As a newly diagnosed diabetic
November is National Diabetes Month, and in the spirit of that, I wanted to share my experience of getting diagnosed with diabetes in my twenties.
In January of this year, I started feeling off. I was constantly thirsty, even if I was chugging a bottle of water. I couldn’t sleep through the night without waking up to use the bathroom. And, my 20/20 vision randomly got blurry. I thought these symptoms were just random, not a manifestation of a chronic condition.
Later in March, as I was driving with my dad, who is a type 2 diabetic, we were talking about these random symptoms and he told me he experienced the same thing before getting diagnosed with diabetes. A few days later, I used his glucose monitor to check my blood sugar, and it read somewhere in the upper 400s (normal blood sugar when not fasting should be below 180).
I immediately made an appointment with University Health Services, where I met with a resident doctor, who after hearing my symptoms said it was likely type 2 diabetes. With the help of her attending physician, I was sent to the lab to have my blood drawn.
The next day, after her attending physician had seen my first blood test results, I was sent back to the lab to have a few more blood panels run and a urine sample done. Just hours later, I got a call from the doctor telling me that she recommended my parents drive to pick me up and take me to the emergency room in my hometown three hours away, so I could immediately be put on insulin as my recent blood panels were extremely concerning. My blood sugar was high; it was in the upper 200s when it should have been below 100. My A1C, which is the measure of average blood sugar levels over the past three months, was high; it was just over 13 when it should have been below 5.6. And, my beta-oh-butyrate levels were extremely high at 2.98 units when they should have been below .27, nearly putting me in a state of ketoacidosis, which is a complication of diabetes that can be life-threatening.
These results sent me to the hospital back home and started a three-month cycle of going to different doctors in an attempt to find both a diagnosis that fit me and my symptoms and the right concoction of medications to fix my blood sugar.
I think I went to the doctors more in this three-month period than I did in the previous five years combined. Eventually, I was diagnosed with latent autoimmune diabetes of adults or LADA.
LADA is a form of autoimmune diabetes where the pancreas will eventually stop producing insulin, which is a hormone that helps the body turn sugar into energy. Eventually, I will need to take insulin multiple times a day to substitute for the insulin my body will stop producing, but until then, my doctors and I have found a routine that has gotten my blood sugar down to a healthy level.
So now, about eight months later, I’m relatively healthy and successfully dealing with my diabetes diagnosis. While getting diagnosed with LADA diabetes was a scary and confusing situation that was only made worse because so many people, including doctors, don’t really have a full understanding of it, I am still grateful for my good health and the doctors and support system that have gotten me here.