Boiling a frog, and old age

We know the story of boiling a frog - you start with cold water and gradually make it warmer, that way the frog does not notice and jump out. [who would do that?!]

Well, I have noticed that getting old is like that. Several times now I have discovered a change in my life that only strikes me when fixed. Being diagnosed diabetic was scary as only when I was on medication did I realise how much all the symptoms crept up on me over the year before. These are symptoms I knew to look for and had drummed in to me by my mother since I was a child, and still they eluded me. Mostly tired and thirsty. I had got used to taking a glass of water to bed - which stopped being necessary as soon as I was on medication. Now I am on insulin, and my diabetes is well under control, or so I thought. Indeed, the annual reviews and HbA1c tests are all good.

The latest example is one where, over time, I have realised that whilst generally feeling reasonably heathy, I was going to bed tired sooner, and feeling much more apathetic and doing less work. If I was up at 9pm there was a joke in my family that it was past my bed time. That should have been a clue. I would sleep for like 9 hours a night, and not do a lot of work during the day.

Then I was put on indapamide as my blood pressure was getting higher, as I blogged recently. The 2.5mg dose was too high and I felt like crap, but now on 1.25mg, I feel better. I realise that since I started on the indapamide I am feeling "better". Over the last few weeks I have designed, coded, and deployed the whole 2FA systems for A&A (four separate systems), whilst also coding a load of other stuff including a Monzo API library and a few other things - documenting it all, and testing it all.

To my surprise, I look back at last week, and realise a couple of days ago I was up at 5:30 am and working solidly until 11:30 at night with no problem, only to be up at 6:30 the next day. I am finding I am bored just watching TV or going to bed, and instead am doing stuff. All last night I was designing in my head new code for a feature on the FireBrick which I ended up getting up and documenting first thing this morning. I feel like I have my mojo back.

The issue is not, as I see it, the blood pressure, which is what the indapamide is for, but it has changed the way my diabetes is working - I am having to take more insulin, about twice what I was, but I am much more stable now. It will be interesting to see my HbA1c in a few weeks time. Indapamide is not listed as a treatment in any way for diabetes, just that it can impact blood glucose levels. What is encouraging is that, having mentioned on a recent blog, I am not alone. Others with diabetes found they were "revived" (which I feel is a really good description) once on indapamide. So maybe it should be a diabetes related treatment?

Now I wonder what the next thing will be - something that will creep up on me over many months before I realise.