10th year Anniversary with Diabetes

Sometime this month is my 10th year diagnosed with diabetes.

We’d had a day off, probably a staff development day that I’d already done in the summer.  I took the day to get some medical issues taken care of, my glucose tolerance test and a mammogram.  Not sure why they didn’t get done in the summer but there you go.  September is the start of a new insurance year for us teachers.

I went to a lab in Irving, and had to drink some foul sugar filled liquid every few hours.  As the day went I got madder and madder, but I thought part of it was being near where my best friend was killed and going to see his memorial site – it was less than a mile away from the lab.

By the time I got to the mammogram site, I was so mad I wanted to hit someone and didn’t care who.  I wasn’t very nice to anyone there, but they were okay.

Don’t remember the weekend much, but to this day, remember that feeling of anger when I first got up and persisted as the morning went on.  By the time I saw my first students, I knew there was something seriously wrong with me and that I couldn’t handle the classroom.  I had a call out to my doctor’s office while they were trying to reach me through the front office.  I remember they sent a sub up to me to tell me that my doctor’s office needed to talk with me and see me immediately and that the sub was taking my classes until I was done.

They immediately booked me into a diabetes education class and hooked me up with Metformin.  I figured out pretty quickly that Metformin was doing the job and switched to mix insulin.  That didn’t do it either so we ended up with a mix and with a sliding scale.

Two years later I was on a pump. 

Now, I’m on my third insulin pump, soon to go to a 4th, liquid metformin, and using an diabetes alert dog.

For 8 years I had pretty good control and then skidded off the wagon due to some environmental factors.  My blood sugar was so high I was considering checking myself into a in-patient mental facility until I realized that it was the blood sugar. 

It’s taken two years to get me back on the wagon, and the dog does a pretty good job.