Diabetes Awareness Month

It's November, the month we promote (among other things) Diabetes Awareness. I am glad that this disease gets as much media coverage as it does, but there are still a lot of public misconceptions about it. (See my section on diabetes myths later in this post.)

First, an update on diabetes in my life: I am very excited to be getting an insulin pump upgrade, as well as my first ever full-time continuous glucose monitoring system (CGMS; these have been out for a few years, but were not approved for long-term usage until a couple of years ago, at which time our insurance didn't cover it). My doctor had to fight our health insurance company to get it approved (new insurance this year), but I just found out yesterday that it will be covered in full!!!

A CGMS is is nifty little machine that attaches to you (much the same way a pump does), and automatically checks your blood sugar every five minutes. The main draw, in my opinion, is that it sounds an alarm when your blood sugar gets either too low or too high, thereby spurning action long before you would have detected the abnormality yourself. My diabetes educator tells me that I will also appreciate its abilities to identify trends, since we will have a much fuller set of data points from which to draw blood sugar graphs (which we don't even have to draw...it comes with a link that allows you to download the data onto your home computer). I should be getting hooked up to this within two weeks.

I will have had Type 1 diabetes for 15 years this December. I was 14 when I was diagnosed. That means I've had diabetes longer than half my life, although it feels like I've had it all of my life. It also means that I am now entering the phase of time when it is possible for long-term complications to begin to surface; doctors say this typically happens when a person has had diabetes for 15-20 years, although it can also happen outside this range. Possible long-term complications from diabetes include heart disease, kidney disease, eye disease, and nerve damage.

I don't think about these things very often (usually only when my blood sugar is high for several hours at time and I can't get it down as quickly as I'd like); but it's good to remind myself of the possibilities every once in awhile, to encourage myself to maintain my regimen as I should, and so that whenever one of them does eventually happen, I won't be in total shock.

I've had to dispell a lot of myths to the general public about diabetes. If you know me well, or if you know someone else who has diabetes, you'll probably know all this, but I'll still include the top 5 that I've had to respond to the most:

1. Diabetes is caused by eating too much sugar or by being too fat. ONLY PARTIALLY TRUE. While Type 2 is caused by insulin resistance due to being overweight, Type 1 diabetes happens when one's own body attacks and destroys the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. Why this happens is officially unknown, but is thought to be caused by an as-yet unidentified virus, or response to stress, or a combination of the two. I can trace the onset of my diabetes to the stressful event of auditioning for the Kentucky All-State Band as a freshman in high school (the only freshman in my high school to try out, let alone make, btw). This was three weeks before I was diagnosed.

2. You're diabetic! You can't have any sugar! FALSE...at least for me. While I do try to eat healthfully, it is also okay for me to have moderate amounts of sugar, since I can adjust my insulin dosage accordingly (I LOVE my insulin pump!). (People with Type 2 diabetes who do not take insulin should avoid sugar as much as possible.) Also, there are many times when my blood sugar gets too low (due to things like too much exercise, a misjudgement of carb content in a food that I ate, my digestion rate being slower than than the rate of insulin absorption, or being sick). In these cases, I MUST have sugar, or I will pass out...thankfully, I never have, although there have been a few times when I have felt close.

3. Babies of diabetic mothers are much larger than "normal," and therefore, they all have to be delivered by C-section. MOSTLY FALSE. If blood sugars are high enough for long enough in a pregnancy, the baby will be larger than it otherwise would be, and larger than average babies. But large babies are also caused in large part by genetics. Rebecca was a perfectly normal 7 pounds when she was delivered at 38 weeks. The reason that I had to have a C-section was not because she was too big to fit through the birth canal, but because the placenta had started to disintegrate (as usually happens with diabetic pregnancies), and my body had not been responsive to being induced into labor. BTW, Rebecca only has a 1% chance of ever developing Type 1 diabetes.

4. I have a friend/relative/acquaintance who has your kind of diabetes, and he/she does not have nearly the amount/severity of fluctuation of blood sugar as you do...you much not take very good care of yourself (or, you must be exaggerating how poorly you feel). FALSE. Your friend/relative/acquaintance probably does not have five additional chronic diseases that they are fighting concurrently, like I do. My doctors think that I am doing the best job that I possibly can. (Thankfully, I've only ever had this said to me three or four times...but, boy, does it sting.)

5. Scientists would make faster/better progress in finding a cure for diabetes if they had more funding for embryonic stem-cell research. I ABHOR THIS ASSUMPTION. Adult stem cells work just beautifully for stem-cell research, and because I believe that life begins when an egg and a sperm are joined, I am one hundred percent against any kind of embryonic stem cell research, even if it meant finding a cure for this disease that I hate living with. For this reason, I do NOT support (and encourage others not to support) the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, since they do advocate embryonic stem cell research.

I'd be happy to respond to any questions about diabetes. Also let me know if you learned something new!