My Type 1 Diagnosis: The Bit Nobody Tells You
I was diagnosed two weeks before I turned 13. Type 1 diabetes doesn’t wait for a convenient time to show up.
Here’s the part that doesn’t make it into the “brave little diabetic” stories. I was a teenager who hated every single appointment because I was always in trouble. My blood sugars weren’t where they should’ve been, so I guesstimated the numbers instead of testing and reporting the truth. I drank, I smoked, I ended up in hospital with DKA more than once. Never landed in ICU, but it was close enough, often enough.
I got banned from my insulin pump at one stage whilst working as a nurse.
And there’s a part I don’t say out loud very often: I used to deliberately run high so the ketones would eat into my fat. I wanted to be skinny, and diabetes handed me a shortcut for it, one that could have killed me instead.
Nothing changed until a doctor sat me down and said something different to what I’d heard before. She didn’t threaten me or tell me off. She said I’d make mistakes with my diabetes, and she’d be there to help me through them, not punish me for having them. That was the first time someone offered help instead of judgement, and it’s the moment I actually started to turn things around.
My now-husband finished the job. He told me straight that if we wanted kids one day, I needed to get my diabetes shit sorted. So I went back to my diabetes educator, the same one who’d seen me as a mess of a teenager, now seeing me as an adult trying to do better. He got me back onto a pump, and onto a CGM.
I’ve been lucky. No complications, until now. I’m currently dealing with some vision issues and I honestly don’t know yet if they’re diabetes-related.
Where I’m at now:
Day to day, management runs on autopilot more than I’d like to admit. Control IQ does the heavy lifting on my pump and CGM. I forget to bolus for meals more often than I’d like to say out loud, probably 80% of the time if I’m honest.
Having kids changed one specific thing:
I don’t want them watching me go through a bad low. They know I need sugar sometimes, and that’s as much as they need to carry. They watch me change my insulin pump, I’ll let them press the button. They watch my husband insert my CGM because it’s something I’m still too chicken to do. Past that, I try to just live as normally as I can, because that’s what I’d want for them too.
If you’re reading this freshly diagnosed, or years in and burnt out, I want you to feel one thing: seen. Not fixed, not lectured. Seen