Hi, Michelle, I’m similar to @wadawabbit - female, 65 in my case but T1D since late 1963 (to be fair, somehow my crappy rural doctor didn’t know enough to get me immediate care, so my first shot came in January 1964, even though I was already looking excessively thin and half-dead in the Christmas photos - nothing like the rest of the family).
At 61 I had better success than @wadawabbit with the cataract surgery, but no credit goes to the surgeon who was congratulating himself while I was only half-anesthetized and hanging on his every word, on how he was setting new speed records for cataract surgery. OMG. But healing proceeded right on schedule despite the race. I only got it done at 61, though, because I’d met my out-of-pocket and everything for the rest of the year was “free”.
The worst of my retinopathy was 1993-1996, but the science and treatment has come so far since then! Wowee. And I take better care of myself, although back then I was still walking 5 to 12 miles most days.
I resisted getting a pump until the tremors in my thumbs made trying to give shots kind of hairy, but the tremors come from something else entirely, so very likely not your worry.
What I do have is some neuropathy - but only at the stage where my left foot might drag a tiny bit after 15 to 20 minutes of boring walking on a track when my mind wanders, and sometimes I have trouble telling without looking quite where my feet are in relation to each other , despite 4 years now of PT for that. But that’s after a fall, no relation to diabetes, backwards down a flight of stairs and landing on my head. That pretty much ruined me for proprioception, but again, nothing to do with diabetes.
I did have a fall that was half-blameable on BG, last December, where my spine went straight perpendicular down which is the surest way to break a lumbar vertabra, even though I don’t have osteoporosis. Yet. It was 6 AM and dark, and I was stumbling.
Stage 1 kidney disease, which I call Stage 1/2 because I had one bad test, in 2017, which couldn’t be reproduced 2 months later or ever since.
Lessee… Really my worse problems stem from my other chronic illness, because of which I have very off-kilter electrolytes, and lack of balance, and I have discovered that the metabolism of blood pressure meds, low sodium & chloride, and diabetes can cause WHOPPING DKAs at dawn, only starting a year ago - I can have medium ketones even before my BG even reaches 220 within 30 minutes of it having been 110. So I wouldn’t worry about that for you unless you wind up on a non-diabetes med that significantly skews your electrolytes.
Otherwise… my cholesterol is off compared to everyone else so I can’t counsel you on that (high HDL, pretty low LDL and triglycerides). But taking care of myself? Doing OK so far, after living alone for uhhhhh, well, decades.
Really, I’d say, if you’re worried, just eat properly and get all the exercise that I hate so much.
And keep learning. Learn anything. Just keep taking your gray cells for an intellectual jog, and I don’t mean Sudoku.
For what it’s worth, cognitively, despite a long record of concussions (since I was 12 and fell 25 feet onto my back in the forest, gulp), I spend my free time studying and practicing genetic genealogy, tracing the actual family connections through segments of chromosomes and learning which individual genes are in specific segments that might concern me. Blame the DNA test that said we were not who we thought we were. I also take wild rides exploring medical genres down to infinitesimal detail, sometimes. I find it far more interesting than the software programming job that brought in an income, but in any case, at 65 I’m not just sitting in a rocker staring at the TV. Cognition doesn’t need to be your worst problem.
But of course, I’m not you, either.
I do read a bunch of memory-loss fiction, though. If fear of loss of cognitive ability is a worry and Still Alice was a problem, don’t read The Memory Book (Lara Avery) (about a teenager) or Elizabeth is Missing (Emma Healey). Those are the two that affected me the most. But you could get involved in genetic genealogy and see what not just your immediate family’s but your cousins and more distant relatives’ histories are with dementia, and which chromosome segments and then even genes those people share… Just sayin’.
I’m not helping, am I? Sorry!