Continuation of my Second Life Day saga.  Catch up to part 1 here.

For a few weeks, I had been feeling a bit off.  I was coming home from work and falling asleep on the couch by 7PM.  I would doze for an hour or two, and then sleep the night away.  But the next morning, I would still be tired.  Having just finished a year and a half of ridiculous hours and draining shifts at Chapters, it was easy to chalk this up to exhaustion.  I just needed to let my body rest.

The next frustration came in the form of thirst.  A nearly unquenchable thirst plagued me.  No matter what I drank, or in what quantities, I could not be sated.  I found myself drinking so much liquid that I was relieving myself every two hours, like clockwork – day and night.  Because of my frequent bathroom visits, I was not getting a good night’s rest, which contributed to my falling asleep on the couch every night.  Easy to explain, right?

Then came the dry mouth.  I began experiencing cotton-mouth regularly. This was somewhat annoying as a contact centre representative, so I started drinking more liquids.  This was happening hand-in-hand with the thirst, so again, all linked together nicely.  But the dry mouth continued to get worse.  It reached a point where it was painful to swallow non-liquid foods, so I wasn’t eating much.  The lack of food meant I had no energy.  No energy meant falling asleep on the couch after work.  Still makes sense.

With the lack of food came weight loss.  Being a corpulent fellow, weight loss was a good thing in my mind.  But drastic weight loss over a few weeks (I had shed nearly 20lbs over 4-6 weeks) should have been troubling.  As it so happened, I had also started going to gym nearly daily, so I could again explain everything away.  The only symptom that I had which I could not explain away was the cotton-mouth.  I finally decided to call my family doctor’s office to schedule a visit. This was on February 26^th.  When I reached the receptionist, she advised me that my doctor’s next available spot would be in early April.  She asked what my symptoms were and, after apparently consulting with a nurse, advised me to try sucking on some hard candy or peppermints to help with the dry mouth.  Of course, some of you reading this will be putting the symptoms together and saying, “That could be diabetes.”  And you would be correct; meaning that my doctor’s office was recommending that a diabetic suck on candy for the next 4-5 weeks until he could see the doctor.  Oh, the irony!

Given that I was told to try hard candy, I presumed that there was nothing overly wrong with me and kept on going through the motions of my life.  This honestly was what I was doing at this stage of my life – going through the motions.  I lived alone in a basement apartment in my mother’s house. The only serious relationship I had been in had ended nearly four years earlier, and I was increasingly becoming a recluse.  I did not love my job, but was quite good at it.

I was now working as a customer service representative in a contact centre.  I had been hired on as a seasonal employee during the holiday peak season.  Shortly after starting work in December and completing my training, I was sent back into training to take on additional call types. Evidently, I had an aptitude for the role.  This lead to another couple of training sessions, adding more and more to my skill set.  I had quickly outpaced the rest of my colleagues who had been hired at the same time.

Yet despite my successes at work, there was little other joy in my life.  My life consisted of – go to work, come home, watch movies, sleep, repeat. My life was fully on auto-pilot.