Category: Personal

Got Islets? Transplant Recipients Talk About Curing Type 1 Diabetes - Home

Got Islets? Transplant Recipients Talk About Curing Type 1 Diabetes

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.
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Out of Sight Out of Mind? Sending Your Child With Diabetes to College

Letting Go: Sending a Young Adult with Diabetes to College

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.
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Trading Places

Trading Places: Putting Diabetes Aside to Take Care of My Husband

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.
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pancreas gland - Why I Became a Diabetes Researcher

Why I Became a Diabetes Researcher

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.
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Moira - Before and After

Longtime D-Mom Loses Weight and Gains Strength

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.
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Don’t Judge People with Type 2 Diabetes

Don’t Judge People with Type 2 Diabetes

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.
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Unsolicited Diabetes Advice

Unsolicited Diabetes Advice: Think Before You Share

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.
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Diabetes Alert Dog - Home

Living with a Diabetes Alert Dog

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.
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Mac and Lois

63 Years After a Type 1 Diabetes Diagnosis

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.
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