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I hope most of you have noticed my efforts on the health front over the last half year. Under the guidance of the health coach Paula, I have tried with the help of modern medical knowledge to find ways and means to go on existing in my sick body. For me the results are impressive. Now I am trying to move on independently. Hopefully, if I notice that I cannot manage on my own, I will realise that I need to look for help again.

Since my problems began about 15 years ago, and diabetes was diagnosed a little later, my health has got worse with varying success. Last year I spent 3 months in hospital with blood poisoning. All that time the knowledge that nothing could get better also killed my ability to think. It was hard to stay sane. Luckily for me there were many understanding friends and colleagues around me. I think that otherwise I would not have held out in recent years.

I had known Paula for a long time. We had also talked about the profession of health coach and the idea of trying to work together. As chance would have it, we got the circumstances to fit at the last moment. Paula found the possibility to think about my problems and deal with them for half a year. I have not asked her, but I think that if I had not unconsciously tried to hide my current state when talking about my health, and she had understood the seriousness of the situation, she would have tried to find time earlier. At the same time I think it must certainly have been obvious to an experienced observer.

A thought-provoking detail is that during this half year I have tried, out of curiosity, to find someone else in Estonia who would do such a thing, and it seems to me there is no one. As someone interested in mathematics I understand how lucky I was that our paths crossed and that the timing and everything else fitted. The probability of that was very small.

From the start of this cooperation, when everything in my head was in a light fog, I liked a principle that stuck in my ears — a health coach must not become a crutch for a person. Being, because of my work, often in working relationships with company managers that have similar features, I understand the importance of this slogan and how hard it is to follow. It spoke to me.

Over this half year I learned to understand the idea — stay honest with yourself and with your coach. If you do not follow it, success is impossible. For me this was the hardest thing during this half year. In the folds of all our brains there is a huge variety of all kinds of thoughts going in every direction. Giving verbal meaning to thoughts and feelings in the confusion going on in the brain is not at all easy.

Fortunately Paula had all kinds of tools for solving many problems. The most impressive of them was the food traffic light.

Once, in my youth as a punk and anarchist, I learned to notice and ponder over limits, over how rules work and do not work, over their enforcement and necessity. Looked at through the lens of set theory, a rule is always a relatively broad generalisation. Usually it is the interpretation of details that proves fatal to how a rule works. I think the key to it working is the effort to understand the essence of the rule. This helps those following it make sensible decisions about details. During this half year it helped me a great deal to understand that following the rules and agreements that occur in such processes is one of the key questions on the road to success. In the autumn I no longer had verbal thoughts in my head, I could not even put on my trousers and I was indoors in nappies with an oxygen machine. I practically no longer believed that anything could be changed. Even a foolish person like me understood that I had no other choice but to put myself in Paula’s hands and try to think along with all my skills and possibilities and act as far as my strength allowed. The first experiences of success already made things easier.

I think Paula’s decision to release me into so-called "freedom, an independent life" came at more or less the right moment. Since I am not a specialist in this field, I do not quite understand the reasoning behind this decision. But I feel that I can already notice problems related to my health, put them into words, and I have the tools to solve them. As always in life, the details have to be dealt with until death.

I count on your attention and watchfulness: if I go off the rails and do not realise it myself, please point it out to me.