Opening the Case

This is that story. Not someone else’s case file. Mine.

Although health and wellness has been my passion and study for over 30 years, my practice officially opened its doors in December 2024. Even so, the irony isn’t lost on me — because the case that shaped everything I now bring to clients was my own. The hidden connections between life events, symptoms, and metabolic health that don’t show up on standard blood panels? I lived them for decades before I had the framework to read them.

This isn’t about judgment. It’s about what the evidence actually looked like in real time, and why each clue made perfect sense to dismiss — because life was happening, and none of it felt urgent enough to stop for.

If you’ve been told your labs are fine while your body keeps sending messages you can’t quite decode — or someone you care about is living with symptoms no one has connected yet — the investigation starts here.

When Life Gets in the Way of the Clues

There are dinners with friends, work deadlines, weekends away, family obligations. Each small signal gets filed under not bad enough to deal with yet. You feel a little off, but nothing dramatic. You adapt. You manage. You tell yourself you’ll look into it when things calm down.

That’s not negligence. That’s just being human.

But the body doesn’t stop sending signals because we’re busy. It just keeps leaving evidence.

The First Entries in the Case File

The advice I received, decade after decade, was sensible enough on the surface: when your blood sugar drops, eat sugar. Carry crackers. Keep juice nearby.

What no one explained — and what wasn’t yet widely understood — is that reactive hypoglycemia is frequently an early warning signal on the road to insulin resistance. The body releases too much insulin in response to a carbohydrate load, blood glucose drops too far, and that shaky, foggy, must-eat-now feeling arrives. Treating the crash with more sugar creates another spike, which triggers another insulin surge, which causes another crash.

A loop, repeated for decades. Quietly exhausting the system in the background while every standard test stayed just below the threshold that would have raised an alarm.

Spain, and the Clues That Made Perfect Sense to Ignore

2017: a UTI. I need to be clear — I had never had a urinary tract infection in my entire life. Not once. So when it happened, it was alarming in the way that a recurring inconvenience never would have been. Treated, resolved, moved on.

But I didn’t know to ask the question that matters: why now, after decades of never? What I understand now is that a first-ever UTI appearing without obvious cause is a documented early signal of elevated blood glucose. When blood sugar runs chronically high, glucose spills into the urine and creates an environment where bacteria thrive. That UTI was a clue worth investigating. I didn’t have the framework to connect it in 2017. Most practitioners don’t either.

Also 2017: prescription glasses. Completely unremarkable at midlife — the eyes change, reading glasses become necessary, everyone says so. And that’s exactly why it slipped past. The lens of the eye is one of the first tissues to accumulate damage from elevated blood glucose, through a process called glycation — sugar molecules attaching to proteins in the lens and altering their structure. Needing glasses in 2017 fit so neatly into the normal ageing story that the metabolic connection was invisible.

Two clues. Two reasonable explanations. Filed and forgotten.

When the Case Accelerated

Then COVID hit. Spain entered one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe. Surgery was postponed, and I spent the better part of a year with severely compromised vision, isolated, in the middle of a global crisis.

What I understand now is that accelerated cataract development is a well-established complication of uncontrolled blood sugar. Cataracts in people with diabetes develop earlier and progress faster precisely because of the glycation happening in the lens. My lens had been behaving as though it had been bathed in excess glucose for years — because, it turns out, it had.

About a month before surgery, in late January 2021, blood work came back with a fasting glucose of 20.8 mmol/L (375 mg/dL). For context, normal fasting blood glucose sits below 5.6 mmol/L (101 mg/dL). A reading above 11 mmol/L (198 mg/dL) typically indicates diabetes. Mine was nearly four times that threshold at 20.8 mmol/L (375 mg/dL).

I was given a prescription, a structured menu, and a deadline. Come back in seven days. If the numbers hadn’t moved, the next step was insulin.

What surprised me was that the menu had me eating more than I normally did — more volume, more structure, more regular meals. It went against everything I’d assumed. Seven days later, my fasting glucose had come down to 6.5 mmol/L (117 mg/dL)

Surgery happened February 24, 2021. And the curiosity that had been quietly building finally had a direction.

What the Pattern Actually Looked Like

The UTI in 2017. The glasses in 2017. The rapid cataracts. The decades of reactive hypoglycemia managed with exactly the wrong response. Every one of them part of the same coherent story. What was missing wasn’t the evidence — it was the framework to read it.

After returning to Canada at the end of 2023, a Libre 2 continuous glucose monitor made that story visible in real time. The difference between a single annual fasting test and watching your glucose respond to everything you eat, how you sleep, and how stressed you are is the difference between a photograph and a documentary film.

Clues Worth Taking Seriously

The pattern in my case file is far more common than the diagnosis statistics suggest. These are the signals worth paying attention to — in yourself, or in someone you care about:

• Fatigue that doesn’t resolve with rest, particularly in the afternoon
• Brain fog that worsens after meals, or difficulty concentrating without frequent eating
• Irritability or anxiety between meals
• Needing glasses earlier than expected, or rapid prescription changes
• A first-ever UTI at midlife with no obvious cause, or recurrent UTIs
• Accelerated cataract development, particularly before 65
• Skin darkening in folds or on the neck, or unexplained skin tags
• Fasting glucose consistently in the 5.0–5.5 mmol/L (90–99 mg/dL) range — often reported as “normal” by standard reference ranges, though these thresholds are based on general population averages and don’t account for age, individual history, or other metabolic factors
• HbA1c creeping upward over time, even within the generally accepted range of below 5.7% (39 mmol/mol) — the trend matters as much as the number itself
• No single clue is a diagnosis. But the pattern — especially when several are present, or when they’ve arrived quietly over years — is the case the Health Detective is trained to read.

If something on that list mirrors what you’ve been experiencing, or what someone you love has been navigating, that recognition is data. It’s worth acting on.

Closing the Case

Not because the evidence wasn’t there. Because life was full, each clue had a reasonable explanation, and nothing felt urgent enough to stop for. That’s the real story — and it’s the reason this work matters.

Blood sugar isn’t just a number. It’s a metabolic narrative that stretches back years before a formal diagnosis and touches every system in the body — the eyes, the kidneys, the nerves, the energy you’ve lived with since you were a teenager.

The body doesn’t send random signals. The symptoms that seem unrelated, the patterns that don’t fit the standard story, the quiet feeling that something is off even when the labs say otherwise — these are case files waiting to be opened.

The investigation doesn’t end at the prescription pad. It begins there.

A dedicated article on nutritional support for blood sugar regulation — specific nutrients, bioavailable forms, and mechanisms — is coming soon in the Case Files.