For a couple of weeks now I have been feeling well below par. I am exhausted. I’ve not been sleeping particularly well, which is unlike me, and yet, all I feel like doing is sleeping. I’ve felt nauseous and not been interested in food, and even coffee has lost its appeal. (As I am a woman of particular age, when explaining these symptoms to others I see eyebrows rise questioningly, heads tilt and the words ‘Could you be…’ start to form on their lips. No. I am not.)

On Monday, my sister and I did some shopping – something we could both do for Australia our skills are so impressive – and I had to sit down in the stores while she was doing her usual trick of finding clothes marked down to a quarter their usual price in her size that looked perfect on her.

I went out for breakfast on Monday morning and when I got home, I had to sleep for a couple of hours just to be able to face the thought of going shopping.

As soon as I started mentioning that I wasn’t feeling great to those near and dear to me, they immediately suggested I go see the GP. But I dismissed it as being because I am busy at work with lots of deadlines looming / we just lived through a bathroom renovation / We’ve been binge-watching a new TV series and should be going to bed sooner / <Insert excuse here>.

I even told myself in a moment of spectacular denial ‘I have diabetes. It’s a chronic health condition and sometimes it makes me feel crap’, when the truth of the matter is that my diabetes has been somewhat quiet and manageable over this period and I would be furious at anyone who dared to automatically assume the reason for me not feeling a hundred per cent is due to my pancreatically-challenged state.

However, two weeks later, I think they may have been right. I probably should go to the GP and get checked out. I am sure it is just a low-grade virus and all it needs is time and rest. (Oh look – there I go again with the denial….)

As much as I hate to admit it, I do blame diabetes when I am not feeling well. I hear myself say things like ‘I had a couple of hypos yesterday’ or ‘I woke with high BGs’ to explain away anytime I feeling out of the ordinary.

I remind people all the time that ‘sometimes it’s not diabetes’ and yet I seem to be happy to use it as an excuse to myself when convenient.

When your body is broken to a degree, it is difficult to know what to do when the usual ‘not feeling well’ things come up. For people who don’t live day in, day out with a chronic health condition, they see it as irregular and react. Those of us with bodies that are a little rogue at times just decide that it is part of being broken.

It took my mum saying something for me to realise that I might want to delve a little deeper than deciding it was just more ‘system failure’. Where others would jump in and suggest I go to the doctor the second I mention not feeling well, mum gets that it could just be part and parcel of the tiredness we sometimes feel living with a chronic heath condition. She gets it – she lives it.

So when she told me the other day that I was ‘looking gaunt’ (proving yet again that at the core, she is (wonderfully) a true Italian nonna), and that she was a little concerned, I snapped to attention.

So – tomorrow I plan to go to pathology and have blood drawn, using the full blood work path request my endo sent me a couple of weeks ago as a precursor to my annual diabetes screening. I will do it and then I’ll follow up with my GP (who is sent a copy of the results) and see where I go from there.

It could just be a low level virus. It could be just tiredness or an iron deficiency. It could be something different altogether. But I am pretty sure it’s not diabetes even though I have been stubbornly trying to convince myself otherwise.