13516
It is Sunday, 14th December 2014. 13,516 days ago (that’s 37 calendar years to you and me) I received insulin to treat diabetic ketoacidosis as I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes mellitus.
The expectation at the time was not great: being a girl and before the introduction of home testing for blood glucose, it was hit or miss whether I’d make it to 20 in one piece.
In the early 1980’s, as blood glucose kits became widely adopted things began to change. Yet, it wasn’t until the Diabetes_control_and_complications_trial was published in 1993 that it was proven that maintaining blood sugar levels as close to a non-diabetics levels would significantly affect the chances of developing complications from long term diabetes mellitus.
Before that, it was guess work. I was reasonably lucky in that my mum was a pharmacologist and bought my first blood testing kit. We’d made a decision to aim for normal blood glucose levels as much as possible but the data we’d previously got from urine tests was never particularly meaningful and difficult to make effective changes to my insulin levels.
The early sets of data led to guess work, careful testing, recording and analysing. Even then it was assumed that women did have a more complicated regime as we had the menstrual cycle, but so little guidelines were provided as I hit puberty and there was so little the research published in the journals we read. That’s now changed, thanks to the internet.
As I “celebrated” my anniversary on Friday, I started a new job and was describing my pump and the display on the screen, presenting the readings from the sub-cutaneous blood glucose sensor. The readings probably suggested my period was due in the next week. I was greeted with shock that such a fundamental gearing of the human metabolism would affect my insulin requirements.
“I’ve known two insulin dependant diabetics in my career and they were both men.”
Posted: December 14th, 2014 under 42, Diabetes.