Balance in Health… A Moment in Time!

  

 

 

 

This music comes from a quartet called Acoustix  and it comes with a built in meaning.  This is the Moment can mean many things… some good… some not so good.  This song is about the good.  My post today is about something in my life that is not so good.

It is said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.  There comes a defining moment in everyone’s life that reveals itself by coming up slowly and subtly, or smacks you in the face with an alarming upstart.  That unfortunately was the case with me in September of 1996 when I was diagnosed as an “adult onset diabetic”. 

This was following several weeks of being extremely tired and complacent along with not being able to quench my thirst.  Little did I know that I had been making the situation worse by drinking lemonade to try and satisfy that dryness in my throat.  What I was actually doing was driving my blood sugar through the roof (neighborhood of 450) and making the situation even worse. 

I realized there existed a real problem that needed a doctor’s attention, when everything I looked at had a shadow behind it.  I later found out that the back of the eye is one of the last places in the body that actually gets rid of excess sugar in the blood stream, and the excess there for the extended period was causing my eye to swell which in turn caused the shadows.

I know where I get the diabetes from… I inherited it from my mother.  She has been injecting insulin for many years and my hope is that now with proper nutrition and exercise I can defer the injections for a looooong time down the road.   

Times are good now with the stress of 2008 behind me and my wife Elaine, and I find that the sugar levels are going down even farther.  This is a welcome site when I read the findings on the test meter. 

The unfortunate aspect of all of this is the neuropathy that has occurred in my feet (partial loss of feeling) and the constant pain that accompanies that as well. I wear insoles all the time and very seldom go without shoes especially on hard floors. 

The neuropathy is also the reason that I no longer am able to sing with the Masters of Harmony, since the rehearsals require hours of standing and rehearsing and then the performances that are more of the same.  As you can imagine I still love the music and support the Masters when and wherever I can.

Thanks for reading and caring,

Stay “tuned”

Jerry Braack

California  USA

Tags: a cappella, Barbershop, Barbershop Art From, Barbershop Harmony, Barbershop Harmony Society, Barbershop style, Masters of Harmony