Excuse me???

[Der Cute]

Would you like a virtual baseball bat to virtually whack Dr. Pill on the virtual head?
Go back to the doc and DEMAND a referral to nutrition and exercise; tell him you're stopping these pills now. "I will visit here in 3 months and we'll check up on me. No pills until then."

Doctors..grumble grrr

[Mytical]

7 is not borderline. 6.5 is borderline. 7 is diabetes. That is if it is your A1C numbers. As for metformin, yeah they play havoc with me..but all I can afford right now..so have to put up with it.

[MamaMootz]

Quoth Pixilated

Thank you for those great points, MamaMootz, especially the one about the nutritional counselling/exercise as the first option. And no, they didn't. The first doctor just told me abruptly I am "definitely" developing diabetes and handed me the prescription. My sis says "They gave you that dose because that's what you need." I love my sis, but she strikes me more and more as someone who believes the first line of defense is pills. (To be fair, sis has also said if I can get my blood sugar back to normal with diet and exercise, I will be able to get off this stuff.)

Good point also about my blood sugar dropping too low. I'm worried about that much more than the gastric upset. I find myself doing much better on the half dose, but I am still really hopeful about getting to see my doctor in Toronto and having her look at the info and giving me her opinion. Due to distance I haven't seen her as often as I should have, but she has been my doctor for two decades and I trust her absolutely.

I also hope she can recommend somebody in My Hometown ...

A friend of mine today told me her doctor gave her a similar alarmist-sounding lecture about being 'pre-diabetic'. Her blood sugar level? 6.1

It concerns me that he put you on 500mg 3x per day off the bat and that's what I was taking when my daily blood sugars were over 200 because of another med I was on. Meformin works best on people whose bodies produce insulin, but their systems have trouble processing the insulin (AKA "insulin resistance).

Mytical is right though, if this was the fasting hemoglobin A1C test then 7 IS diabetes. If they took the A1C test without your fasting first, then it's not an accurate test.

Pixilated, if you want to take a look at a good program to bring the sugars down, the Paleo diet seems to work well for a lot of folks. I'm on something similar to it right now under the supervision of a nutrition counselor and feel much better on it. I'm hoping to get my sugars down to normal and off the Metformin for good.

[AccountingDrone]

Quoth mosspack1

When I read that first sentence my first thought was why not try diet and excercise.

I was originally dx in 1980 with full on insulin dependent gestational diabetes that resolved to regular type 2 [insulin resistance] that I was able to control with diet and exercise until 5 years ago [mainly because the arthritis made it impossible for me to continue with long walks] the first thing they did was 50 mg metformin bid/5am and 5pm. The dosage crept up until last year when I hit the max effective dose 1000mg bid and they added first byetta and then replaced the byetta with lantus [though I do know how to play mixnmatch with vials because of the gestational ]

Quoth MamaMootz

It concerns me that he put you on 500mg 3x per day off the bat and that's what I was taking when my daily blood sugars were over 200 because of another med I was on. Meformin works best on people whose bodies produce insulin, but their systems have trouble processing the insulin (AKA "insulin resistance).

Mytical is right though, if this was the fasting hemoglobin A1C test then 7 IS diabetes. If they took the A1C test without your fasting first, then it's not an accurate test.

Pixilated, if you want to take a look at a good program to bring the sugars down, the Paleo diet seems to work well for a lot of folks. I'm on something similar to it right now under the supervision of a nutrition counselor and feel much better on it. I'm hoping to get my sugars down to normal and off the Metformin for good.

I am on a pretty restrictive regime, my nutritionist and I hammered it out. Evening meals are pretty much the only wild card - I almost always do oatmeal for breakfast and a chopped salad of a fairly specific combination for lunch. If I have to go out for lunch I do the salad for dinner I will admit that it is fairly low carb, for a mainstream nutritionist to have assigned

If you do go the exercise and diet method, which I heartily recommend, please *do* menu plan by the week, and try to shuffle the recipes so it doesn't bore you into cheating. I surf foodgawker frequently, and if something looks interesting, I print it out and add it to a file, and write any modifications i might have to do on it and if it works out for all 3 of us, it goes into the menu rotation. The adventurous dinners make the boring breakfasts and lunches worth it