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With a quick glance at the newest chart included in my medical file, which was now resembling a tattered Greater Little Rock phone book, my doctor scribbled out one more prescription order and pronounced that he had good news.

“The next time you come in, there won’t be a chart like this. It will all be on computer,” he said proudly. Meanwhile, I had empathy for whoever would be tasked with coding it all in. “We’re moving into a new age.”

That was the good news. The bad news was that I was moving into a new age, as we all do daily whether we like it or not.

I would now be taking a new pill and pricking my fingers twice a day to see just where my blood glucose stood, another reminder that I’m not as young as I once was. One more pill container is added to a growing collection.

I’m becoming my grandmother, the one who amused me in my 20s with her nightstand covered in pill containers of assorted sizes. It’s scientific fact that, like the rings inside a tree, one can tell a person’s age by taking the square root of their total of pill containers, rounding up to the next whole number, and multiplying by 12.

With this latest diagnosis, I joined yet another grouping for the Centers for Disease Control: people with Type 2 diabetes.

“I got some interesting news the other day,” I mumbled to a close friend on our way to lunch. “My blood test came back showing I was diabetic.”

“Oh. I first found I had it five years ago. It’s no big deal if you keep your sugar under control,” he replied. No big deal? Apparently so, since I hadn’t known he had it.

“Join the club,” said another longtime friend who, until I confessed my situation, had not informed me if his. I was beginning to believe the CDC numbers might be off, that there must be more than 1 in 30 people in the U.S. with Type 2 diabetes, until I realized that much of a 30-person random segment in America would be under 30 years old.

I guess a daily breakfast of Ding Dongs and Mountain Dew were probably not the breakfast of champions after all. Maybe I should have passed up having large fries with all the singles with cheese, or ordering desserts after every meal, and making the midday run to the vending machine for a Snickers. Then there’s the pasta — gosh, who can resist pasta? — and the rolls and the bread and the beer. Oh, the beer. And the whisky, the Scotch kind where they leave off the “e” in whisky. But single-barrel Kentucky bourbon whiskey’s not bad, either.

And maybe I should have exercised more, but who had time for exercise with all the runs to the vending machine or the liquor store or Wendy’s?

Shouldn’t the Surgeon General have included a warning label long ago on all refined sugar products, just as with cigarettes? Sure, sugar might not get you as quickly, but the end result looks the same and diabetes has become a national epidemic that pushes up health care costs astronomically.

So this boomer, like many others, faces one more hurdle — a wakeup call he can deal with. As time moves on, we learn we have to change. Dylan’s old song is always playing in the background.

(Jim Harris is editor of ArkansasSports360.com.)