Upsides to Everything: Upside to Being Type 2 Diabetic

If there is one thing you learn and understand very well as you get older is that there are downsides and upsides to EVERYTHING. You may not be able to see them, and they may not show themselves for years, even 10s of years—but in the end there is unexpected collateral from EVERYTHING.

I was recently telling someone that I am Type 2 diabetic and they responded in a flash with “well at least you are a lot less likely to get a cancer”.

When I queried this statement they went on to tell me that insulin, something a Type 2 diabetic tends not to have a lot of in the their systems, is a powerful cancer-promoting hormone.

I have since done a bit of research and they are basically right. Insulin is a cancer-promoting hormone. People with high levels of insulin are much more prone to developing cancers and it is especially a problem for people prone to breast cancer or who are trying to recover from breast cancer.

Of course there are significant downsides to being Type 2 diabetic and thereby having low levels of insulin, such as falling into a diabetic coma while you are asleep and not waking up; and thereby dying. Or, on the other side, unknowingly overloading with sugar and thereby causing irreversible kidney damage as the amount of sugar in your blood skyrockets and does not come down quickly (because of the lack of insulin being introduced into your blood by your pancreas to do something about all that sugar).

At this stage I might just try and focus on the upside which is: When I eat a cupcake, an apple or banana, ice-cream, or potatoes, peas, corn, rice, bread, and my sugar levels spike up—as they do for everybody because carbs produce sugars when digested—my system does not (cannot) suddenly pump excess amounts of cancer-promoting insulin into my blood stream to deal with the sugar.

Are you jealous yet? ….

Okay … so I might die in my sleep tonight from a diabetic coma … you can’t have everything …