Some of this is ranting, but much of this is also my self opening up about a great part of my life and history, because it just feels good to vent sometimes
The early years
I have seen a lot already, both good things and also bad things, the world is a constantly changing place not only around me, but around each and every one of us, 26 years built up with many experiences in life, and enjoyed many great things, some of which no longer exist today. For the first 15 years of my life, my health was virtually trouble free, perfectly healthy, no problems at all, and just ate food without having to think at all about carbohydrate content. I was also a kid with dreams of doing very big things, I wanted to go into the Army, be a pilot in the air force, or a race car driver in professional open wheel motorsports. Those were all ideas I dreamed of back during a much better time, to me that is simply known as, the 90’s. Back then I had great anticipation for the 21st centry thinking it would be a new golden age ahead, for me however, I had no idea it would be the complete opposite. Back then as a kid, I heard about bad medical conditions and diseases including Diabetes that has entered people’s lives, some deadly, some not so bad. My Uncle Michael who lived in San Francisco had died of Colon Cancer back in 1994. Until Type 1 diabetes took me by surprise, his Cancer was the only severe medical condition that had a direct impact on my life. it was a huge devastating blow not only to the family, but especially for me, he is one of the main people responsible for sparking my interest into so many things that I am now into today, cars, playing with motors and wires, racing, computers, games, all that fun stuff, he is the biggest reason I am who I am as far as my interests go.
Back then I foolishly felt that “Nah nothing will happen to me, I’m perfectly healthy so what could possibly go wrong???”… I thought I was invinceble, or so I thought.
But reality showed that, I was wrong, dead ■■■■■■■ wrong… I had no idea at the time what was coming my way.
The reason I got insured
Getting insured was a pretty funny story early on, in 1996 at the age of 11, a few friends and I got Go Karts, and began racing each other around the neighborhood, and also developed our own road course and oval circuit in my own 1 acher backyard. But out of the 3 of us, I was the most daring and pushed for the highest speeds, in excess of 40+ mph. While my dad got great laughs out of watching us all race wheel to wheel, my mother on the other hand began to rip her hair out and felt that health insurance is going to be very important to have encase I get into a bad accident and need to goto the hospital. Which totally does not surprise me today seeing how much of a crazy little kid I was, something was bound to go wrong at some point.
Later on something did go wrong, but not the type of accident we anticipated, I split one of my fingers wide open while replacing my Go Kart’s clutch as it had become burnt out after hours of madness. The split in my finger lead to not only unstoppable bleeding, but oil and other fluids had gotten into the gaping wound. My mom and sister took me to the Sonoma Valley hospital here and it cost my mom a whooping, $800! Right after that she said “thats it! I am insuring you!!” And so she did, and got me fully insured. This as you already know, pays off big time later on.
A very crippling illness strikes
In the spring of 1997 when I was 12, I caught the ultimate fever, it wasn’t just any ordinary fever but it was quite litterily like, a full blown flu, a bad cold, strep throat too, and a burning temperature staying above 100F for a solid month. I was in an out of the hospital a number of times, barely able to eat or drink. I had never been as sick as this, and still have not caught anything as bad as that to this very day. I was as sick as a dog from early March and up till middle of April. During this my mother had become extra thankful that she got me insured, otherwise this would have costed an arm and a leg in ER visits and bills. I even remember having a very hard time trying to watch the 1997 CART Race at Surfers Paradise Australia on TV because of how sick and dizzy I felt during that very race.
This very illness might have played a role in causing my case of type 1 Diabetes, that will come up again down below.
The beginning of the onset
In the fall of 2000, my mother took notice that I simply wasn’t the same anymore, I was becoming easily confused, disorented, and increasingly lazy.
Fast forward to my 16th birthday on the 28th of December, 3 days after christmas, and just like any other year, I had my self a big birthday cake! But this birthday was however different, after eating some of the birthday cake, something just wasn’t right, why was I becoming aggressivly thirsty???
The very day I had turned 16, was also the very first day that I had personally taken notice that something just was not right with me anymore. I began to lay off the soda and started just drinking water, endlessly, that birthday cake did a real number on me! And I did not even know it yet, it was like the kind of birthday present that nobody wanted, the first noticeable signs of a life threatening disease.
The worst year ever
Throughout all of life, the year of 2001 was the worst I had ever lived and seen, not only to what had happened to me, but the drastic changes that were taking place all around the world, changes that were not good…
On the eve of 2001, instead of going out with some friends to get drunk and have a good time (yes I was a partier), I layed around at home because not only was I not feeling well, I also wanted to stay close to a water supply. The clock just turned from 11:59pm to 12:00am, at the time I had no idea that I had just entered what was going to become, the absolute worest and most disasterous year of my life, this would be the year that had altered my entire life, away from what I had orignally wanted.
A week and a half go by, I steadily got worse. My Mom was also leaving town going to my Grand Father’s birthday of turning 84 at the time, he just turned 94 recently and is still here). She wouldn’t return until very early january 16th. Right before she left she said “did you tell you’re Dad that I’m leaving and that you need to stay at his house while I’m gone?” And I was like “Yep!”. While in fact I had not told him a thing, becaues I was way too lazy and feeling like crap at that point to bother traveling between the two places, he lived across town, they divorced back in 1994. So instead of being a good boy which was something I was well, never very good at in the first place, simply lied out of my ■■■ so I could ultimately stay at my mom’s house. The entire time she was gone I slept a lot, and when I was awake, played a lot of Counter-Strike (online game), and also ordered a number of pizzas from money she left behind for me to order food with. Twice while she was gone I ordered not only pizza, but also cheesey bread, a full 2 liter of pepsi or coke (non diet!) and chomped away at those. While she was also gone I had also come across another startling development which made me question the state of my health, as I stood on the scale, I thought to my self “Either this scale is wrong, or I just lost 10 pounds…” I was becoming increasingly thinner.
On the night of the 15th I made another Dominoes order of a pizza, more cheesy bread with ranch, more non diet soda, oh and lets not forget the Cinna Stix!!! At the time I felt that if I was loosing weight, ■■■■ it cant hurt to eat more fatty good food now can it?? Little did I know that I was effectivly killing my very own self by eating all that, at that my blood sugars had to of been at some incredibly dangerous numbers. I didn’t even make it a quarter of the way through that bottle of soda and I stopped, I the increasingly bad salty feeling throughout my entire body had reached an all time high of total misrable discomfort. From there on, I was chugging all the water that faucet would flow, and was in and out of the bathroom at least 5 or 6 times that night alone, I had no idea that I was dieing.
January 16th, the day of Diagnosis.
My mom had just returned home and found me looking as sick as a dog, a discolored face, lots of empty glasses in my room, and smelling extremely sugary. She got me more water as I layed in bed, then she went to grab the phone, and called up Kaiser, and told them what was going on. Shortly after that, she came into my room and said “grab your stuff, we’re going to Kaiser right now”. I got into the car and we left, off to the Petaluma Kaiser medical center. As soon as we got there, they wasted no time and took me in immedately. The Nurse began asking me a series of questions such as “are you drinking a lot of water? Recent weight loss? Frequent bathroom visits?” and so on, I answered Yes to pretty much every question. The nurse left the room and returned with minutes with what appeared to be, the first ever blood glucose meter I had ever seen. She said “John I am going to need one of you’re fingers”. I wasn’t happy about her using a lancing device on me but at that point I felt too rotton to even resist.
She made the lancing punch, squeezed a drop of blood, put it on the strip and meter, then she waited a bit, then suddenly, the look on her face went from normal to just, bad… very bad… She didn’t say a word to me, she simply turned around and walked right out of the room. Now I was confused, I had no idea what on earth was going on with me. Within a couple of minutes, the Nurse, along with the doctor and my own Mom with a very distressed look on her face had entered the room, I could just tell that this was going to be bad, they apparently told her something. The doctor looked me in the eyes and told me that I now have Diabetes and you are in extreme danger at this very time. At first, I didn’t know what to think, let alone I also had no idea what the disease really was at the time either, all I knew was that I had some very serious condition and that I required immediate medical attention.
I received my ever insulin shot, but at the time I was also a chicken ■■■■ for needles, I always hated needles as a kid. But all of the sudden I was being told that there will be many, many more of these shots up ahead. After that I was being sent to the San Rafael hospital down in Marin county, where I would end up spending the next 5 nights at.
The entire first day was just getting my BG’s back under control and down to more normal levels, and that phase was going on exactly 10 years ago from this very moment that I now type this. What they began to tell me after that was more than I ever wanted to know, the training of the syringes, needles, dosing, Sensitivity factors, Carb/insulin ratios, you all know what I’m talking about. It was now my turn to be introduced to the world of being a Type 1 Diabetic, a world that currently has only a one way road into, and no road to exit. I learned that I was going to be using insulin for the rest of my life.
I did not entirely know what to think, and I had no idea of the crazy new life that awaited me ahead, ER visits later, passing out in public, around friends, in the car, on a trail, things I never thought I would one day experience.
Meanwhile, my parents and my sister were hit very hard by this, it took the entire family by surprise, my sister even flew out from her home Chicago to see me. I was the only Diabetic in the entire family at the time, and my mom’s side of the family is huge. My diagnosis set off a ripple effect across the large family and they all began to freak out getting them selves tested to make sure they were ok, thankfully all of them were good, everyone was in normal condition, except for me of course… I was asking my self, why did I have to be the one??? Out of everybody in the family and not to wish this on anybody of course, but couldn’t of this just gotten someone else who didn’t have dreams that would get shut down by this??? No I guess it didn’t, the disease had to just go pick off somebody who had plans which required this medical condition to not exist, and that unlucky person was me.
Theorizing the cause
While we were all discussing the causes of Type 1 Diabetes, one of the doctors had brought up the theory that it is very possible that my 1 month strep/cold/fever illness back when I was 12 may have been the cause of my antibodies turning hostile towards me, after all it was a very very bad illness, one that could have easily killed me back then had we not stayed on top of it. I never would have thought that anything even as simple as a flu, could potentially cause autoimmune problems to develop.
But then again, this is only a theory, but it is a very interesting one. All of the way up to this very day, I still wonder if that illness back from 1997 had played a direct role in leading me into the condition I now live with today. Sadly though, we will never fully know for sure.
Life changed, forever
In the hospital, I had just become aware that quite literally all of the major things in life I wanted to do, had just gone right up in smoke for me.
Poof, gone! Forget about being an airline pilot, forget about being in the military which was a thing I had looked so much forward to. And most certainly a race car driver, even if well trained, no team would put a diabetic in a car out on the track without knowing what my blood sugar would do. Plus at the time I had not been pursuing it much which in some ways turned out to be a good thing not just due to the disease, but other reasons such as the deteriorating of American Open wheel Racing, I’ll mention that part just up ahead.
Exiting the hospital into an entirely different life, and world…
This was just the start of this very bad year, When I went into the hospital, we had a very good president in the white house who actually knew how to run a country, Bill Clinton! But on the morning of the day I was getting out of the hospital, Bush was being inaugurated, as I sat there in the hospital bed with an already disgusted look on my face. I step into that hospital with one president, and stepped out with an entirely different President, that in its self was another huge change, thats a no brainer here, from the very day forward I was released from the hospital, a president began to destroy my very own homeland, the very place I love so much.
I felt like my life had become totally flipped upside down, but as far as other life and world events, this was just the beginning.
The beginning Collapse of CART
More things were to go wrong the year of 2001, For those of you who dont know me well, I was a huge fan of CART/Champ car (Championship Auto Racing Teams) which ran into huge troubles in the year of 2001 and it began to deteriorate, Texas Motor Speedway incident of excessive G-Forces, Zanardi Lost his legs at the German 500, Roger Penske ditched CART following the 2001 season to the IRL. This was a series of Racing that I had to live for, I loved everything about it.
This was the beginning of the 21st century for crying out loud! We are supposed to be advancing forward, not going completely backwards to low tech cars like the IRL and the obsolete tech NASCAR. But all of this in its self is another story, so for anybody who even cares to see more light shed on the biggest blunder in the history of sports http://sports.espn.go.com/rpm/nascar/cup/columns/story?columnist=hinton_ed&id=5195237 that explains it all. But I will say, seeing the loss of CART in its final years after this was another huge loss to my life personally, This was a series that I had closely followed since my childhood at 8 years old, and I could never even begin to imagine what it would be like to live someday without it. Never again will I get to see the greatest cars on earth running at speeds which overshadows today’s crap that now exists out on the track. That was just one more reason why 2001 was the year from hell.
Attempted out of state move
But it does not stop there, oh no. Then in September of that year my mom, who I felt at the time did not care about how I felt about it, decided she wanted to move not only her self, but also attempt to move me as well to Bellingham Washington, besides the summers, I cannot tolerate the cold and endless raining type of climate, she tried to convert me away from being a California kid and wanted me to adapt my entire life to Washington. I was however flown between Bellingham Washington and home in California, so I could see my real friends and enjoy the place that I actually belonged. But as for Bellingham, I hated the place, plain and simple, suddenly I’m away from all my friends back at home in California, where a lot of the fun was going on at. I did later meet some people in Washington, but certainly not the kind my parents would ever want me hanging around at all, and so I kept it secrete, and found my self being introduced to some very bad and destructive new habits. To this very day It never ceases to amaze me how oblivious my mother actually is about how plentiful and easily available serious drugs are in the state of Washington compared to home in Sonoma. During the miserable pouring rain or freezing temperatures, just like how it is most of the year there, what did I find you’re self doing to pass the time by? Not to mention that it also helped me escape my anger towards how much life was beginning to truly suck, and I began to question whether or not if life was worth continuing if it was being forced into unhappiness. It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. This went on for a while, from 2001 up into 2002, but after seeing some other very bad things happened with others involved along the way, I decided to separate my self from it all, and get the hell away
Long story short, it was obviously apparent that Washington was truly not a place for me to live. My mother swore it is a much better place to grow up than California, but she didn’t have the slightest clue what was really going on.
I kicked the drug habit, I left her and came back to home to live with my dad in California where I truly belong, minor or not I began taking matters into my own hands. To me I was born here, and I will die here, and that is the way it is going to be. She happily lives on with her life up there, and see each other from time to time. But we will never again live together, especially in Bellingham Washington.
`
While my Mother did do a pretty good job with me in the early years, it wasn’t until the whole move stunt she pulled on me where she began to ■■■■ up, she really really screwed up, and the good times of us living together had come to an end.
But as far as that went, if I was smarter at the time, I would have made my stand and refused to go, even if it went against her custody power. I very much regret cooperating with her on going there, by not going there I would have saved my self a ton of grief and trouble, some times parents begin to make very bad and costly decisions without even realizing it. But she made her choice, She had chosen her new home, and I already had my home set long before all of this began.
More disasters take place
Back to during the year of 2001, 9-11 had suddenly taken the world by storm, and a very tragic one it was, that is another day I will not forget.
2001 was the worst year for me known to date, last year was bad too but it couldn’t come even close to what 01 was like.
I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes
A President took office who lacked even the most simple brain functions needed to run this country properly. Bush I have two simple words for you, ■■■■ you…
then CART began to spiral down
then 9-11 happened
getting moved to a place I should have never have been allowed to see
It seems like that entire year just crashed down right on top of me, and I had to drag my self out from underneath all the rubble and was forced to reevaluate my entire course on life, gone was the dream of going into the Army, Aircraft Pilot, Racing driver. My greatest talents suddenly made almost useless…
This is the main reason I hate this disease so much. I loath it, I despise it, and I hate it with every part of me that there is. And what also totally kills me is the fact that my very own body had done this to me, and even if caught early, there is no stopping this disease, unpreventable, unstoppable, incurable, and stuck with me for the rest of my life…
Premature pump attempt of 2002
This is another dark part of my life with the disease, and unfortunately my Mom once again was making a very serious mistake. My Nurse Practitioner at the time began suggesting an Insulin Pump, but I was never a fan of the idea at the time. I felt insulin pump technology was too premature at the time. On the other hand my mom was totally jumping up and down about the idea falsely convinced that it would magically solve all of my problems. But me on the other hand, I had no interest in the thing, I felt like I was achieving perfect control on MDI alone and thus I felt “If it aint broke, dont fix it!”. That was my argument towards the debate, but I was also only 17. And do you know what that means? I dont have the ultimate decision making power yet, but I was turning 18 in about 6 months away. My mother went ahead an ordered the pump without my full approval, it was a Medtronic Minimed 508 pump, which is a complete useless clunker compared to my Animas Ping, which I feel is superior over any other pump on the market today. But back then, that MM508 was supposed to be the real deal. They argued that this thing was supposed to relieve my life of all stresses, ■■■■■■■■, it was the complete opposite. That pump felt like a huge ball and chain attached to me whenever it came to going swimming. One of my top concerns was, how exactly am I supposed to go into a pool with something like this? The nurses response was simply “you dont…”. Ok, lets just stop right there, how on earth is this thing going to improve my life if I am suddenly limited in what I can do by carrying this thing??? A non waterproof pump alone completely defeats the purpose of having a pump in the first place! Sure I could disconnect it for some time to enter the pool, but that resulted in serious BG spikes soaring into the 300’s in little time. At least with MDI, having active lantus made a problem like that non existent. Instead of having to jump back out after a few minutes, small bolus, then back in. Not to mention some girls also didn’t like the look of the infusions, it scares some of them away! Now I was real mad, and that wasn’t all, I also had huge BG control problems with that piece of ■■■■. It seems like I had to bolus way more insulin than MDI would in order to maintain a BG of under 200. Very recently I have begun to wonder if that pump even dosed accurately, because when I jumped off of MDI recently to the Ping, the transition was virtually trouble free and everything worked the way it was supposed to. But, back to that MM pump. Things only got worse with that thing.
One afternoon, I had a huge incident take place with the pump, and I nearly died. I was at my Dad’s house at the time in Sonoma, and nobody was home when it happened.
I woke up on my floor, very dazed, confused, splitting head ache, and totally disoriented. As I came back, I suddenly noticed the hypo emergency glucogon kit sticking out of my leg. I suddenly realized that I had passed out into an extremely severe and life threatening hypoglycemic state. Somehow I still had enough in me to get the hypo kit deployed, and was able to rip the infusion out of my self, but I have no memory of doing it. As I woke up, my BG’s were still in the 40’s. I had to drag my self to the kitchen, drink some soda and juice to get it back up more. It was a frightening experience, a memory I do not enjoy having in my head at all. And what bothers me the most is that my very own mother was responsible for it, she allowed her self to get brain washed thinking the pump would make the disease just, disappear…
Nothing makes this disease disappear, nothing! At least not yet…
As a result of this accident, I lost complete trust in everybody who surrounded me, I also did not want the attention all around me again like when I was first Diagnosed. But another problem was, I was a minor, I was only 17 at the time. And because of that, anything I say to my doctors, my parents also know, and if just one of them found out about it, that would cause a huge huge stir in the family once again, the kind of attention I do not want any of… I felt the only way to keep the accident secrete, was to go silent, and by doing that I had kicked everybody out of the picture. I no longer talked honestly with the doctors, and denied any suspicion of something going when they asked. I took the pump straight to the Nurse Practitioner and told her to take the pump. She said she was not allowed to take it, but I stated that if she did not take it, I would just toss it out some where, or introduce a bat to the thing to make it unusable. I left it and its box right there at the appointment, and I left. And I never looked back at that pump again. My mom gave me a huge amount of ■■■■ over it, claiming she was working hard for me to make things better, and the amount of money that had been wasted. I told her that it was her who decided to waste the money, not me. It was her choice to risk buying the pump. Had I just been able to try out the pump instead, such as a loaner unit like I got for an Animas Ping test drive recently. I would have turned around and handed that MM pump right back and said thanks for letting me try, but its no good to me. And this disaster would have been totally avoided from the start.
Post 2002
The following years had been a roller coaster, my glucose control had been good at times, and very bad at other times, at times I didn’t take care of my self properly and landed my self in some extremely bad situations, some from mistakes, others from ignorance towards the importance of tracking my self correctly. I do not in any way enjoy waking up in hospitals, or surrounded by people and paramedics/firefighters as I wake up, the near death experiences I have had multiple times, nor do I enjoy the amount of responsibilities that are now stuck to me… I had become more sluggish with my control because I wanted to stay away from the lows as much as possible, and I ran my self higher on purpose. Further killing my self which I had been doing for 8 solid years.
I have lived two entirely different worlds of health, 15 years of being trouble and complication free, and now 10 full years of living a life in which I now have to devote a huge amount of never ending attention just to keep my very self alive… I did not have any of this in mind, not at all. But I am glad to still be here, despite life being totally nothing like it was back in the 90s, its hard to believe that was over 11 years ago now since we finished that decade, and what a great decade that was. I hate to say this, but this last decade has mostly sucked big time, It was nothing like I had anticipated. Not just for my self, but the world around us is not the same place either, No body can deny that.
I have survived a very rough time with the disease, I have officially cleared 10 years of this medical wreck of mine. And I can defiantly feel the difference inside of my self between being a diabetic, and my old non diabetic self. I also feel that I have lost some brain cells as a result from the near death lows and seizures I’ve been through as well, and maybe a little from other things… My overall brain power is noticeably less than it once was. Hypoglycemia has done a very serious number on me. Kidney pains occasionally show up, despite normal kidney lab test results, frozen feet as well, a problem I once thought was never possible.
The Ping
In the past few months I decided to make some serious changes with how I handled my self and the disease. For a long time I had despised the idea of using an insulin pump, but in the more recent times I had become aware that I had a new growing control problem, two entirely different basal insulin needs, some days I had serious resistance to insulin, other day I quite virtually, had none… My sensitivity randomly changes now, lantus served me very well for over 8 years, but the time had come for something better, something that would allow tighter back ground insulin control instead of the lantus stuck inside me with no way to adjust it. One of my sole requirements of accepting a pump was for it to be waterproof, in other words, be able to take it anywhere without having to worry about water damage, like the pool, the river, the beach, and those pesky water park rides at Six Flags near by. MDI for me had bypassed that problem up until I began reading about Animas pumps, and the fact that they are not only waterproof, but also warrantied against any leaks! This initally grabbed my attention, I began to pester a number of people on TuD here, as well as searched all over google comparing safety records of the Animas.
Long story short, the Animas pump won me completely over, in my opinion, no other pump is worth any consideration at all compared to this one, all but for one exception of the Omnipod, and that it is tubeless. But that is more of a personal preference, for me personally the tubes dont bother me at all, except for those occasional times where it gets caught on something that I am walking by and yanks on my infusion site. Ugh! and the feeling of that never gets old. But for those of who want tubeless, the Pod is another good pump to consider.
This next decade, I am hoping for better. Its time for me to push my self a lot further to get more enjoyment out of life, do new things, see new places far from home, sky dive, bungee jump off a bridge, crazy ■■■■ many people wouldn’t even consider.
Looking onward to what lies ahead
The next 10 years for me I hope will be better. I do hope a cure will be achieved at some point, but I will not hold my breath for it either. But there is nothing more I want than to get to live like I once did, because that would make every day feel like a total luxury, the luxury of having to do nothing and let my body do the job its self of managing my blood glucose levels.
Only time can tell what comes next, For me, I have no idea what to expect in the coming years, exactly as how I felt 10 years ago from this very moment, where I also had no idea what kind of twists and turns that had awaited me in the times after I get out of the hospital there.
Life is full of strange and twisting surprises, some good, some not.
Either way, I will not just sit at home waiting for something to go wrong, I will get out there and continue my life as it is right now.
When your time comes, it will come.
So until then
I will cross my fingers
and hope for the best…
