Welcome!
Welcome!!
Diagnosed in 1971 at 9 yrs along with my sister who is 2 yrs older, So tough for the first few years. When I think back now, donāt know how our parents survived.
Sis and weāre both told weād be dead by 30 yrs. Am turning 62 in 9 days and my sister 64 shortly after.
Just waiting for something to really change the T1D game - am exhausted with diabetic fatigue.
Itās always nice to be here - so very appreciative of everyone in here.
Cheers!
hi, iām new here! lifetime athlete and outdoorsperson located in the mountains of the great american PNW. thereās no history in my family of diabetes, so last year i was baffled when i experienced increasing exercise intolerance, fatigue, poor sleep, escalating polyuria, and unexplained/unnecessary weight loss.
i ended up taking myself to the ER where it was revealed i had blood sugar of 390, an a1c over 14, and a bmi around 15, and thatās how i learned i was diabetic. i was dehydrated and emaciated, and still trying to train through: the care team was amazed i had made it in before i went into DKA. i was released a few hours later after IV fluids and some insulin, and the next day began my journey through life with diabetes.
unfortunately my first provider default diagnosed me as t2 and put me on metformin. i reacted badly and ended up switching providers, and i am finally getting an insulin treatment program ironed out and wearing a libre 3 cgm. bloodwork shows very low c peptide and we are waiting on autoantibody results. given my profile, family history, bloodwork to date, and my longterm lifestyle, the working assumption is t1.5/lada.
any tips or recommendations, especially for managing diabetes as an athlete and in outdoor and endurance sports especially, would be so appreciated! itās nice to have a community to feel a little less alone!
Welcome @panda . This is a pretty good place for those kinds of concerns. There are a few athletes around. @Eric runs marathons and @CarlosLuis and I both do a lot of biking. @daisymae does a lot of swimming and there is a long thread on āgetting back into the poolā that covers a lot of different approaches to handling blood sugar levels when training. There are some good threads on how to train generally as well. There are a lot more athletes here than the ones I just mentioned, but those are the few that come to mind.
I agree with @bostrav59, this a great forum for those seeking to learn more about managing their BGs during exercise. If you search on āexerciseā in the search box, youāll find a wealth of information in the form of threads and wikis specifically on exercise, some going back several years, but still very relevant. Welcome to FUD!
Hi @panda!
Welcome to FUD!
Tell me what you want to do, and letās get it done!
I suggest starting a thread specific to your sport and training and letās dive into all the 'betes management parts of it.
Hi, Iāve mostly been browsing the forum, but I figured I might as well introduce myself. Iām from the US but I live and work in a small town in British Columbia.
I was recently diagnosed with T1/LADA in November of last year. I developed all the textbook symptoms a couple months after being infected with what felt like a mild case of COVID in 2022. From what Iāve learned since diagnosis, it was probably several things working against me: moving to a new town, being under prolonged extreme stress, genetic risk, that coupled with a viral infection with Known immune-disrupting effects likely kicked off the autoimmune response.
But because I was grossly uneducated about diabetes in the typical way of someone without the disease, I of course did not recognize my symptoms as such, and certainly not as diabetes. I wasnāt a child and I wasnāt obese so diabetes simply was not on my mind.
I carried on with my hobbies outside of work, hiking trails and up mountains by myself (very scary in hindsight), thinking my excessive thirst and dry mouth was the arid climate of BCās southern interior disagreeing with me, and that there may be truth behind āgetting old and dried outā after all as a woman over 30. (I went from drinking about 18floz of water a day as a forestry technician doing 10 hour field days to drinking 2-4 LITERS working my new desk jobā¦closer to the end there I was drinking 6 liters of water a day. Coworkers remark āthatās a lot of waterā or even āItās good youāre drinking so much water, I should drink moreā )
The immediate change in vision came early, but when I mentioned it offhand in a call to my father āIām so stressed I feel like itās affecting my visionā instead of telling me to see a doctor he said āIāve been stressed like that before, donāt let it get to youā andā¦it eventually āresolved.ā I suppose my eyes began compensating for the refraction change in my lens.
I noticed I was hungrier and spending way more on food yet not gaining weight though my activity level was way down, and only several months in did I have the recurrent thought āThis doesnāt make sense. I wonder how I will pay for this in the future.ā
During this time Iād been putting all my focus into my job, taking on projects, and dealing with a coworker who felt threatened by me and who would talk about me behind my back like it was Her hobby, while browsing my project files on the organization server and lift my techniques to use in her own work. Very stressful, but because she was more senior and I was new, I just kept it to myself.
Fast forward eight months, just as I get the promotion my weight falls off a cliff. I lose 12 lbs in two weeks, so fast I could feel the weight coming off and thought I could see myself getting thinner day by day despite trying to reverse it by consuming a huge calorie surplus of 3000-4000/day (huge dread, alarming) My veins were bulging and my skin looked shrink-wrapped to me. That one of my toes had gone numb was an afterthought. My parents over the phone beg me to go into emergency.
I mention drinking 6 liters of water to the intake nurse and itās like a siren goes off in her head. She gets a glucometer and my glucose is too high for it to read. Itās too high for a second machine to read. They have to send my blood to the hospital in Kamloops and it comes back 49.5mmol/L, my a1c was over 15. I feared cancer but it was diabetes.
The diagnosis has changed my life, and I am Prioritizing management and learning all I can about it, because understanding helps me more than following a doctorās/educatorās advice by rote and the docs told me So Little. So far Iāve found āType One Talksā on youtube, and āMastering Diabetesā. As well as watching videos for med students explaining the pathophysiology of the disease. Not to mention a ton of medical papers. Iāve browsed Reddit, but the vibe over there is soā¦not what I want to surround myself with. After a while of browsing FUD silently, Iām finally starting to post
Welcome, @ninako! While Iām sure youād rather have been in some other group, FUD is great group of people to learn from! The people here share liberally so take as much a part in discussions as you like. You may agree or disagree with some viewpoints, and thatās OK, we all learn from what others present! Hopefully youāll share what does and doesnāt work for you so others here (young, old, new to T1/T2, or long in the tooth) can learn from your experience too! If you have questions, ask them; thereās very little one of us hasnāt experienced and can help or inform you; your contributions are equally welcome!
Your symptoms leading to diagnosis are classic and youāre fortunate to have had an alert medical person recognize them, test you appropriately and get the initial diagnosis without having to be wheeled in to the hospital. Sounds like youāve done quite bit or research on your own already to educate yourself. My biggest piece of advice: Be your own advocate, LEAD your own team of advisors (i.e. accept the advice as advice), and make your own determinations after educating yourself (sounds like you do that anyway, so good for you). Iām sure others here will jump in too!
Hi @ninako -
My story is similar to yours. I was diagnosed a little over a year ago. Symptoms started two weeks after a mild covid infection. Things got progressively worse with me trying everything - drinking liters of water for the insatiable thirst, compression socks/magnesium pills/yoga for the debilitating leg cramps, hot saunas for the constantly burning muscles, new prescription glasses for the constantly changing vision. When I finally saw the doctor I was very ill. Since that time Iāve sought out as much information as I can find about my diabetes and the best care. Iāve learned a lot from the people on this forum. Welcome!
Jennifer
Thanks Tom,
From what Iāve seen this is a great community, and Iāve learned so much just hanging back and reading. I still feel so new to learning to manage the condition, so I donāt know if Iāll have much to share very soon, but I look forward to contributing as I get into the swing of things. Iāve also bookmarked a lot of reading mentioned in the posts here, like The Athleteās Guide to Diabetes, Bernstein, Sugar Surfing, D-Solve and many more. Iām a little slower to get around to the books because I work full time on top of still getting the hang of how to manage my sugars, but I do plan to read them! I sometimes think my first choice of post might have rankled some people, but I hope to show Iām not caught up in clickbait or implausible stories of remission. I have T1D and probably for the long haul, so I want to learn how to deal with it at the v least, the hope is nice though.
And when I look back at all the time I was undiagnosed, I was SO lucky. All the time I could have developed serious DKA and been without help, hate to think about it
@ninako [editted] Your point about ālong haulā is important, T1 is a marathon, not a sprint, so give yourself time to absorb all the advice and donāt beat yourself up about short-run, short-term effectsā¦all with-in reason of course (easy to say, sometimes much harder to do!). You mention some good sources of info; another that many, if not most, will endorse is āThink Like A Pancreasā by Gary Scheiner (sp?) who runs IDS (https://integrateddiabetes.com/) in Pennsylvania (I have no association other than they have good info!). The IDS website has some great other information and a newsletter you can sign up for with good info, approaches, and even recipes (many low carb, some not so much).
i think credit for the excellent observation actually goes to @ninako but i could not agree more! and thanks as always for sharing resources.
@panda Thanks for the correction, I editted the post; not sure why I made the error! Though the comments (as you point out graciously) still hold outā¦
@TomH itās a great point @ninako makes for sure, one i could definitely do to remember more oftenā¦slow and steady, one day at a time, right? best we can do! and you probably mixed us up because based on the intro, we have a ton in common. heck i almost mixed us up myself!!!ā¦we are both new here, and we both live in the same general region, seem to have similar interests activities lifestyles and pursuits, and we had very similar arcs to the same eventual diagnosis. i think we are also about the same demographic (30+ F), etc.
I just found this group and Iām super excited! Iāve just been reading and reading and found so many helpful tips already. I was diagnosed at 28 in my third trimester of my second child (Iām 42 now). The glucose tolerance test found it! Looking back, I was so thirsty and I just didnāt realize it.
Fast forwardā¦I undercount carbs now because of injecting 10 units directly into my bloodstream by accident on a manual injection and battling a dangerous low for hours. Iām hoping to figure out how the hell to actually figure out my I:C ratio and basal level to prevent a crappy A1C and dangerous highs.
Iām an open book too so ask me any questions. I live in West Point, Utah and love golf, but HATE the lows that come with it. Iām scared of doing so many activities because of diabetes. I donāt want to feel trapped anymore. My A1C hangs around 6.7 to 7.2. Iām also using Tandem & Dexcom G6.
Hi @Cameedee
Welcome to FUD!
You found the right place! Create a new post about your activity and D management, and letās get started!
I thought low was the point of golf.
I know that you are concerned about exercise induced hypoglycemia. @Eric is the go to person for working out what works for you.
Thatās important because management is personal. There are guidelines but they are rough approximations.
Iām a type 2 using a pump. Over the years T2DM has progressed from diet and exercise to Metformin, then Lantus and now a pump. With every change i had to figure out how to exercise safely without going low.
Getting a Dexcom became a valuable asset. My favorite activity is bicycling and Dexcom BG displays on my Garmin bike computer mounted on the handlebars. For other activities on my watch.
I still carry a kit with glucose tabs and food plus an ever present meter. Sometimes CGMs can play false.
Anyway I know you will find what works for you, itās worth it.
Yes low scores! Iām just so tired of eating and eating and eating to keep sugar numbers at bay! I wear an apple watch for numbers which is very helpful! I created a post and canāt wait for the pros to provide their input. Thank you for being so kind.