Hello, welcome to FUDiabetes (For Unlimited Diabetes). We’re happy to have you here and look forward to sharing, learning, and exploring all things diabetes together.
I’m Sam, formerly known as Sam19. I live in Alaska with my wife and 2 young children. I was diagnosed with T1 unexpectedly at age 29. I currently manage with tresiba, novolog MDI, and Afrezza. I use a dexcom G5 cgm intermittently. Nice to meet you all.
My wife, my two sons and I live in rural Wisconsin, about halfway between Milwaukee and Madison. My older son goes to college in CA.
My younger son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in the spring of 2016. His diagnosis has made a big change to all of our lives. We want to make sure that he can never see it as a limit.
We have found that the best information we have obtained on how to manage his condition is not from his endocrinologist or his CDE, but from other diabetics. What we have learned from them has radically altered the way we manage his BG - and our attitude to it as well.
Being the parent of a diabetic child is not always easy. You would like to take his sickness onto yourself, and the fact that you cannot – in reality, the need you have to see him in control of his own diabetes management – is difficult to accept. In a strange way, interacting daily with other diabetics is a humbling experience that makes us parents realize how trivial our burden really is.
We hope to learn plenty from everyone here. We also would like to contribute more to the fight against diabetes. We have tried many times to volunteer with ADA or JDRF but without much success - so we are also looking for other opportunities to fight back.
Hello all. I live in Ohio with my wife and two sons. My oldest is 5 and was diagnosed when he was two. We currently use Omnipod and Dexcom (hoping for a quick release of the new Omnipod dash system soon). I have found that the mainstream medical establishment is woefully behind the tech advancements of business and community. I have found that the most useful information I gather isn’t from the doctor–but from my peers. Glad to finally have a place where people aren’t censored.
Hi All,
My husband, and my 2 children I live in New York City. I was misdiagnosed as Type 2, and am LADA, insulin dependent. Looking forward to sharing our collective experiences/knowledge for the benefit of everyone. Life is a long journey. Diabetes management is a"marathon" requiring perseverance and “with a little help from my friends”- we’ll get through this.
Nice to meet you all-some familiar faces and some new ones. 
Hello, my wife, two sons and I live near Portland Oregon. My son was diagnosed with Type 1 as a Christmas present two winters ago. He is a very active kid who plays Soccer, Baseball, and the electric guitar turned up to 11 (only when his parents aren’t home, but the neighbors let me know ).
As serendipity would have it, 20 years ago I spent five years creating and studying implantable glucose sensors. When my son was diagnosed, I realized how little I actually understood about diabetic control. Now that I have a live test subject to run experiments on, my understanding is slowly coming into focus, and my little “rat” is running in the big maze.
We are lucky enough to have a great school system that supports all of the T1’s in our district and helps them get independent. Almost every day at school, in addition to his CGM, he can go pet a friend’s diabetes dog and get a quick check of his bg. As others have mentioned, the information and expectations of our healthcare professionals is lower than my son’s personal expectations, and we are looking forward to continue learning with your help!
Hi, Kimmon the CatLady here, from Eastern Idaho. I was diagnosed T1/LADA almost 3 years ago but I feel like it’s taken me this long to accept it. I really appreciate all the support from online forums, especially for trying Afrezza from Sam!
PS We have 6 cats and the oldest will be 21 next month. 
Hello everyone. What a pleasure to be with you all. My name is Harold and I’m father to six wonderful children and a loving wife of 18 years. Although our family has had many medical struggles through the years, having my two year old son diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes last February 29th has proven to be our biggest struggle to date.
A little history of my families medical conditions:
Note: Before my OWN direct children, none of what I’ll list below can be attributed to either mine or my wife’s heredity.
When my, now 14 year old son, was one year old, he was furniture walking and doing the whole beginning to be independent thing and then suddenly began stop walking. He began crawling everywhere and refused to stand up. When we took him to the Pediatrician, they told us he just wasn’t feeling well (he had the flu at the time) and he’d walk when he feels like it. Eventually (after a month and what seemed to be endless Dr’s visits) he stopped crawling and would just sit on the floor. We took him in to see our Pediatrician again and, fortunately, our usual doctor wasn’t in the office that day; instead, another doctor was in charge of seeing him. Immediately, she knew something was wrong with him…without even needing to check him out. She told us to take him to Children’s Hospital in D.C., where, later that evening, he was diagnosed with a type of Cancer known as Neuroblastoma. His tumor grew out of his right kidney and metastasized around his spine. The tumor began to squeeze around his spinal cord causing a reduction in blood flow to his lower extremities (which explains why he stopped walking/crawling). Anyway, he was put on Chemo that night as well as a steroid to stop the swelling. The doctors at Children’s told us that; had we came even a week later, the tumor would have ruptured into the blood marrow and he’d his prognosis would not have looked good. Fortunately, with the proper amounts of chemo and final surgery to remove the remaining dead tissue on his right kidney, he’s grown up to be a perfectly healthy young man.
When my, now 10 year old son, was just a month or so old, we noticed he’d never “focus” on us…he’d always appear to look through us and there was never eye contact. He was a very different infant/toddler in that he could not tolerate any loud noises and these would often throw him into screaming fits. It was under a year old where he was diagnosed on the Autism spectrum. He’s high functioning and his main draw-back has been his lack of social skills (which is common in children on the spectrum). He’s brilliant when it comes to math and he’s very uniform and quite a perfectionist (as is common in this disease.)
Before my diabetic son was diagnosed, autism was my biggest challenge. Learning how to help our autistic son to cope with things that other children find normal was nearly a full time job. Fortunately, his school educators as well we my wife (who is a full-time stay at home mother and does all the hard work when it comes to caring for our children, getting them to our schools and picking them back up, the home, etc), have done an amazing job getting him well adjusted to the world. His communication skills are still sub-par but they are coming up to speed every day.
…and that brings me to our biggest challenge to date.
Last February, our 1 year old son was acting very lethargic all the time, ALWAYS thirsty, and his diapers were literally drenched in just an hour or two. We took him to the doctor and once again, they weren’t able to diagnose anything other than he’s feeling ill…and he’s slightly dehydrated (which we couldn’t understand because all he was doing was drinking water!). So we put him on electrolytes. This was a Friday. The doctor told us to bring him back on Monday if he wasn’t feeling well. On that Sunday we woke up and found his legs and feet had swollen for some reason. We couldn’t wait until Monday so we took him to Children’s Hospital where he was, later that day, diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. We stayed in the hospital for some days until they dialed in the right amount of insulin for him.
This disease has changed my families lives…1000%. Even with CGM and Pump I still don’t sleep easy thinking about how “up hill” of a battle this is going to be for him. When I think about how he’ll be discriminated against, made fun of, bullied, his devices and/or medicines possibly stolen, his lifetime worth of struggles that he’s yet to even begin facing…it just breaks my heart. As his father, I want to take this from him so badly. I would gladly give my life to make him healthy again…but that’s not meant to be…unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that.
So; instead of wallowing in my sadness (which I do on occasion), I have tried to just become as educated as possible so that we (my wife and I) can teach him how to deal with this disease and not allow it to define who he is. Diabetes is a part of who he is, but it is NOT WHO he is…he can be, and do, anything he wants with his life and my goal is to help him grow up into the kind of strong man that I’ve worked at making sure my other children are growing into.
I won’t pretend that it’s easy because it isn’t…it’s every day, 24 hours a day. It’s sleeping with one eye open all the time. It’s making sure my ears are cleaned out so that I hear alarms. It’s the ever moving target that is his age which makes dosages a very difficult thing to perfect. It’s a total 180 degree turn from how life was before diabetes. And it’s not easy…and it’s not fun.
…but life isn’t always fair. My 8 year old threw out a little ditty that he learned in school a year or so back and I use that often these days when describing how I feel and how I will react…
“You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.”
Harold
We have three, and a big dog. Used to be 4 cats, but one did not get along with the others at all - she had to be relocated to a friend’s house:-)
Our cats are pretty young, all between 5 and 7 years old.
We also have 4 cats! All either strays or rescue cats. All young, 3 years or younger. No dogs, though. We tried our best to be dog people…we just couldn’t do it. Too much licking, too much chewing up everything, too much…maintenance. It’s like having a 7th child! If we want another child child, we’ll just have a 7th. 
It’s much more fun.
Same for us!
That’s really interesting how different we are! We often wish our cats behaved like our dog: The cats have cost us many $1,000s of damage around the house - we don’t have a piece of furniture that is not destroyed by their claws:-) We probably just don’t know how to deal with them, although we have tried a myriad of possible approaches.
My thought: a water pistol for everyone in the house. But my wife disagrees.
We let ours outside…well, 2 of them. Of the other 2, one hasn’t yet been brave enough to go outside…during the Spring/summer we leave the doors open to let them come in/out as they want, but this one has always been very skittish…not sure what he went through during the first couple months of his life, but it made him very shy. The second is a 2.5 year old female that was declawed before we got her. 
It was either we take her or the family that had her would put her in a shelter as they couldn’t keep her any longer.
How awful:( It is really nice of you to take this poor cat.
Ours are all indoor-outdoor cats, so they range as they want. In winter, the weather gets pretty fierce around here, so we feel leaving them out harsh (although many strays live in barns year-round). Around here, vets frown on letting your cat roam at will (even though ours are fixed), but I figure their life must be so much more fun that way. Ours love to go out in any weather but the coldest.
I have some acreage way out in the country away from civilization. Mine go out when they want and they come in when they want. Cats love it outdoors just like kids do.
So do we:-) We are very rural, and live in the middle of a forest, along a river, with no neighbors at all.
Correction: our close neighbors are all wildlife – beavers, muskrats, minks, foxes, deer, turkeys, you name it…
Where near Portland? I grew up in rainier or, right across the river from Longview wa
We live in lovely Lake Oswego. When not at the baseball field we spend a good amount of time in the wilderness, we especially like hiking in the Crystal Mountain/Rainier area, as well as many places in the Oregon Cascades. My son has been going into the Southern WA area to learn to bowhunt from a friend for the last few years. Lovely place. Our favorite after living in MN, TX, NJ, and a few others.
I’m here because I didn’t listen to the fatherly advice of a certain admin at a certain D forum:
“The friends that you choose have a big influence on who you are and how you choose to behave and that plays out the same way in this community.” —***
Funny that… 
I appreciate diversity. As such, I hope to fulfill the role of token Dr. Bernstein freak. That is, I’ll be the one who reminds PWDs that it’s possible to use an insulin pen like a pump (Hat-tip to Ryan Whitaker at D-Solve!) and your meter like a CGM.
Glad you are here, and the more the whole story comes out, it is starting to be more and more unbelievable.
I just could not believe that quote…
Apparently I am an undesirable friend:(