Diabetes

My Type 1 Diabetes Diagnosis Story

Insulin pen for type 1 diabetes

The year is 2008. The Twilight series is all the rage, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” is virtually inescapable, and Taylor Swift is still (kind of) a country singer. Thanks to the Summer Olympics in Beijing, Michael Phelps and his impossible arm span have become famous. Barack Obama wins the US Presidential Election. The Great Recession is in full swing, though no one is calling it that yet.

In the small town of Tilbury, Ontario, a 15-year-old finally gets her braces off—but first, she receives a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. Here’s how it went down.

My Transformation into Sleepy Pee Monster

Like many high school students, I was very busy. In the tenth grade, I played volleyball and soccer, acted in the school play, and worked after school some days. Despite also being a huge nerd who actually cared about her grades, I also spent lots of time with my friends. With so much going on, I didn’t notice right away that something strange was happening to my body, though for a while I had felt that something was a bit off.

The first concrete sign that something was wrong happened in mid-February, when I was struck by an unquenchable thirst. Soon after the thirstiness began, it quickly intensified, and with it came the almost constant urge to pee. I used the washroom between classes, and I left each class at least once—sometimes twice—to get a drink at the fountain and go to the washroom once more. I couldn’t sleep through the night without waking up and hurrying to the tap and the toilet. The urges to drink and to pee became so constant that they literally never went away. Even when I had a mouthful of water, I still felt a desperate need to drink. After using the toilet, I would often immediately sit back down again, convinced that I wasn’t done.

As if the constant intake and output of fluids weren’t disruptive enough, I was also exhausted. Waking up every few hours wasn’t helping, though I later realized that this wasn’t the real problem. I found myself unable to resist the urge to rest my head on my desk during class or to close my eyes while watching a movie at home. I felt dull and lethargic, and people kept asking whether I was feeling alright. Basically, I had transformed into a sleepy pee monster.

And then there was the weight loss, which was swift and jarring. During gym class one day, I weighed myself for the first time in two weeks. My eyes nearly left their sockets when I realized that I had lost nearly 20 pounds. This concrete number confirmed my suspicion: I knew at that point, with almost 100% certainty, that I had type 1 diabetes.

A Quick Note on the Strangeness of Time, Change, and Life in General

This certainty of my condition is where my story differs from many others. My mom also has type 1 diabetes, and she also developed it in high school. I had grown up seeing her take insulin every day, and I had heard her diagnosis story enough times to know that I was displaying every symptom of the genetic disease. 

With this knowledge, why did it take me several weeks and a 20-pound weight loss to fully accept what was happening? It’s kind of difficult to explain. Sure, part of my delayed response was caused by the hyperglycemia that was fogging my brain and dulling my wits. Overall though, I think it had more to do with time being so slippery—on the one hand, three weeks is a long time to feel unwell, but on the other, it’s no time at all.

Think about the past three weeks of your life. I’m sure a lot of things have happened. You’ve probably gone to work or school, spent time with different people, maybe even taken a trip somewhere. But most things about your life probably haven’t changed. You’ve likely continued, more or less, in the same routine as usual. If that’s the case, you might feel that you’ve mentally absorbed anything strange or out of place into the reliable, stable whole of your regular life.

Or maybe I’m totally off, and something major happened, like the birth of a child or the death of a loved one. If that’s the case, the past three weeks might simultaneously feel like the longest and shortest weeks of your life. Your grasp of how much time has passed is probably weak. You might feel like you’ve been spun in a circle, and now you’re left deliriously asking questions like: “What day is it? What year is it? Where am I? What’s happening? When’s the last time I ate food?”

Change is strange—it must be in cahoots with that fickle foe, time. In hindsight, major changes feel all-encompassing. But in the moments when they really come to pass, life as we know it still goes on. Just as the hospitalization of a family member wouldn’t negate a mother’s need to feed her kids or pay her mortgage, the onset of hyperglycemia symptoms didn’t put the rest of my life on pause. Time kept flying by, as it always does, until I found myself facing the undeniable truth of a type 1 diabetes diagnosis.

Truth Will Out (Especially When You Can’t Hold Your Urine)

I wasn’t the only one facing that truth. My family had, of course, also noticed what was going on. My poor, poor mother . . . though there was nothing she could have done to prevent me from inheriting her genes, she still felt incredibly guilty when she finally checked my blood sugar with her glucometer. She did this only after some serious urging from my sister, who had witnessed my decline into sleepy pee monster with alarm. The result: 21 mmol/L. Definitely diabetic. Definitely time to see the doctor.

A new type 1 diabetes diagnosis often means a short hospitalization. This gives the person some time to get their blood sugar back on track and learn as much as they can about insulin—a dangerous drug when you do understand how to dose it, a potentially fatal one when you don’t. Though there was some talk of me being admitted to the hospital over March break, I was lucky: I had a resident diabetes expert at home, so I got to skip the pediatric endocrinology ward.

My mom watched me closely while she helped me figure things out. For a week after I started taking insulin, she set an alarm for 3 a.m. each night, came into my room, and checked my blood sugar. She did this so swiftly that I didn’t even notice she was doing it until the third day, when she woke me with a glass of milk after finding my blood sugar was on the low side.

I remind you again that I was 15, not 5. But my mom knew from experience that learning how to live with diabetes is overwhelming, and she did everything she could to relieve some of that burden (and, you know, to make sure I didn’t die in my sleep).

Thank you, mom. I think you might love me a little.

Life Goes On, Even After a Type 1 Diabetes Diagnosis

Twelve years have passed since my sleepy pee monster days, though hyperglycemia is a state I have revisited innumerable times over the years. Lots has happened since my type 1 diabetes diagnosis. I got my driver’s licence, finished high school, earned a bachelor’s degree, got my first editing job, relocated to Toronto for my second editing job, and moved in with a guy who gives me smooches on the regular.

During all this, I checked my blood sugar around 35,040 times—about 8 times a day for 12 years. I took insulin around 17,520 times—about 4 times a day. I experienced hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia thousands of times, though I won’t even try to put a number on that.

Life went on, and diabetes went on with it.


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