Look into my eyes.

I want you to believe what I have to say to you.

I don’t want you to lose your vision.

I don’t want you to lose your limbs.

I don’t want you to have a heart attack.

I don’t want your kidneys to fail so that you have to go on dialysis or wait in line for a transplant.

And I want you to avoid Type II diabetes, because it can do all these things and that scares me to death.

My grandmother had what I was told was a brittle version of juvenile or Type I diabetes. Hers was difficult to control and is the reason I’ll always remember breakfasts with her.

A big old stove sat in the corner of the kitchen of her Marquette, Mich., home, and each morning, it held two pans of boiling water. One was for her oatmeal, the other to sterilize the syringe she reused for her insulin injections.

She assured me the shots really didn’t hurt much. But the diabetes did.

On her visits to our house, Grandma was often hospitalized in diabetic shock or flat on her back on the fold-out couch in our family room. The diabetes that did that later required amputations of her limbs. Finally, it cut short her life.

All this is why I think of the rising tide of Type II diabetes predicted for the nation and world as a tsunami of suffering I want you to avoid.

And it’s why the debilitating effects diabetes has on the kidneys struck me so much while I worked on a recent story about that.

Type I and Type II diabetes unfold differently. The first usually appears in childhood, the latter in adulthood, although Type II is appearing in people at younger and younger ages. Either way, both are diabetes.

With its evil tag team partner high blood pressure, uncontrolled and often undetected diabetes attacks the veins, arteries and capillaries of our vascular system. Mot associate the term cardio-vascular disease with heart disease. But it’s a disease of the entire vascular system through which the heart circulates the blood.

What I didn’t know was how much kidney disease is a vascular disease as well, vascular disease that damages the kidneys. High blood pressure thickens our blood vessels and makes them less flexible — “hardens” them for those old enough to remember the term “hardening of the arteries.”

At the same time, high blood sugar, along with high cholesterol and other things, coat the insides of our vessels, narrowing them, until the flow of blood lessens inside. That sends less blood to the organs.

Heart attacks come when the coronary arteries are blocked and can no longer supply the heart muscle with blood. But when the kidney doesn’t get enough blood, it goes haywire in ways that are often unnoticed.

First, it’s less able to filter the toxins or poisons from our blood. As it turns out, the small capillaries that do the filtering not only are damaged by high blood pressure, but are overworked by blood with high blood sugar. When those filters start to break down, impurities build up in our veins and arteries, making the situation there even worse.

Eventually, blood flow is reduced to the kidneys and they’re less able to do their other jobs. They fail to release the hormone that tells the bone marrow to produce red blood cells, and we get energy sapping anemia.

They become less effective at regulating our already high blood pressure, and it spins out of control.

So if you have diabetes or high blood pressure, see your doctor and control them.

If you don’t yet have either, watch your weight. The major cause of the Type II Diabetes and high blood pressure that cause cardiovascular disease and kidney failure is obesity.

Look, even with the help of insulin, my grandmother couldn’t control her diabetes. You may have a chance to control yours.

I don’t want what happened to her to happen to you.

Look into my eyes.

I mean it.