By John Guinivere on 11/23/2009 11:25 AM
I was diagnosed January 1st. 2001 around 10 AM at an emergency clinic right by the Las Vegas Airport. The doctor said I shouldn’t have an infection in my salivary gland so he was going to check my blood sugar. Very quickly he told me that my blood sugar is 425, I asked him if that was good? He told me no you have diabetes, seconds later I was hit by the proverbial ton of bricks.
I had no insurance at the time but a friend knew a doctor in town who was doing a trial for a new medication, unfortunately I flunked the criteria, the doctor said there is no way around it, I needed to start injecting insulin and the pile of bricks came back again, I couldn’t stand needles.
I guess my body had lacked insulin for so long I didn’t know what it was like to have normal blood sugars, the difference was immediate and wonderful. I stopped peeing like a race horse, my dry skin went away, no more hair by the drain in the shower, the pains in my legs went away, I went from 149 pounds back to a normal 175, I stopped needing a nap every half hour and my anxiety all but went away. I was a huge fan of needles and insulin very quickly.
Treatment has come a long way, especially in the last decade. The insulin for one is identical to human insulin, before it was bovine (cow) at was not a perfect match. In the old days your blood sugar was tested monthly if you were really lucky, no one had meters that could check it any time of the day. There was also attention paid to just sugar, when all carbohydrates are turned into glucose, it’s high glucose levels in the body that are a problem, not sugar!
When I was diagnosed I set out on a two year search for the cure on the Internet, lots of claims, tried some things but I realized nothing that was a true cure had yet been developed. Being the optimist I am I figured it wouldn’t only be a few years, 8 years later I would say we are much closer maybe on the brink but brinks can even take a while.
It turns out gastric bypass is an unintended cure for type 2, for folks that overweight they remove the first part of the small intestine as it leaves the stomach, which has led them to believe maybe some mixed signals from that region may be part of the cause. People have been cured by having islet cells inserted into their pancreas but then they must take rejection drugs, if their own cells are replicated and reinserted no drugs are needed.
Type 1 will be trickier, it is an autoimmune disease, for whatever reason the body sees the islet cells that produce insulin as invading objects like it would a cold virus, so it attacks them and kills them off. The science here is closing in, inflammation seems to a very large part of the problem and there are drugs that are in human trials already.
The nice thing is that there are all sorts of approaches and a lot of dedicated scientists are working hard for a cure, once there is a cure it will have substantial effects on the worlds health care system, in time it will not only save millions from an early death, billions of lost productivity, it will over the years save trillions of dollars in saved medical costs, the estimate is 250 million worldwide and climbing. It is responsible for 5% of all deaths.
It’s not just high blood sugars that is the problem, it is the damage that is caused by them. It beats up all of your organs and cause the failure of some or all of them, leading to very costly medical problems that would disappear with a cure. There is one bad thing that will come from a cure, a lot of people in the medical profession won’t be needed, I guess we will just have to live with that.