Other than diabetes, do you live with any other health issues?

Other than diabetes, do you live with any other health issues?

  • yes
  • no

0 voters

I have other autoimmune stuffā€¦ Hashimotoā€™s, vitiligo, retinitis pigmentosa (RP), also skin cancers from living in the tropics.

Caleb has a peanut allergy.

Just had a kidney transplant so I will on autoimmunestuff(:slight_smile: ) forever.

Yup. Graves Disease (= Thyroid gone); Psoriatic Arthritis along with scalp psoriasis; spinal damage at C4-C5 level, messes up my balance and coordination; plus some mysterious ailment that randomly causes my BP to drop down to the 80/40 range for an hour or two (gotta lie down til it passes). I donā€™t even want to know what causes it. Canā€™t handle another diagnosis! Glad to be alive!

4 Likes

Hi earthling. Iā€™m new to the forum. I also have Graves. My mistake was to let my then dr treat me with 2 ablations. I always considered myself a healthy T1 but now I canā€™t work, lose wt, and have difficulty maintaining control. I have symptoms of both hyper and hypo thyroid disease. Itā€™s the worst. At least I know Iā€™m not the only one. Thanks for sharingšŸ˜Š

4 Likes

Hi @earthling and @ana46, I have Gravesā€™ as well. Iā€™ve been taking anti-thyroid medication for the past two and a half years, no ablation although Iā€™ve been offered it numerous times. My thyroid is currently low so trying to get that re-balanced with my medication. Iā€™ve also found my diabetes much more difficult to control since diagnosis, Iā€™ve had problems with fatigue and muscle aches/tiredness, and I also experience symptoms of both hypo- and hyperthyroidism, sometimes at the same time! It has definitely thrown me for a loop that I am still trying to recover from.

I also deal with more than just Gravesā€™ and Type 1ā€¦ It gets so exhausting at times. If itā€™s not one condition out of whack itā€™s another, or even better, two or three acting up all at once. I am handling it all, but I am out of sick days at work, and if anything else came along I think I would take short-term disabilityā€¦ Sadly, Iā€™m in my 30s so I am pretty sure that at some point other autoimmune goodness will come along to join the party.

1 Like

Nope, just diabetes for almost 48 years

1 Like

@ana46,@Jen. Really good (although I also feel sorry) to hear that you two struggle with this as well. I donā€™t know what kind of thyroid replacement med you take, but for me the desiccated pig thyroid gets the best results. I take the the generic called NP thyroid, and have to cover it myself because Medicare and Medicaid wonā€™t (not made by Big Pharma :rage:). Synthroid and levathroid always left me feeling awful so I tried the old fashioned stuff which feels better. Exhaustion is my middle name too, Jen. Argh. I hope you can keep your thyroid. Graves is a creepy disease.

My diabetes was much easier before too. Iā€™m considered 100% disabled by social services, but donā€™t feel like that. I guess youā€™d call me a ā€œhomemakerā€. I do like my life, though, grow a big garden, try to eat well and drink more beer than anyone like me should. Good luck to both of you, and when the storms of menopause blow in, remember one day things will calm down.

1 Like

deleredā€¦

Diabetes Type 1 was the first one I had (which I was diagnosed with in early elementary school about 30 years ago), but since then I have gained several others, the most significant being a seizure disorder, Adisonā€™s disease, and Celiac Sprue (I may have not give the complete technical names correctly, so guilty as charged for that). The Diabetes is definitely the one that is most noticeable during my daily life, but the seizure disorder probably had the biggest long-term effect because it made my doctors not let me get a driverā€™s license, and made it very hard to survive college (although I eventually did) and get a job.

1 Like

Hashimotoā€™s and autoimmune atrophic gastritis. Also a hyperreactive bronchial system, which manifests itself in persistent dry coughing after a cold. And a grass pollen allergy, which is rather benign though (mostly stuffy or running nose).

Graves disease

As well as T1D: 55 years, I have

  1. MMN (Multi focal motor neuropathy) 30 years
  2. SLE (Systemic Lupus erythematosus) 10 years
  3. CHF (Congestive Heart Failure) 2 years
  4. Pulmonary Hypertension 2 years

Aside from that Iā€™m as healthy as can be :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Separate from but still related to diabetes I also have another autoimmune condition, Wegenerā€™s Vasculitis. (There is a proposal now to rename it, since Dr. Alois Wegener was a Nazi, but to me that seems like removing George Washington from the dollar bill because he didnā€™t believe in global warming. We are all products of our time and place and Iā€™m sure some future era will condemn us all for not donating all our surplus money to save the worldā€™s starving people.)

Many of us could add other diseases which are sometimes called ā€˜late sequelaeā€™ of diabetes, such as diabetic neuropathy or diabetic nephropathy, but whether these just are part of the natural history of diabetes or should be characterized as separate entities is open to dispute.

Itā€™s already been renamed and maybe you should get with the times too. Not everyone was a Nazi in the 1930s and I have no idea how participating in or collaborating with a genecidol regime is equivalent to having an opinion about global warming.

1 Like

Not everyone from the 1930s was a Nazi, but many living in Nazi Germany were. Today it is perfectly acceptable in the modern western world to upgrade your television set by spending the same amount of money that would keep someone in Africa from starving for a year because that is how the range and nature of moral duties are now conceived. If people stopped and thought about it a moment, perhaps they would see investing in a new tv rather than a life as wrong, but the moral medium in which we exist does not encourage that reflection. Some could argue that it is the moral equivalent of murder to buy the tv, but not in this culture or in this time. We tend to attribute to ourselves a perfection we donā€™t deserve when we demand that everyone else transcend their time and place even though we donā€™t require that of ourselves, and instead we just persist in our existing and inadequate moral conventions.

The whole past is tainted with deviations from our current moral standards, but those insisting on a new name for Caesarian Sections because Julius Caesar didnā€™t believe in womenā€™s rights just introduce a vicious regress in which all historical names will have to be changed because the people designated by them were imperfect by our standards. Since Wegener was the first properly to identify the disease, and since it is common practice to name diseases after the person initially describing them, from Bellā€™s Palsy to von Recklinghausenā€™s Syndrome, we should recognize this as an honor limited to crediting the doctor or scientist with the first adequate description of the condition, not with being a perfect person.

I had ulcerative colitis and had my large intestines taken out 24 years ago. I have an internal pouch that is mildly inflamed. After I had my colon taken out, I was diagnosed with type 1 a few years later.

Whether someoneā€™s artistic or scientific work can be separated from their awful ideas or actions is a fair debate, but you are using false equivalencies to make your point. Nazism was not a cultural standard at one time from which humanity evolved; it was an abhorrent movement from which some of its perpetrators at least were put to justice. You couldā€™ve made your point more accurately by pointing out that Washington owned human beings, a practice as disgusting as Nazism.

1 Like

I only used Washington being removed from the dollar bill for not having believed in global warming as an example to show the absurdity of blaming people for what their circumstances did not allow them to subscribe to, not because I thought it was in any way equivalent to Nazism. But the example of him being a slave owner is more nearly equivalent, if less funny, though I think the point to take from all of this is that people should be honored for what they did and if the other things they did or believed were not honorable then donā€™t honor them for that. Otherwise we shall only have statues of people who were perfect, which would amount ultimately to having no statues at all.