I'll see posts from friends in the diabetes community who have been diabetic all their life as in since they were little kids. I sometimes wonder if their life is worse because they've had it their whole life or is my diabetes less significant since I was 20 when I was diagnosed. My sister was diagnosed when she was 30 so does that make hers less severe?
Type one diabetes sucks, some days it occupies all your thoughts. Yesterday I went to the Twins Baseball game and I put a new CGM in. It took forever for the CGM to read as a new sensor and actually took six hours of unplugging it, charging it, removing it from the clip, blah blah blah but it finally worked! Then it was reading above 400 when it was actually 150, here comes the #calerror alarm.
So the real reason for this post was inspired by Alison Peters, a friend I met on Facebook at some point in the past. She asked a question about mixing insulin, man its been YEARS since I've done that! Below I'm going to talk about my treatment through the years, focus on the word I'm using, TREATMENT.
NPH - Twice a Day
Regular - a few hours before I ate
Here is how it would work:
Wake up and take a combination of NPH and Regular. In essence what you were doing was covering the following:
Breakfast, Snack, Lunch
Get home from work and take another combination of NPH and Regular but this time you were covering for dinner and evening snack.
What if you wanted to eat more or eat less? You could adjust your insulin intake on a sliding scale so you had a little room to work with but not quite as much room once I moved to the new insulin.
Round 2
Lantus and Humalog
How Lantus was first explained to me was you take it once a day and if you eat nothing you should be within 30 ml/d up or down from the start of the day.
Humalog was to cover anything I ate, the neat thing was I could eat when ever I wanted instead of a fixed time. I could also take the insulin right before I ate, I could eat 100 times a day and take 100 shots or I could eat nothing and take no shots. Life was so much better like this, funny i gained a lot of weight around this time but I blame metabolism and quitting smoking.
Round 3
Insulin Pump
I'd have to say insulin pump has been the best. Temp Basal, Bolus to the .1 unit of insulin, Correcting at .75 units...control you wouldn't get with regular injections. Don't get me wrong a lot of people do well with injections but personally I really prefer the pump.
All of this being said, all the above rounds are still just rounds of TREATMENT not a cure. (Sad Face)
