Hey Sue!
On the contrary, thanks for writing directly: forums are great in general but even better when they get personal
I definitely can relate, similar stories, this thing popping seemingly out of nowhere and SO hard to get anything that could look as a concrete, potential solution. Plus the worry, uh?: "Dang what the heck, my kids are still so young, I can't possibly have the luxury of getting sick, what am I supposed to do now?" At least it is like that for me, the kids are 15 and 10.
I was actually quite happy with myself this year: I'd been overweight all my life but for the last couple of years I had started rebuilding my life, shook off the depression, rethought the marriage, lost most of the extra weight, exercised daily, got a dog, regained my sense of humor.
But yeah, work, house, long commute, so it seemed practical to forget about meals and just eat anything, preferably sweet, when at all possible. The calories in an ice cream with all sorts of toppings were about the daily caloric requirements, right? And I haven't eaten anything else, right? Then why not? Yeah.

My mother has been diabetic for 15 years, the non-disciplined kind, and she now has neuropathy and numbness in one arm and part of the face. So when my symptoms started (on a Sunday after a particularly awful week) I of course panicked and got myself a glucometer and found out I was prediabetic. Tests followed but that's still the only diagnosis I have: prediabetes and peripheral neuropathy. Related? Maaybe.
Since the options of treatment are basically the same whether the cause of the PN is known or not I'm not really putting energy on removing the "idiopathic" label from mine. *shrug*

Do I drink, you ask? Yeah, I love wine, I enjoy a good beer (so hot in Mexico in the summer ), vodka is a great thing. I'd say I drink about once every two weeks, never more than two glasses/pints. Once every two weeks on average, sometimes I get lucky. But when I get a chance to drink it is always a good, calm moment, a treat. So for the time being I refuse to even consider blaming the alcohol for this, I won't give up something that *perhaps might be discovered that it could in some part be related* and that I enjoy when there are still all these things that are much more likely to be related and in my case are just bad habits that I'm not going to miss.

My latest finding is that coffee could in fact be part of the problem [expect a thread about it soon ] and, yeah, these days I am a heavy double-espresso consumer, I mean, I need it almost every morning (it used to be "with whipped cream", before). So I'm thinking, OK, let's tackle that first if indeed seems appropriate, leave my Shiraz alone.
I like to think of it as "evidence-based lifestyle changes".

So, you see, I'm also in need to talked it all out
Let's keep talking.

Try to take it easy,
sUsY