The Quietest Thing Diabetes Took From Me — Four Years Without Feeling

 

The Quietest Thing Diabetes Took From Me — Four Years Without Feeling the Ground 

A Twenties Lived on Dirt

Every morning, these feet lift me out of bed.

My twenties were lived on dirt.

Ballpark dirt. Dirt jammed into my cleats. Dirt that ended up in my mouth after a slide into second base. After every game, when I peeled off my socks in the locker room, my feet were either red or black or both. I lost toenails more times than I can count. Blisters were a daily condition. Back then, I thought sore feet were just how it was. A baseball player's feet were supposed to hurt. That's what I told myself.

Looking back, I never once thanked my feet during those years. They carried me to first base, to second, to home. And I never said sorry to them either.

 For thirty years, my feet lived inside these.

Thirty Years Inside Dress Shoes

When I left baseball, I joined a company. From that day, for the next thirty years, my feet lived inside dress shoes.

I put them on before dawn and took them off after midnight. At company dinners, my feet swelled inside the leather. In the back seat of the taxi home, I wanted to slip them off but never did. When I finally got home and removed my socks, there were shoe-shaped grooves pressed into the top of my feet. The next morning, I put the same shoes back on.

I never thought about my feet. I worried about my stiff shoulders. I went to the doctor for my back. I took pills for my stomach. But my feet? My feet were just there. A silent piece of equipment that carried me to meetings, to clients, to dinner tables where soju bottles outnumbered the people.

It took me too long to understand that my feet had silently endured those thirty years without complaint.

The Day the Feeling Disappeared

It was around the time of my retirement.

I can't tell you exactly when it started. That's the cruel part of this condition. It doesn't arrive one morning as sudden numbness. It disappears so slowly that you don't notice it's gone.

The first time I really noticed was when I was putting on socks. The soles of my feet couldn't quite feel the rough texture of the fabric. It was like dressing someone else's feet. Then in the shower — water hit the tops of my feet and I felt it, but the soles registered something duller. At first I told myself I was just tired. Then I stopped paying attention. Then I told myself, I guess this is just what getting older feels like.

During that period, my fasting blood sugar had crossed into pre-diabetic territory. My doctor told me, "You're not at the medication stage yet, but you need to start managing this now." I nodded. And that evening, I had another company dinner.

Diabetic peripheral neuropathy. Studies show that 30 to 50 percent of diabetic patients experience some stage of this nerve damage. But there is a more frightening fact buried in the research: this condition can begin before a formal diabetes diagnosis, while you are still in the pre-diabetic stage. When blood sugar stays elevated for too long, the tiny vessels that feed the nerves break down. The nerves, starved, begin to die. The thinnest nerves first. The farthest ones first. Which means, the soles of your feet first.

To say it more plainly: at the exact moment my doctor was telling me, "It's not diabetes yet," my nerves were already dying.

I had no idea.

Retirement, and What Came Back — and What Did Not

I retired at fifty-five.

At first, it was bewildering. I have written about that empty stretch of time at length elsewhere on this blog — the silent phone, the days without meetings, the dress shoes sitting unmoved by the door. I thought I had lost my identity.

But four years later, looking back, something strange comes into focus.

Retirement saved my body.

The company dinners disappeared. The pre-dawn alarms disappeared. The twelve-hour days inside dress shoes disappeared. In their place came morning walks, mixed-grain rice, and quiet afternoons in my small supplement shop where I had time to actually massage my own feet between customers. My monthly paycheck stopped, but the parts of my body that the company had been taking from me every day — those came back.

My blood pressure came down. My liver enzymes returned to normal. My waistline shrank. My fasting blood sugar moved back into the normal range. The bathroom trips at night decreased. Many things got better.

But the feeling in the soles of my feet did not come back.

Four years later, it is still gone. It may be gone for the rest of my life.

I have written many posts on this blog about "the numbers that got better." All of them are true. But today I need to tell a different kind of story.

Some things do not come back.

What makes diabetes terrifying is not that it kills you. It is that it quietly, permanently, takes something away. I learned that lesson through the soles of my own feet.

To any man my age reading this, I have one small request. At your next health checkup, tell your doctor: "I'd like to have a sensation test on my feet." It is done with a thin filament called a monofilament. It takes five minutes. It costs almost nothing. Those five minutes might decide the future of your feet. I had mine done years too late.

And one more thing. If you are a man in your fifties with frequent company dinners and not enough sleep, do not feel safe just because you haven't been diagnosed with diabetes yet. Nerve damage can arrive before the diagnosis does.

After thirty years of ignoring them, I am using my hands for my feet again.

So I Apologize to My Feet

I made my feet live on dirt through my twenties. I locked them inside dress shoes for thirty years. And as if that weren't enough, I let pre-diabetes punish them one more time. Only now do I say sorry.

So I do five small things every day. Nothing dramatic.

One: a foot massage whenever I'm sitting down. In quiet moments at the shop, when there are no customers, I work on one foot at a time — slowly, patiently. Soles, tops, between the toes. When blood flows, the nerves that are still alive get a fighting chance.

Two: foot stretches. Toes up and down. Ankles left and right. The same warm-up I used to do before games. After thirty years of ignoring my feet, I am doing those movements again — this time, for them.

Three: warm water first, the moment I come home. But I test the water temperature with my hand first. Because my feet can't feel heat properly anymore, using them to gauge the water could mean a burn I wouldn't notice. This matters. If you have similar symptoms, please use your hand or elbow to test the water. Never your feet.

Four: moisturizer. When skin on the feet cracks, bacteria find a way in. Feet that can't feel pain can't warn you about small injuries. So I prevent them before they happen. One caution: avoid the spaces between the toes. Moisturizer there can lead to fungal infections.

Five: toenails cut straight across. Rounded corners dig into the skin. For a diabetic, an ingrown toenail is not a small inconvenience. In this disease, small wounds become big problems quickly.

At my shop, I also sell supplements aimed at nerve health — alpha-lipoic acid, benfotiamine, methylcobalamin. There is reasonable clinical data that they can slow the progression of diabetic neuropathy. But I will tell you the truth: none of these will bring back feeling that has already been lost. They may help prevent things from getting worse. That's what the studies say. I'm a supplement shop owner who, embarrassingly, hasn't started taking them himself. But honesty matters more to me than appearance.

My feet no longer steal bases. They don't take big leads off first. But every morning they lift me out of bed, and every evening they walk me to the front door of my small shop.

For that alone, I owe them more than I can repay.

And sometimes I wonder — if I had stayed at the company longer, what would my feet look like now? Ironically, retirement gave me the chance to take care of them. Retirement, it turns out, wasn't only a bad thing.

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This article is not medical advice. If you suspect diabetic peripheral neuropathy, please see an internal medicine doctor or a neurologist. This is simply the honest record of a man who walked this path a little earlier than you.

Gammab-seumnida — Choco Papa, with apologies to his own two feet.