“What are you going to do with all of that extra space after I leave?” my grandson asked.
I had to think. There were no grandchildren when we moved into this house 23 years ago. Now, they’re 22 and 20 and – finally – leaving “home.” Granddaughter drove off to her college town yesterday morning and Grandson informed us that afternoon he would be moving out September 1. This is after a lifetime of spending weekends, school holidays, and summers with Grandma and Grandpa and, finally, moving in altogether.
Once upon a time, I had a guest room and a room solely devoted to my office. Maybe I can have those again. Maybe I’ll miss having a pile of shoes in the foyer (despite my pleas to put the darned shoes in their rooms). Children and young adults in and out of the house – without knocking – all hours of the day. Empty pizza boxes in the living room. (No, I am NOT hiding the trash cans. It’s possible that children of that age can only find the kitchen when they’re hungry, but not when they need to throw away trash.)
Maybe an empty nest will be good. We’ll see what happens the first time I wake up low and there’s nobody here to bring me a bowl of cereal.
Maybe I should keep their rooms intact for a bit longer. Maybe they’ll be back.
Where, you ask, is my husband when I need to get my blood glucose up? Probably at his office. By the way, we celebrated our 38th anniversary last week. If I want to celebrate many more with him, I need to get him to either change doctors or begin seeing an endocrinologist. I’ll even share mine with him.
Last week, I told you about his doctor deciding to wait another three months before doing anything about his 7.4% HbA1c.
After reading the comments on that post, especially the one from JohnC who suggested the doctor may just be ignorant, I decided to ask Sweet Baboo some questions.
“Does your doctor check your feet?” I asked.
“No.”
“Has he ever?”
“No.”
Note to self: Next time you make an appointment with your podiatrist, make one for hubby, too. It’s important to check those feet before an impending problem becomes problematic. Don’t wait until a problem crops up before getting your first exam, either; the doctor will need a baseline to refer to.
“Has he ever mentioned you need to have a dilated eye exam?”
“No.”
Now, this one I’m not too worried about. He does see an ophthalmologist, and the eye doc knows he has diabetes and will look out for him. In fact, that doc knows about diabetes from a personal perspective.
I do, however, worry about the primary-care physician’s other patients. A lot of the town’s bigwigs go to him and some of them have diabetes. I often wondered why none of them ever went for education, but now I know: He doesn’t refer them to education. At least, he didn’t mention education to my husband.
“How about your kidneys? How are they doing?”
“He’s never mentioned my kidneys. Why should he mention my kidneys?”
Because you’re at risk for kidney disease. Especially with an HbA1c of 7.4% that your doctor is “keeping an eye on.”
Geez.
I feel that I should tell you my husband isn’t stupid. He’s Phi Beta Kappa and has a PhD. But I believe he still thinks doctors know what they’re doing in every instance, and they don’t. They can’t. There’s too much stuff out there to know.
However, I still believe that diabetes is prevalent enough that primary-care docs need to know more about it. They aren’t doing their patients any favors by being unable to properly care for diabetes.
Do you know what your doctor should be doing? I’ll let you in on at least the highlights next week.
And I need to crack down on my husband. If he were to check out, it would be way too much of an empty nest for me.
