For Gina’s second transplant (two years after the failure of the first) researchers at City of Hope added a component of treatment called anti-thymoglobbulin induction, or ATG, which is designed to keep the body’s immune system from harming the new islet cells.
Category: Personal
How does one actually pull off a normal life when you have a disease that requires constant monitoring and care? With diabetes, it’s easy for the diagnosis to become all you are.
I remember it like it was a minute ago: that moment I pulled away from the college dorm, leaving my daughter with diabetes in Washington DC, 500 miles from home. I’d spent hours helping her arrange her room, and her diabetes supplies were tucked back under her bed in the cool containers I’d purchased just for them.
He was feeling the way I have often felt over the years because of my diabetes. He was angry, in pain, worried about money, upset about letting the kids down, and he needed my help. For the first time I understood just how much diabetes strained our daily lives. Being the partner of a person with diabetes takes its toll.
While the drug I worked on at UVA did not prevent or reverse the onset of diabetes, I have continued to study what initiates the development of Type 1 diabetes and how we might be able to stop it. Fueled by my desire to help Katherine, I am working with a team of other scientists from around the world to determine whether or not viruses might play a role in Type 1 diabetes development.
That’s right. While I worked hard and constantly not only to keep my daughter with diabetes healthy: blood checks, doctors appointments, the seemingly endless battle with insurance, educating others, setting things up so she could embrace the life of a “normal” child, etc, I forgot to focus on me.
People with type 2 diabetes continue to be seen as culprits who brought diabetes onto themselves instead as of people struggling with a difficult illness. Type 2 diabetes shaming has become part of our culture. I used to be part of that.
If you are a friend or family member who provides TLC in the form of spontaneously delivered diabetes advice, thank you! That is so nice! Unfortunately, not all of it arrives in the loving, friendly form you intended.
After thorough research on diabetes service dogs, we decided to work with Diabetic Alert Dogs of America. On February 18, 2015, our son became the handler of a diabetes alert dog (DAD), a wonderful male Goldendoodle, appropriately named Jellybean.
There were no meters, you didn’t know what your sugar was. The only way to know for sure was to test your urine, which was three hours behind. So I paid attention to the signs, I could tell when I was high or low. I remember that I’d eat something—a candy bar or a pint of ice cream—and I would run three or four miles.