Diabetes entered my life quietly. About one year before diagnosis, I took a tumble while downhill skiing. My ski came off, spun around and abraded my leg through my ski pants. That abrasion took months to heal. It made me wonder but wasn’t curious enough to pursue the issue. It did eventually heal but I just wrote it off as one of those unsolved but inconsequential mysteries in life.
The diagnosis
I was 29 years old that year. I ran my own small business, but my passion was life in the outdoors. I lived in Idaho and loved to camp, ski, back-country hike, bicycle, canoe, and white-water raft.
I sold my small business that summer, turned 30, and enrolled in a two-year electronics technical program starting that fall. With solid math skills, I started the program and excelled in my first quarter’s studies. Over the Christmas holiday I took to the slopes and thoroughly enjoyed my school break.
Returning to the classroom in January 1984 presented unexpected challenges. I was having a hard time understanding the concepts of transistor theory. My brain was like mud. It had been my habit to sit in the back of the class but I had to move to the front row to overcome some blurriness in my vision. I remember one day bicycling home from school and I was so tired when I entered my house that I just laid down on the floor and drifted off to sleep.
An insatiable thirst and frequent urination rounded out my classic diabetes symptoms. One of my friends raised the possibility of diabetes and I soon found myself in my doctor’s office. Blood was drawn, the doctor called with his diagnosis, and I ended up in the hospital. My doc was an internal medicine practitioner, but lucky for me, made the correct T1D diagnosis. Looking back I see that I was a slow onset of diabetes as an adult or LADA as it became known much later.
Early, archaic therapy
I started on a once per day shot of NPH insulin. My first hypo happened in the hospital and I drank some juice to treat it. BG chemstrips served as my first blood glucose test strips. These strips were read visually with a timed comparsion to a color panel on the side of the container.
The one shot of NPH insulin soon transitioned to two daily NPH injections. Not too long after that I started to add Regular insulin before meals. I graduated from my two year electronics program and found work with a major commercial airline in California. With that move came a change in doctors, my first time with an endocrinologist. That doc liked insulin pumps but I was reluctant at first. I tried my first pump in 1987 and have been on them ever since. Blood glucose meters became a main-stay of my therapy.
During these years I would strong-arm my therapy with increasingly higher and higher doses of insulin. As my insulin usage crept up, so did my weight. I was damned good at squelching the ever present hypoglycemia threat with suitable treats and the inevitable rebound. I took up bicycling as my main sport during this time. It kept me in great shape but I had some hellacious lows while cycling. I was lucky to survive some of these. I enjoyed cycling trips to Utah, Colorado, Oregon, Baja California, and Ireland. One of the appeals of cycling is that I could eat almost anything I wanted on my various excursions.
A complication and a new commitment
In the 1990s, the dot-com boom drove up rents to unaffordable levels in the SF Bay Area. That prompted me to take up sailing in 2001 and move aboard a 33-foot sloop-rigged sailboat.
I adopted a Dexcom 7+ CGM in 2009 and still use a CGM to this day. I retired in 2011 and started to experience some troubling digestive problems in early 2012. With a visit to the Mayo Clinic, I discovered that I had gastroparesis (GP) or delayed stomach emptying. This is one of the complications of long-term diabetes. It was my ultimate wake-up call.
I had started reading online and at TuDiabetes around 2009. During that period TuD erupted in raging debates about the use and value of low-carb eating to people with diabetes. I followed these debates but did not seriously consider such a radical change in eating until I faced the GP diagnosis. I knew from the findings of the Diabetes Complications and Control Trial that tighter BG control was often marked with fewer complications or slower progression of complications. I jumped into the low carb way of eating with both feet. I was not about to spend my new retirement faced with a parade of debilitating diabetes complications.
Low carb pays high dividends
Eating fewer carbs immediately paid dividends. I cut my insulin usage in half while drastically curtailing BG variability. I enjoyed more energy as I lost 25 pounds with little effort. With my CGM I could watch the drastic improvements in my average BG, the reduction of my standard deviation (variability), and most importantly the huge increase of my time in range. It’s not unusual for me to spend 90% of my time between 65-140 mg/dl.
As a side note, I was paired up with a hypoglycemia alert dog in 2010. I never had a dog before and Norm is a perfect fit for me. He’s a 58-pound Yellow Labrador Retriever. Not only does he alert to low blood sugar but his comforting presence surprises me. His companionship and emotional support rounds out my life.
If you have read this extended diatribe this far, I thank you. We all have a story to tell and I hope to see others write theirs in the near future. In the meantime, I will continue to participate here as I value this community!
None of them are very good at figuring out when my bg goes low… fortunately, I’ve always been pretty good at sussing that one out. Like the time my husband and I were hiking Boynton Canyon in Sedona. I had only recently checked my bg with a glucometer (and it was 193) so when I started feeling a little light headed a half hour into the hike, my first thought was, “Is this what a vortex feels like?” My second thought, though, was, “Check your dexcom.” Thank the Heavens for a pragmatic inner voice, right?