabetes,” she said. “But in those days I didn’t have much interest in my health. I wasn’t getting any exercise. Just not taking care of myself.”That’s when a long time personal friend of mine came to my rescue. “She decided I was over-worked and said, ‘I want you go to get a personal trainer and just get out there and do it.’ She set things up so I’d get the training, but what he didn’t know was that I didn’t have the motivation.”
Given the blahs Sullivan had, she says all the money did initially was make her feel guilty. But eventually, “that she thought I was worth it got to me, and I thought I should make some effort. Here was someone saying to go take care of myself.”
Soon Sullivan found her self attending diabetes education classes through Kaiser Permanente. “They put me in with other people that were in way worse shape than I was – hugely overweight, wanting magic bullet cures, juvenile attitudes, still viewing their doctors as gods who could save them,” she said. “I also was shown diabetics who lost their eyesight or their limbs – people with no legs going around in wheelchairs. And it doesn’t have to be that way.”
The education helped. Sullivan was able to put mind over emotion and get with the program. Educators told her that losing as little as 10 pounds would help her diabetes. “I did, and it did,” she said, “even though I still had to take insulin to keep things in better control. I could probably lose some more weight, too, but at least I did that much.”
Also, the endocrinologist she saw to make sure her insulin was correct told her he didn’t usually see diabetics as healthy as she was. “That was kind of a wake-up call actually. It was reassuring to find out he thought my health wasn’t bad, because when you have a newly diagnosed condition it’s like you’re on this little island, and you don’t know whether you’re a little sick or a lot.”
“So, I started putting one foot in front of the other. That guy paying a $1,000 a month for me to go do activity. It still wasn’t anything I wanted to do, but he sort of forced me into the position because he was giving this money,” Sullivan said. “I joined a gym and hired a trainer. She was short like me, and that woman could throw a javelin the length of a football field. Anyway, she took a personal interest in me and worked me hard. I started training for a walking marathon – you start with two to three mile walks, then five and 10, and in the weeks preceding the race you do 17 and 19-mile walks. Just ball busters, and she was so supportive, even speed walking back where I was at the back of the pack to encourage me.”
“It was wonderful. Exhilarating. I went from a couch potato to being able to walk 19 miles. It was like climbing Mt. Everest, and I was in my late-fifties. Here I’d never been athletic in my whole life! This was a brand new world for me, and I even got to where I could bench press 200 pounds. I was totally buff, and I knew I was doing the very best I could do to manage my diabetes.”
Sullivan was not fated to walk her marathon, though. A bout of viral meningitis with its accompanying nightmarish headaches that only high-test opiates could temper put her in bed for several weeks. Even worse, in the aftermath the fear of becoming addicted to the painkillers overwhelmed her.
Continued in Part Three
