Diabetes

When the Principals met with me and my fellow cohorts in May, they stressed two things. First, they stressed that they were not looking for perfection, they wanted us to be "authentic" in how we presented ourselves. Second, they emphasized the importance of finding the right fit both for me and for my prospective school.

When I look for a school, I am looking for a school that will allow me the time and resources to make adjustments, because despite my experience, I will not achieve perfection coming out of the gate. Every thing I do now is geared toward doing whatever I can do to prepare myself for whatever comes.


Many of the lifestyle adjustments I am making this summer are a result of my desire to become a more effective teacher. Teaching requires a superhuman amount of energy. Even seemingly "unimportant matters" like a teacher's health matter greatly, as I have learned. Now, I have learned, there is some real urgency in setting and making progress towards my health goals: I have just been diagnosed with diabetes.

Now that I'm "being real," which is something I will always be on this site, I can confess that, during the last part of my practicum, I  sometimes operated on zero sleep -- in fact, at a critical time, I spent a period of over 48 hours without sleep to meet deadlines. Obviously, a lack of sleep sometimes affected my thinking and how others perceived me.

This summer, I am taking the opportunity to work on taking care of matters, such as health and appearance, which have never been my highest priorities. On Monday, since I am starting a new fitness program, I met with Dr. Prinz to take a physical. Today, I got the results of my blood test: My blood sugar level of 137 is technically diabetes. My goal is that, through diet and exercise, I can reverse that and bring it down to 126. On a secondary test for a particular hemoglobin, my 8.7 was higher than 6, which is considered optimal, which indicates that my blood sugar level has been high for a period of three months. Dr. Prinz said I needed to lose 20 pounds. Hearkening back to something I heard Tony Robbins once say, I am reframing the results of my blood test as "just a result," or more interestingly, as a "really cool science experiment."


On Monday, I also made my annual visit to Dr. Gofreed. A few years ago, I was referred to Dr. Gofreed by Dr. Prinz, and she presented the medical case for using a bi-pap machine to control my severe sleep apnea, a problem that added difficulty to my first two years of teaching. Imagine trying to teach a lesson with a brain that has been deprived of oxygen every night!

After my bean soup is ready, it's off too the gym I go!