Today marks my fifteenth lap around the sun with type 1 diabetes.
When I look back on my journey, I realise that there was a time where diabetes management was a real ‘focus’ of my life. Trying to adjust to my new ‘normal’ that nobody around me truly understood. Meticulously trying so hard to get things right. Experimenting with food, activity, new tools and technologies. And experiencing a lot of feelings of frustration and loneliness when I couldn’t get the perfection that I was so badly chasing.
It’s probably more the other way around these days. If I don’t have the site change reminder on my pump switched on, there’s a good chance 5 or 6 days will go by before I remember to change it. There’ll be Fridays where I leave the house only to realise I have to ration the 20 units of insulin left in my cartridge because I ignored the warning to replace it last night. It can feel hard to try and accommodate diabetes as I get older, as my career progresses and as I take on more responsibilities in life.
I constantly wonder whether I’m doing enough to look after myself. No more evident than the lead up to my annual eye exam on Tuesday, which has turned into more of a one-year-and-four month exam. Or during a long afternoon or evening working, where I’ve completely forgotten that I have diabetes for several hours only to see that I’ve been cruising above 15.
Undoubtedly, living with diabetes today is easier than it was fifteen years ago. No more evident than yesterday’s software update to my insulin pump, which now gives me the ability to administer insulin from my iPhone without having to pull my pump out from underneath my clothes. The insulin, tools and technologies that I have at my disposal definitely help me to manage my diabetes in a bit more ‘cruise control.’
This afternoon, I went for a long walk along the Coast. It was the most glorious late autumn day, where the sea and surrounds were bathed in the golden light of the late afternoon sun. Yesterday it was a run, but today I just felt like a walk. Getting outside every day is one of my non-negotiables. It’s one of the best things to do for a time out from the throes of life, and to keep my mental health in check.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that those burdens are still there. Diabetes is still a burden. I guess after fifteen years, I’m kind of grateful that the tools and technologies that I have at my disposal give me a bit more room to think about the bigger picture.
To think more often about those broader things that I can do to continue to best support and challenge myself to endure, as I commence another lap around the sun.
Hi Frank. Glad to see you have reached 15 years without apparent troubles. I am sure your positive attitude is an important component of that. When I reflect back on now 58 years on insulin, from age 13 (1966)- I now see what the diet of most of those years has in part created – complications – pesky ones like trigger fingers, carpal tunnel, arthritis, some retinopathy which receded and now is creeping back, cataracts and this year – the biggies appeared like a narrowed coronary artery and of arteries in my right leg plus autonomic neuropathy. I have been on ketogenic diet for 7 years with HBA1cs of 5.2% but that leaves the other 51 years on high carb diet. But why do I write about these things? In April this year Dr Bernstein died at age 90, (78 years with T1D.) And maybe some shoulder cuff problem as his only remaining diabetes-related complication. His Calcium score, that test of coronary arteries, was recorded as 2. Yet, diagnosed with T1D in 1946, it was from 1969, at 23 years of T1D with accompanying, recorded kidney, eye, muscle-skeletal and vagus nerve complications, he began using a glucometer, developed the basal-bolus insulin regime and adopted the very low carb diet. see his ebook: Dr Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution 2011 – advocating low and very low carb diets (T1 and T2D) and normal blood sugars (e.g. 4 to 6.5 mmol/l) and HBA1c ( 6 or 7% and nonsense post-prandial limit of 10 mmol/l bsls?? The effects of some hypo remedies and the polyol pathway are concerns for another time.