Sometimes Knowledge Bites
I have unusually high levels of protein in my urine.
and it might go away and it might stay-here at stage one kidney disease- and it might progress to kidney failure and all there is to do is run lots and lots of tests over and over again and wish that there was a cause that we could do something about and wonder if it will go away by itself- as these things often do- or stabilize and leave me here in limbo or progress on to more dire stages of kidney disease. we wonder if my kidneys could have been impaired by my abnormally high levels of testosterone, which were coaxed downward over the summer, or if we might have missed noticing a kidney infection among my many colds, and if it means anything that my blood pressure has risen though it is still really low. and we ponder every little weight loss, as they have now added up to quite a large weight loss and i look at my skinny and diseased body and wonder where it is going and i wonder how or if i ever thought i could control this mess that is me. and not me, this body that seems to be on a crash course towards distruction. of course, the most likely outcome is that the protein levels will go down and maybe they'll come back and in the meantime we'll be aware that they put me at increased risk of microvascular complications such as retinopathy and neuropathy and all sorts of opathies and we'll ponder the doctor's suggestion that maybe i have kidney disease entirely separate from diabetes and we'll remember that 45% of people who start on dialysis got there from diabetes and defensively we'll point to my wonderfully low glycosolated hemoglobin levels - only 1.1 times the upper limit of normal- and we'll worry so loudly that the silence won't be able to threaten us and in the end i'll remember that we only tested my urine because of the diabetes risk thing. after a careful consideration of treatment options suggests that the best treatment for me is no treatment, we will wonder:
why did we want to know, anyways?