All Pumped Up

All Pumped Up: My Life as a Diabetic

Author's Note: This is a work in progress, and will be adding more as my therapy continues, so pardon if this sounds a little incomplete.

~MCB

         I had thought that the summer of 1995 was going to be sweet as ever, however, it turned out to be so sweet that my life would be forever changed. It was the end of my eighth grade school year, and I was looking forward to a summer vacation full of sleeping in late, pigging out on my favorite treats, and just being the normal teenage boy. I remember it being hot that year, so when we had a family get-together, it didn’t seem strange at the time that I was quite thirsty. I’d go through several cans of soda in one sitting. For some reason I couldn’t quench the insatiable thirst that I had, but I figured it was because of the summer heat, and so ignored it.

         It wasn’t until I was having lunch with my mother and grandmother at the mall when my grandmother noticed my constant thirst. She recognized it right away as a symptom of diabetes, as both my aunt and uncle on my mom’s side of the family were already diabetic.

         Growing up I only knew a little about the disease, like that my aunt couldn’t eat sugar and had to drink diet soda, and had to give herself shots. But I had no idea that I could be a diabetic myself, after all, my mother wasn’t a diabetic.

         Still, I was taken to our family doctor, and he diagnosed me with Type 1, or juvenile-onset diabetes. We went to the hospital to get my blood sugar down from the above 1000 that it was when the doctor took the blood test. I wasn’t used to IV’s, or needles period. Knowing that I’d have to take multiple shots per day, and watch what I ate from then on was not something that I was too keen on. I wondered what the rest of my teenage and adult life would be like, now that I was a diabetic.

         After a while, the blood glucose testing and insulin shots weren’t a big deal to me, however, the diet was the hardest part to get accustomed to. In the beginning, I’d have to measure every portion of what I ate, and had to follow a particular exchange diet plan. Imagine being told you had to ration out how many breads, fruits or vegetables, dairy and meats each meal, with little leeway on what you wanted. I couldn’t have extra peanut butter on my sandwich, and only one small glass of orange juice with breakfast instead of the two I used to have.

         I also had a tendency to cheat on these restrictions in the beginning as well. Being a teenager and wanting to “fit in,” when out with friends I would eat a candy bar or drink a can of non-diet soda. I didn’t even tell my best friend that I was a diabetic until years later.

         Home life was easy for me to control my diabetes, because I had my mom and stepdad around to make sure I did what I needed to do. School was a different story, and that became the start of my problems.

         I am known as what is called a brittle diabetic, which means many different things can upset the balance of blood sugar levels in my body. Stress, illness, and infections affect me more than a typical diabetic, so I have to take extra care of myself whenever those situations occur. I had to learn this the hard way back in high school, when the typical stress of a student would suddenly increase my blood sugar, causing me to get sick.

         The symptoms of high blood sugar, or hyperglycemia, are not pretty. The extra sugar in the blood is spilled into the urine, making me have to go the bathroom more than usual. As a result, the body dehydrates, and in my case, it does so very quickly. This is the reason for the constant thirst, because the body wants to recover the lost fluids.

         The body also starts breaking down fat for energy, creating a byproduct called ketones. This result of hyperglycemia is called diabetic ketoacidosis, or DKA for short. I’ve been diagnosed with DKA too many times in my life to count, and I fear that while I have recovered each time, too many more instances may lead to the dangerous complications associated with diabetes down the road, like heart and kidney disease, blindness and nerve damage.

         Going through DKA each time is a tough experience. I lose my appetite, get thirsty very quickly, and I feel extremely fatigued. Sometimes this happens at work, which is much harder to handle than at home. When I am home, I have been able to give myself insulin and keep myself hydrated enough to avoid a hospital visit. But sometimes it gets to the point to where I am so dry that I become insulin resistant, and even trying to drink water nauseates me. In those situations, I have to go to the hospital and get IV fluids to flush out the ketones and sugars.

         My blood sugar levels have not always been high. I’ve been at the lower end of the “sugar spectrum.” The condition of low blood sugar, hypoglycemia, is just as dangerous. When the body doesn’t have enough glucose, it can’t function properly. If I take too much insulin, or not eat enough to cover what I’ve taken, I get light-headed or groggy, and my arms, hands or legs shake involuntarily. When this starts to happen, I can usually fix it by eating or drinking something with sugar in it, like a can of soda or a piece of sugary candy. Though it sometimes takes a bit of time for the sugar to metabolize, I come out of the strange feeling.

         If it gets too bad, however, hypoglycemia can get scary. I have gotten to the point where I was incoherent and my grandparents had to convince me to eat something, because I couldn’t understand what was going on. This sensation can be likened to being on drugs and stoned out of your mind. Things aren’t always as they seem, and the sense of reality is altered.

         My scariest experience of low blood sugar happened in March of 2001. In the middle of the night, I was having some eerie dreams, unlike ones I had ever had before. Even when I woke up, it still felt like I was dreaming. I remember thinking that I had to eat something, so I started to go upstairs into the kitchen for a snack. However, I lost my balance and tumbled down half the flight of stairs, injuring my forehead and knee in the process.

         My grandfather, who heard me from his room upstairs, came down and saw me quivering on the floor. Whenever I tried to speak to him, in my mind it sounded like I was talking in slow, drawn out speech like a record played at a different speed. He had fixed me a glass of root beer, and told me to drink it, but as incoherent as I was, I wasn’t so responsive.

         The paramedics were called, and they fed me a gel that quickly dissolved in my mouth and began metabolizing. I began to come to my senses, and they asked me questions to make sure I was going to be okay. Eventually everything was fine, and I ate a big breakfast that morning. It turned out my blood sugar reading was 19 that day, a number that is nearly critical. Any lower and I could have gone into a diabetic coma, or worse, have died.

         Diabetes research and testing has brought on a lot of changes in my therapy as well as others. I have gone through several different blood glucose monitors since my first AccuChek back in 2001, and each one has improved upon the other. The one I currently use, the FreeStyle, has been the easiest to use and most comfortable. I can now get blood for the test from my forearm instead of just my fingertips, and it is less painful as well. With software I have purchased as well, I can download my results to my computer, print them out and give them to my doctor at my checkups.

         The kind of insulin I have taken has changed over the years as well, helping with the problems associated with eating and taking shots. I took regular insulin mixed with NPH a half hour before each meal. Meal times had to be structured: breakfast around eight in the morning, lunch around noon, and dinner at five. Eating out or vacations were difficult to manage sometimes, since schedules don’t always conform to my lifestyle. The NPH insulin, which is slow acting and works over a longer period of time, would often cause my blood sugar to drop at different times, like when I would miss a snack.

         Since then, the regular insulin has been replaced with Humalog, which works much faster and I can take it right before eating instead of waiting a half hour. Other benefits to this kind of insulin are that I can eat a little more freely, by taking extra insulin when eating more, and that because it acts quickly, I can take some in a high sugar emergency.

         Instead of the slower acting insulin, NPH, I take Lantus. While the NPH insulin has its peak time when it starts breaking down the sugars, the Lantus is steadier over the course of a day. Now there are no sudden drops in glucose if I miss a snack.

         In the summer of 2004, almost nine years since my diagnosis with diabetes, I decided it was about time that I take better control of my diabetes than I have in my life, and looked into going on insulin pump therapy. With the pump, the insulin is delivered through a small cell phone-sized device, which can be likened to a miniature IV, instead of by injection. I had heard good things about the pump, but at first I didn’t think it would be for me. The more I looked into it, however, the better it sounded.