Hello.

Hi, there.  My name’s Trisha and I’m a fairly newly diagnosed diabetic…at least I feel kind of newly diagnosed.  I have a really hard time with this disease so I thought I’d start up a blog to help get some of my frustrations out and maybe find some other diabetic folks to talk to.  I guess for this first post I’ll tell you a little about myself and give you the play-by-play of my diabetes to date.  Let’s see if I can accomplish this without it sounding like a cross between a personal ad and a full autobiography.

I’m a 26 year old wife and mother of one son living in Pennsylvania.  I’m not currently working but am planning to start school in the spring either for medical office administration or business managment.  I don’t really want to do the latter but my husband and I think buying a franchise of a certain chain restaurant might be lucrative for us…we have the perfect place for it picked out.  A business management degree might help us out if we do pursue that idea but I’d more enjoy something in a medical setting, I think.

Hmm?  What else?  I’m a pretty uninteresting person.  I like to do the occasional cross-stitch but just little kit ones, I don’t have the patience or attention span to buy the books and the floss and make big intricate ones.  I enjoy reading though I don’t get to do it much.  Stephen King is my favorite author and I read almost nothing but his books.  My dream in life (besides a cure for diabetes) would probably involve being rich enough that I didn’t have to work and could hire somebody to do pretty much everything for me.  lol  But seriously, I guess I’m pretty family oriented.  I like to have my husband and son around me and some of my more extended family when possible.  And I’m generally pretty content with very little.  Materialistic would not be a word anybody would use to describe me.

The diabetes?  Well, my maternal grandmother and both of her two siblings all were/are diabetic and my maternal grandfather was as well.  My mother and I lived with my grandparents and I started giving them insulin injections when I was about seven years old.  I always assumed they were all type 2 but given some information I have now I’m not completely sure of that.  I had always heard the whole “diabetes skips a generation” thing and thought it was a bunch of baloney.  Lo and behold…

I got pregnant and my glucose tolerance tests at 28 weeks showed high blood sugar.  Diet brought it down quite a bit and my fastings were always perfect but I did need a little insulin until my son was born.  After his birth I wasn’t put on a diabetic diet and I wasn’t given insulin injections in the hospital.  I was supposed to get another glucose tolerance test done after my post partum visit but hey!  Gestational diabetes clears up after the pregnancy, right?  I put it off until I started noticing how terribly blurry my vision was at times.  We lived in an apartment with a tiny living room and I couldn’t read the on-screen guide on my TV from the couch…less than six feet away.  I found myself unable to make out any kind of road sign until we were almost on top of it.  I knew something was wrong and I went for the test.  After two hours my BS was 540.

My OB was the one who had ordered the test so they referred me back to my family doctor since I was no longer pregnant.  I was a 23 year old woman who had never been overweight in her life and I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.  It was devastating for me.  If there’s anybody on this planet that was not made for this disease it’s probably me.  I have the biggest sweet tooth of anybody I ever met, could almost live without meat or any other protein source and, despite my small size, can at times out-eat my 6′6″ husband who has weighed 300 lbs before.

My doctor started me on Glucotrol and Actos (or did he start me on Glucotrol and add Actos later?  Vice versa?  I can’t remember now) and in less than three months I got down from a 10.0 A1c at diagnosis to a 7.7.  But as time went on I had a harder time watching my diet and even when I was the oral meds were working less and less.  I completely gave up off and on over the next year and a half or so, not caring what I ate and not even bothering to take the medication at times.

We were living across state from our hometown and moved back.  I saw a new doctor about twice but even with an A1c of 13.something he didn’t seem to think I was doing that badly.  He changed my med dosages, told me “most people as bad as you are would be in the hospital but you seem very alert” and sent me on my way.  By August of ‘07 I started really noticing the effects of the constant high blood sugar.  When my son would wake up in the morning I would get him a cup of milk and some dry cereal and lay down on the couch where I’d fall asleep for an hour or two.  Luckily, despite how badly I was doing, I was always aware, even when I was asleep on the couch.  The minute Noah would get into something he shouldn’t be I was awake and stopping him.

The thing that really cemented the seriousness of this whole thing in my mind was when I started getting weak.  Noah was a little behind in his gross motor skills and so he was not able to walk up stairs and was even kind of slow at crawling up them so I had to carry him up to bed every night.  I started feeling like I wouldn’t make it to the top of the stairs.  I just felt like my body wanted to quit, wanted to give up, had nothing left in it.  I contacted a diabetic friend to find out what doctor she saw and if she liked him and made an appt.

I’m not generally very afraid of needles but the idea of giving myself a shot terrified me but I had made up my mind that I was going to ask to be put on insulin.  During my pregnancy I only had to take one shot a day so my husband was able to give them to me.  I wouldn’t have that luxury any more.

So the new doctor agreed that I should be on insulin and told me that given my age and size I was probably “essentially a type 1.”  My A1c at this point was 15.7.  I couldn’t even find charts that went that high to find out what that meant my average BS was!

I tried giving myself shots but for the first few days I only successfully touched the tip of the needle to my skin, froze and cried.  Then one of the needles just seemed to slip in and I’ve given them to myself ever since.  Sometimes it’s still hard.  I’ve had days where it seemed like I literally could not get the needle to break through the skin or that it hurt too bad and I’ve thrown the syringe at the sink, cried some more, said “fuck it” and ate something I shouldn’t have.  Most of the time, though, I can give myself the shot even if it takes a few attempts.

So, that was a little over a year ago.  In that time I’ve gone through an emotional rollercoaster I sometimes didn’t think I’d survive.  My husband was diagnosed as bipolar in March of this year and from about December of last year through July of this I didn’t know which way was up.  My marriage was in shambles, my husband was some stranger in a familiar body and I didn’t know how I was going to cope.  Going through all of that I often either completely forgot to take my insulin and/or think about what I was eating or just didn’t care.

To top all of that off I found out at the end of January that I was pregnant again.  My sugar was doing a lot better and it gave me the motivation to turn down foods I shouldn’t have been eating, take all of my insulin and test my BS regularly.  It didn’t matter.  I miscarried in March, two days before my husband was diagnosed as bipolar.  Did I mention my mom also had a heart attack less than two weeks before that?  It was a rough time, to say the least.

There was confusion through the entire pregnancy.  Positive pregnancy tests followed by negative ones, nothing on ultrasound, good hormone levels, uncertainty of dates…  Turned out I had a “blighted ovum” which means that while I did get pregnant and a placenta and gestational sac formed, no fetus formed.  Didn’t feel like a blighted ovum to me.  The OB specialist I was seeing told me that when they see such cases in diabetics it’s usually because the BS wasn’t adequately controlled.  Honestly that kind of pissed me off.  I tend to research stuff (too much, I admit) and they don’t even know what causes blighted ovums but they are the most common cause of miscarriage.  Their best guess is that it’s literally just a bad egg from the start.  I’m not saying being an uncontrolled diabetic had nothing to do with the miscarriage and I would expect him to say something like, “You should get your BS controlled before you try to get pregnant again.”  But the way he said it almost made it seem like he was placing blame on me which is just what I needed at the time, really.

So, I went back to my “fuck it” mentality after the miscarriage and rarely tested or took insulin.  Then I ended up in the hospital at the end of July.  I was dehydrated, my potassium was dangerously low, sugar extremely high and probably a bunch of other stuff that I don’t remember.  I spent two nights in there and had only one BS reading below 200.  The rest were mostly in the high 200s or 300s.

I’m trying to at the very least make sure to take my insulin now.  I was out of test strips for a while (yes, a deadly sin for a diabetic, I know) and just started testing again yesterday.  So far not too bad.  I had one reading of 416, one of 250, one of 89 and the rest in the mid-to-high 100s.  That’s pretty good for me.

I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to try going on an insulin pump.  My family doctor referred me to the only endocrinologist in this town and I don’t like him.  But I’m in the process of getting the pump purchase approved by my insurance and should have it by the end of the year.  I’m worried about certain aspects of it (being tethered, having the infusion set in 24/7, getting the infusion set in, etc.) but I’m hopeful that at the very least it will get me closer to controlled levels.

The endocrinologist told me basically that he’d put money on me being a type 2 diabetic but he added something after it and I can’t remember what he said.  I have to ask him at my next appt.  However, with what he talked about, what my family doctor talked about, what I know about my condition and what I’ve found through research I think I’m what they call a LADA diabetic or type 1.5 which is basically type 1 but it generally has a later onset (usually after 25) and it has what some call a “honeymoon period” where your BS isn’t bad and you will respond to oral meds.  Over time, though, your pancreas will produce less and less insulin until it’s producing none and you will become insulin dependent.  I would like to know for sure what I have because it seems there are some potential treatments and/or cures on the horizon for type 1s and I’d like to know if I might get any benefit from those when the time comes.

So…now that I’ve prattled on for over 2,000 words (there’s a little word count feature on here) I guess I’ll close my first post.  I hope to post at least once a week, updating on the status of the insulin pump and how I’m doing with it when I get it but maybe I’ll post more if I’m having a particularly rough time or good news to share…or less if there’s not much going on or I’m in another sort of denial phase.  But we’ll see where this goes.  ‘Til next time…