I am 66, a T2, with medical care at Kaiser. As I have written here before, when I was first diagnosed there 6 years ago, I had an infected toe. They cut it off. My first A1c was 9.1. Three months later, having read everything I could get my hands on and refusing to follow Kaiser's carb-heavy diet, my A1C was 5.1. Even so, I suffered from peripheral neuropathy, autonomic neuropathy, and amyotrophic neuropathy that was so bad I couldn't walk for months. After two years of A1Cs under 5.2, I ended up with Charcot. All of this the doctors blithely diagnosed as caused by "high blood sugar for a long period of time." I doubt that was ever so, but it has been my goal to keep my blood sugar under the best control I can anyway. Last year I started having morning readings in the low 100s. When it started creeping up past 115 or so, I asked about Metformin and it was prescribed.
I can't say the Metformin really did much. My A1C got up to 5.5, then just a month ago, to 5.6. Then I started having severe leg cramps at night. Not the kind you get when you've overexercised, where you wake up at night and have to jump up and stomp it out. These were very severe cramps that started in my feet and went clear to my hips. And they happened 3 or 4 times a night. During the day, my leg muscles were very tight and stiff. My doctor advised taking magnesium. I did, and it didn't help. Met is the only drug I was taking, so I stopped that and within 2 nights the cramps were gone. I emailed a note to my doctor to say I'd stopped taking Met, and this was the reply:
"I'm OK with you stopping Metformin. As we age, we tend to move away from advising strict blood sugar control. There is no advantage of keeping HgA1c under 7 and low sugar (hypoglycemia) is more dangerous than slightly high sugar. Please let me know if your fasting sugar gets higher than 150 or post meal sugar over 200."
It makes me want to beat my head on the wall. THEY blame all the problems I've had on diabetes, without a single supporting test for that diagnosis, and yet don't even have a basic understanding of the benefits of good blood sugar control. And how could I possibly have hypoglycemia when I'm not taking any drugs?
This is the second doctor I've had. The first was even denser. I am not allowed to see an endocrinologist at Kaiser because my A1Cs are "too low." At this point, I have no confidence their endo would be much different, anyway.
In the meantime, I continue to learn all I can to take care of myself. I'm so glad TuD is here, or I'd be stumbling along in total ignorance, probably headed for disaster.