The Last Pill

I beat diabetes.

Photo by Roberto Sorin on Unsplash

Popped my last metformin required this morning.

No ritual, no celebration however with no toast with champagne merely one little white pill… same dimensions and design in structure with most just like these earlier and after one gulp… finished. The container’s finished and also the prescription’s finished and something which sounded akin to alleviation washed within the after quiet.

For so long metformin was a daily nod that I was on my way to destroying myself through my own body - and the numbers this medication held at bay. Taken with breakfast. Or taken with dinner.

Monitored.

Adjusted. Rinse and repeat. That reminder is done today. My numbers are “good” in my doc’s estimation - and perhaps I’ve stuck to “making better choices -” it’s a non-necessary to my medication box.

Officially.

Victory.

Unofficially, I can’t write my name anymore.

Three years with neuropathy has made me graceless and untrustworthy. I can barely sign my name. That graceful signature that used to come with as much attention to spelling than tying my shoes looks now like it’s being forged by a five-year-old who has only finger-painted before this year’s artwork.

It’s worse now: the bass guitar has spent these three years sitting in it’s case.

Those days when I’d pick it up, and it would fit into my hands like a warm coat with extensions for arms, well those have ended now. It’s just pieces of wood and string that don’t, won’t, reliably behave according to intention any longer. I lost those callouses years ago. The muscle memory is still lodged securely in my brain, yet the physical execution remains-or becomes-confused; the nervous connection between intending and producing has been cut in some places, or amplified into static in others.

I used to think the hard part would be getting off the metformin. It turns out the hard part is living with what the years of high blood sugar already took. The pill is gone. The damage is not.

Just not ungrateful, is all. Better diabetes management does at least promise the neuropathy won’t inevitably continue to ravage my nerves until my fingers lose all dexterity in their ability to feel my guitar playing it’s very own lament - there’s even treatment to explore there, doctors still available to tap, adaptive implements to test. My iPhone can convert my babblings into language. I can buy thicker ink pen for when I make to scribbling at an album’s worth of lyrical inspiration will hit, I can buy, well eventually I hope, to once again be playing bass or to give it away to someone who will appreciate its particular set of charms as much as I always did.

But today is not about solutions. Today is about marking the line.

I took the last metformin I will ever need.

I can barely write my name.
I can’t play bass anymore.

Both of those things are true at the same time. The body keeps its own score, and the score isn’t finished just because one prescription ended.

Still, an empty bottle is an empty bottle. I’ll take the win where I can find it.