Diabetes will be the death of me – soon

My day, as usual, was going along pretty well. I walked around whistling the theme from "The Andy Griffith Show" while waving at people and thinking, "There's no such thing as strangers, just friends I haven't met."

Then I saw the article and everything turned gloomy.

The headline said, "Type 1 Diabetes Linked To Lower Life Expectancy."

Oh no.

I'm doomed.

The article was on the website WebMD, where you go to find out if your illness could be fatal. It's a great place to terrorize yourself.

This terrorized me.

According to a recent Scottish study, men who have Type 1 diabetes (which I have) "lose about 11 years of life expectancy compared to men without the disease." Women lose 13 years.

What? Whaaaa? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa?

I read on, learning that the big danger is to our hearts and that men with my condition have an average life expectancy of 66 years, compared to 77 for those without it. For women, the numbers are 68 and 81.

Here's a secret: I'm within 20 (OK, 15) years of that expected life span.

This is not good news. Let's face it, if my life were a book, I'm closer to the appendix than the table of contents. I thought there were still plenty of chapters left. But now?

They're telling me it's almost over (and I haven't even completed two of my bucket-list items: Golfing with Wayne Newton and watching every episode of "Gilligan's Island").

Here's what makes me mad: When I became a diabetic at age 14 – back when we just had three TV networks and "Google" was an outdated reference to a comic-strip character named "Barney Google" – my doctor sat me down and gave me the low-down on what the disease meant. He said that it would likely take 10 years off my life.

Big deal! I was 14! I was more concerned that I couldn't drink chocolate milk!

Fast-forward several decades. After the invention of accurate blood-testing strips, insulin pumps, the invention of NutraSweet, cholesterol-control medicine and more, they say it will reduce my life span by . . . 11 years.

It's worse now?

Diabetes already let me down once (when I campaigned to have my disease renamed "Brad Stanhope Syndrome," much like Lou Gehrig, Alois Alzheimer and Cy Nusinfection), but this is worse.

This is the 1994 baseball season, which ended in August. This is watching a two-hour TV program only to find that your DVR stopped recording after 90 minutes. This is finding out that the food you've been hiding was eaten by someone else. This isn't fair!

I tell myself that the numbers won't apply to me, since I consider myself bulletproof. I remind myself that people who have strict control of the disease do better. I acknowledge that modern technology has allowed us to track and adjust blood-sugar levels. I consider that the explosion of Type 2 diabetes (really a different disease) has led to many breakthroughs in treatment.

One doctor in the article pointed out that it wasn't until the 1980s that the medical community figured out how to best use insulin to control blood sugar levels (What? I was a diabetic before that and they acted like they knew what they were doing!). He reminded his interviewer that people in the 1920s with Type 1 diabetes had a life expectancy of less than a year. He said we don't know what will happen next.

So maybe things aren't as gloomy as the report indicated. Maybe all those people dying at 66 got hit by trucks, struck by lightning or killed by Wayne Newton on a golf course.

Or maybe they read WebMD articles that said statistics they believed all their lives were wrong. Maybe they found out that their childhood doctor was making things up.

I can always hope. And eliminate the Wayne Newton thing off my bucket list, just in case.

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.