Living With Diabetes
No Laughing Matter
My name is Andy Tiedeman; I am 26 years old and have had type I (juvenile) diabetes for over 13 years.
It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I took a late night trip to the emergency room at Children’s Hospital and was told by a doctor with a half-smile that I either had diabetes, or someone had switched my blood sample with blueberry syrup. I remember laughing at that and figured that he was joking, what a comedian. Earlier that evening my family and I had gone out to a local diner and I had already decided in advance that I would order a chocolate milkshake. I had an upset stomach on the way to the diner and so we headed home instead and finally to Children’s Hospital.
How long, I asked the doctor, until I could get out of here and get that milkshake? Well, he said, you’ll be here for at least another day, and as for the milkshake, that will have to wait a bit longer. How much longer, I asked, a few hours, a few days? No, he said, more like a few months, or quite possibly a few years. He said I would have to learn how to balance my body’s blood sugar levels first by using insulin injections and that it would take time before I could eat something with that much sugar. He said that from now on I would have to limit the sweets and other carbohydrates that I ate to be based on the amount of insulin I was taking. You’re joking, I said, no one person could do such a balancing act on a daily basis for every meal that they ate. No, he said, if I was joking I would have said, “a horse walks into a bar and the bartender asks why the long face.”
Okay, so maybe that’s not exactly what happened the day that I was diagnosed, but the important thing that I remember is how ridiculous the whole experience felt. Here I was a confused twelve year-old barely able to pass algebra 1 and all of a sudden I was saddled with the responsibility of having to measure ratios of insulin and carbohydrates just to drink a glass of milk or eat a piece of toast. It took a lot of trial and error and coaching from endocrinologists, Joslin doctors and nurses, and even counselors at Joslin’s summer camp for kids with diabetes to get me to where I am today.
The difficulty of measuring insulin to carbohydrates on a day-to-day basis is why I am so excited to start treatment using a device called the CozMore insulin pump. An insulin pump is a small mechanism about the size of a cell phone that delivers insulin via a plastic tube placed underneath the skin. The CozMore, made by Smiths Medical, has the ability for the user to input the carbohydrate amounts either manually or by using the on-board food database and the user’s blood sugar levels and, based on this information, calculates and delivers the required amount of insulin. Advances such as this give hope to people with diabetes like me who think that a brain freeze from a chocolate milkshake is bad enough, never mind a headache from the math!
