Who has time to blog when on top of actual adult things you have to do, you find things like this on the internet and spend precious time laughing your head off?
But let me rally and gather the last of my strength to bring you some interesting, yes INTERESTING my friends, information on diabetes.
There are 3 kinds of diabetes: Type 1, Type 2 and Gestational. Type 2 is usually brought on by old age or bad diet and gestational only happens when pregnant (what's up with that? Like growing a human being inside your stomach isn't complicated enough, now some women can't eat chocolate while doing it?! Lame). For the purposes of this blog, I will focus on Type 1 which is classified as an auto-immune disease.
Type 1 diabetes is when the pancreas shuts down and insulin production is compromised or completely non-existent. Without insulin, the body cannot break down sugar and turn glucose in energy to be stored in muscle tissue, fat cells, and liver cells. Basically, without insulin, your body has no way to transform food into actual fuel the body needs to keep going. Those with Type 1 diabetes generally have very high blood sugar as a result.
Symptoms of Type 1 Diabetes include blurry vision, excess thirst, fatigue, frequent urination, hunger and weight loss. Go too long without insulin and your body can shut down and go into a coma, which left untreated, can result in serious permanent damage to vital organs or even death. So....insulin is important, to say the least.
Treatments for Type 1 diabetes include a strict regimen of eating a very carefully calculated diet, exercise, multiple daily insulin injections and frequently testing your blood sugar several times a day. This is also known as the No Fun Allowed Life Program. Well, maybe not no fun. But seriously, a strict diet and exercise program alone is enough to give me the sads, and then I have to start injecting myself with needles DAILY?! Rough stuff.
I have a friend with Type 1 Diabetes (which I shall from here on out refer to a s TOD aka Type One Diabetes. See how creative my laziness gets?) and she has an insulin pump. Basically, this insulin pump is a small machine, the size of a cell phone, which carries insulin in it. A tube attached to the pump connects into the blood stream via a small incision in the stomach. The pump can be programed to inject insulin into the body as needed, so rather than sticking a bunch of needles into her skin every day, she can just press a few buttons and the insulin goes right in through the little tube. It SOUNDS cool, and every time she uses it she reminds me of some awesome human-machine hybrid, but imagine if after EVERY time you ate ANYTHING you had to add up the sugar value of the food your consuming, calculate it into glucose, and determine how much insulin you need to pump into your body. And remember, your life depends on this. So...now we're adding math to this nightmare? Gross.
TOD is a chronic condition and there is no cure. Plus, like almost all immune diseases, scientists and doctors don't really know what triggers TOD, so there is little to no preventative measures someone can take to reduce their risk. Most people with TOD are diagnosed between childhood and their early twenties and once you have it, you have it for life.
So that's my succinct and probably not very informative post about TOD. I am sure you have many more questions, so I direct you to the much more informed and accurate American Diabetes Association homepage (though I doubt their cartooning skills are as amazing as mine. Also, no cats on their website, to I win on that very important level). Don't blame my short post on me, blame it on my participation in 800 million other things. If overcommitment was an autoimmune disease, I would be on life-support by now because I clearly don't know when to say when.
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