By: Katherine Itacy, Esq.
Dated: November 1, 2017
November is National Diabetes Month in America. According to the CDC, “More than 30 million people in the United States have diabetes, but 1 out of 4 of them don’t know they have it.”
Thankfully, my mom was (and continues to be) a registered nurse, so she noticed several things in my behavior and health when I was four years old that indicated diabetes (i.e., excessive thirst and frequent urination). She caught it quickly and brought me up to Boston to the Joslin Diabetes Center, where they took excellent care of me.
While my mother and my doctors provided me with excellent care and diabetes-related education, I spent most of my youth thinking that diabetes was not going to slow me down. I kept telling myself: “I have diabetes, but I am not a diabetic!” But the truth is, diabetes has ended up having me. It has taken over my body. It has attacked my sensory nerves in my arms and legs; it has worsened my circulation; it weakens my immune system and makes me more susceptible to illnesses; because of it, I heal very slowly from cuts and scrapes and am prone to infection; it has deadened nerves in my wrists and elbows; it has caused the blood vessels in my eyes to leak, my eyes to hemorrhage and cataracts to form; it has caused benign tumors to form in my breasts, and has caused such inflammation in my fingers that the tendons get stuck as I try to bend and straighten each digit.
As a Type I Diabetic, I am at risk of going blind, going into kidney failure and having my toes or limbs amputated. I am even at greater risk of heart disease and strokes.
Now, I am at least partially to blame for the speed in which my diabetes has worsened. There were a number of years during which time I ignored my blood sugars and intentionally failed to cover all of what I was eating with the appropriate amount of insulin. I have been through a lot in my life; most of which, good or bad, I do not regret. But I do regret not taking better care of my diabetes.
A medical professional said to me earlier this year that he wished diabetes was called “diabetic cancer,” so that his patients (and the general public) would take it more seriously and understand the severity of the disease. Now, I have never had cancer, so I cannot say whether that is a fair comparison. What I will say is that even after receiving the best medical care out there, and the best diabetes-related education from both my mother and from Joslin, I unequivocally failed to take my diabetes as seriously as I should have. Because of that, I will have to accept the fact that I may have lived longer, and suffered from less diabetes-related health complications, had I taken better care of myself.
Now thankfully, medical treatment for diabetics and diabetes prevention has come a long way since I was diagnosed in April of 1988. I am now using an insulin pump that works pretty similar to what one would expect from an artificial pancreas. Had I been born recently, things like the Medtronic 670G insulin pump could have helped keep my diabetes under much better control. Like I said, I will have to live with the bad decisions I have made over my healthcare. But hopefully, future generations will not have to suffer as I have.
Hopefully, if I do not see a complete cure for diabetes in my lifetime, I will at least be alive to see when diabetes is no more of a burden to the newly-diagnosed than having high blood pressure or cholesterol. Until that day, it is essential for the general public to keep themselves educated and informed about diabetes and its warning signs, treatments and potential complications.
Please, use me as a cautionary tale – no one wants to go through the amount of pain and discomfort that I have endured if they can help it. And you can help it. I have a very uncertain future ahead of me, health-wise. Yours doesn’t have to be. Stay informed, my friends!
To learn more about my life journey with diabetes and other health struggles, keep an eye out for my book, From National Champion to Physically Disabled Activist: My Lifelong Struggle with a Diseased Body, and the Lessons it has Taught Me Along the Way, which will be submitted for publication soon!
To follow the CDC regarding all things diabetes, check out their twitter page at @CDCDiabetes. To follow the Joslin Diabetes Center, their Twitter handle is @JoslinDiabetes.
Katherine Itacy 