The Mole That Changed Everything

It started with a mole.

Not a health crisis. Not a wake-up call. Just a spot on the skin that needed to be looked at. Routine enough that there was no real concern going in. Get it checked, get it cleared, move on.

The doctor looked at the mole and it was nothing.

Then she ran standard labs. Hadn’t been in a few years so why not. Routine. Unremarkable. The kind of thing you forget about before you leave the parking lot.

She called the next day. Needed to see me at once.

That call changes something in you. The drive back to the office. The waiting room that suddenly feels different than it did twenty four hours ago. The way the doctor’s face looks when she has numbers in front of her that she wasn’t expecting.

The diagnosis was type 2 diabetes. Not pre-diabetes. Not a warning. The real thing, sitting there in black and white on a lab report that started with a mole.

She put me on medication immediately and referred me to an endocrinologist.

The endocrinologist was not a small man. He added Metformin, scheduled a follow up, and sent me to a nutritionist to learn how to eat.

The nutritionist was not a small woman.

She taught me the standard American diet. Potatoes were fine. Ice cream in moderation was fine. Grains, starches, the full architecture of everything that had helped build the problem in the first place -- all of it presented as the solution with a straight face and a printed handout.

Went back to the endocrinologist. Numbers still not good. Added a second medication. Glyburide.

Woke up that night with stars in my vision.