Type 1 Diabetes Awareness Day
Today is Type 1 Diabetes Awareness Day. To mark it, I would like to share some facts about this condition and my life with it.
- Only about 5% of the people diagnosed with diabetes are type 1. That's around 6.8 million of the 135 million worldwide. Most diabetes-related advertising/journalistic writing is NOT geared toward me.
- There is no cure for diabetes. Insulin makes it possible for us survive, but is only a treatment.
- The cause of Type 1 diabetes is not an overabundance of sugar in the diet. (Nor is it a direct cause of any other kind of diabetes.)
- I was diagnosed when I was almost 18 years old. I mark my diagnosis date with my birthday because I started giving myself insulin shots on my 18th birthday.
- I test my blood sugar 6-12 times a day. Test strips cost about $1.35 each, so that's $8.10 a day just to get a very general idea of how I'm responding to my insulin dosage and food intake. Diabetes costs me and my insurance company ~$12 per day, every day.
- I have worn an insulin pump for just over two years. I feel it has made my life 100% better.
- In order to keep up with my diabetes, I carry my "pancreas" with me everywhere I go.
- The JDRF is my organization of choice for fundraising for type 1 diabetes, but their focus is mostly on children with diabetes. I find this very frustrating, as I was barely a child when I was diagnosed, and all those children will still have diabetes when they are adults. What then?