Today I'm going to share my personal story with diabetes and how I came to find out I was developing it. We were at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Walk to Cure Diabetes in support of our daughter and they had a booth set up for TrialNet. This is a study in which certain family members of type 1 individuals can be screened to see if they are at risk for developing the disease as well. I signed up right away and participated at our local diabetes education center. I went through the screening process and a simple blood test to see if I had autoantibodies or other markers that put me at a higher risk or not. I did have autoantibodies and so a I entered the next phase of the screen which was to do a glucose tolerance test to study how my pancreas was working (insulin secretion, A1C, etc.) This was done every six months and each time they could see an increase in my A1C and a decrease in insulin production, and this is when I was diagnosed with early adult onset type 1 diabetes. We also had our son's blood tested at about 4-years-old and his first blood test came back positive for the same autoantibodies that I had. We decided we didn't want him to participate in the second phase (the glucose tolerance test) as this requires a 3 hour IV and we didn't think he would be able to handle that at his young age so we decided to keep and eye on him with an extra glucose meter and randomly checked him.
In mid 2009 my physician advised me to begin taking Lantus (long-acting insulin), but I will admit that it took me a few months to start the injections as I was partly afraid of giving myself injections and partly in denial. I couldn't believe this was happening. I finally started the injections when my fasting BG reached 200 (that scared me) but I felt so much better after just a few days. At first I didn't need to take NovoLog (short acting insulin) for my meals as long as I kept my carbohydrate count in a certain range. This ended after about a month though, as my blood sugars began to creep up. It was still quite a few months later before I had to start taking insulin for pretty much anything I ate but that is one of the differences my doctor told me about with adult onset versus childhood onset. With children it goes quite fast (within weeks) and with adults it can take much, much longer to progress, sometimes even a year or longer.
If you are interested in finding out more about the TrialNet Study please visit http://www.diabetestrialnet.org/ as this is a wonderful way to help find a cure as it gives them more information to find out how this all begins in our bodies and how to go about hopefully one day being able to stop it.
Since my diagnosis I have entered another study for Diabetes Prevention. Although I had already been diagnosed and for now there is no cure, there are ongoing studies for medications, etc. to see if there is a way to slow down the progression and/or stop it where it is and hopefully maintain what insulin your body is still producing on its own. To find out more about the current study I'm in please visit http://www.benaroyaresearch.org/, as this one is much more detailed and would be better understood from visiting their website.
Next time I'll tell you about how our son came to be diagnosed, as it's different from my daughter and I.
If you have any comments, questions or would like to share your story, I would LOVE to hear from you and I know others would too!
With support for you,
Anitra
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