Looking for someone like me

I am 63, T1 since age 58. I am very active and eat a healthy diet. I have a hard time keeping an even blood sugar. Would love to engage with someone similar to me.

I'd like to think that everyone here is similar to you in certain ways. The only way to find out is to engage in discussions and have conversations with people. That is after all how we make friends. In my view, what we all share is our diabetes, our age, our diabetes type and what we do to exercise and eat only reflects an aspect of who we are. We are all much more than that.

I absolutely agree with bsc...and I'm 63 and was diagnosed at 58! I eat very healthy as well - though I had to redefine what that meant on diagnosis. I differ only in the "very active part". Hard to know what you mean by "hard to keep an even blood sugar" - more details please! As a Type 1 fluctuations can often be a part of the picture - we're all different in what that entails. But if it is constant then perhaps you need to make some changes in your dosing? Can you give us some examples?

I agree that age, diabetes, exercise and eating habits only reflect an aspect of who we are. I posted my question precisely so that I could engage in disucssion about this. I have had a very hard time finding any people in my age group with T1 diabetes. My only personal acquaintance is a co-worker who was diagnosed at age 4. He has been a big help, but his life-long journey is different than my relatively recent encounter with the disease.

By difficulty with keeping an even blood sugar, I mean readings that range from 48 to over 400 with no seeming explanation. The biggest challenge is with exercise. I am on vacation this week and determined to make the same bike ride every day and see if I could figure out a good way to manage the insulin pump. The first day was not so good - 65 - 157. Yesterday and today I rode the 22 miles with much better success - all readings in the 100-130 range. I turned off the basal insulin and drank some juice along the way with no bolus. I still wonder if another day will look different.

A couple of years ago an organized ride that was 60 miles one day and 60 miles back the next. The first day I was staving off low readings all day and through the night. The next day I was chasing highs.

I know this is an unpredictable disease and that there are no pat answers. It is a challenge for me because I am a logical thinker and like it when I do "a" and get "b" with some degree of certainty.

Appreciate your responses and hope I will learn more!

I'm 57 and nearly 9 months into this new life style. If I've learned anything it's you need to take every little bit of information as to how your body reacts to food, insulin, activity, etc. and then use that only as a guide for the next day. Since this manual method of operating our bodies ability to use glucose to fuel itself is dependent on factors that we don't always take into account. With the pump and lots of lessons learned, I'm getting better at this. It's a slow process. Take time to 'listen' to your body, doctors and CDE's advise. Also, the wisdom that is available here from fellow D's.

Yes, from all the reading I do on here I've heard that exercise definitely throws a monkey wrench in everything and all you can do is trial and error/trial and error to find your own patterns and then hope you can replicate them...which, actually, it sounds like you have had a good experience doing.

I am also logical and spent a good part of my first year on insulin working hard to "get it right" and then slowly coming to the realization that there was never going to be one moment that I hit on the exact formula or formulas that would yield the perfect result every time. I do all my own tweaking of doses when I see patterns - more basal than I:C which stays quite stable. But then I hit a period of time where everything goes all to hell for no discernible reason and it's back to the drawing board. I've been on a pump for a year and a half which does bring a whole new set of variables but I still find it much more effective to be able to have variable basal rates and to bolus exactly to the decimal point, not have to round up or down.

And yeah, there is definitely a big difference between the experience of people diagnosed in childhood and now in their 30s say and those of us diagnosed in adulthood. Most people we ran into randomly our own age are type 2's who are dealing with a different set of issues. I did start a type 1 women's group and there was a wide range of ages and times of diagnosis which was very enjoyable.

Welcome to my world !! :(