Feeling Comfortable with Diabetes

It took alot of time to get used to it for me and now that’s my problem again. I really hatwe to fall low in front of anybody but the first time around it took me about 6 months to get used to the idea that I was “special”. Good Luck to you.

That first one is really scary. You wake up and don’t know what’s going on. I really hate the fact that everybody else freaks out over it. I have slowly gotten used to the lows now. Back when I first took it you couldn’t cheack you bg at home.

I was diagnosed about 4 months ago but it was kind of gradual. My nurse practitioner doesn’t believe in prediabetes so when my A1C came back 7.2 she told me I had diabetes. I went to see an endocrinologist who told me I was perfectly normal because my fasting and 2 hour numbers were in the normal range. I saw a dietitian who told me to eat 240g of carbs a day and test after 2 hours. Well, my 2 hour numbers were great- around 100-120. But I still was thirsty all the time and exhausted. I did my own research, tested myself at an hour and found that I was spiking to 180 on tiny amounts of carbs. I lost way too much weight because I couldn’t get enough calories on the low carb diet. Finally I had the antibody tests done and was diagnosed with Type 1. I have islet cell antibodies. The first couple of months I thought about it every minute. I would wake up in the night and my first thought was “I have diabetes.” Now I might go several hours without thinking about it. I try to take a break from testing every now and then by eating very low carb meals and not doing a bolus and it also helps that I started back at work after a sabbatical year and can have another identity for several hours a day. When I am with the kids, my teaching is much more important than my diabetes. The other thing that helps is this site. Before I found you all, I would worry about something and talk it to death with people who really couldn’t offer much advice. Now I can get answers to a lot of my questions and that frees me up to get on with the rest of my life.

Right now I worry about it all the time. I worry that I’m losing too much weight, I worry because I can’t sleep, I worry because my numbers SEEM higher than they used to. I never really tested that much until May … and now I’m pretty obsessed with it.

How does one get “normal” about having this disease?