Life With Jenny: Type 1 Diabetes Diagnosis

I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when I was 6 years old - 30 years ago! I've spent my life with this chronic condition and have told people parts of my story but never really taken the opportunity to share it, all of it. So here we go, here's my story:

It's fall 1992 in Massachusetts. I am 6 years old in 1st grade in elementary school in our small town of Charlemont, Massachusetts. It's flu season. A lot of the kids at school have been sick, so inevitably, I got sick too. I caught the flu but didn't get better in a few days like most people. It's been 30 years but I remember being sick. I remember feeling terrible. I remember feeling so thirsty - bathroom faucet water tasted so good in the middle of the night! I remember constantly having to pee, and every time I went pee, I drank more water from the faucet and the process repeated, over and over. I couldn't keep any food down and didn't want to eat. I was just so tired, I wanted to sleep but my dang bladder kept waking me!

As a 6 year old, I had those fun 'footie' pajamas that zipped up from the ankle to the neck. While I was sick, those were the only thing I wanted to wear because I was so cold. One morning, I was in the living room and my mom had given me a clean pair of footie jammies to put on, I can't remember but assume the pair I had on had gotten dirty somehow. So, as I am in the living room changing, my mom comes back into the living room from the laundry room, looks at me and gasps. My mom told me she could see all of my rib bones and that was the moment she felt this wasn't just the flu.

My mom called our family doctor who said to bring me in right away. At the doctors office, they had me pee in a cup (I don't remember doing this...) and tested my urine. The doctor comes back over to my mom and I and I remember him telling my mom I needed to get to the hospital immediately. There was no time to wait for an ambulance - go now and go quickly. I remember my mom being panicked and I remember her crying. I was so thirsty. My mom put me in the truck, we had one of those old Chevy C/K trucks with the single cab, bench seats, I just laid down on the seat while my mom drove quickly to the hospital. The nearest hospital was 30 minutes away - I think we made it in 15-20 minutes. I remember an intersection we went through, my mom crying and other cars honking their horns. We arrived at the hospital - the doctor had already called and told them to expect us. My mom stopped the truck, picked me up in her arms and ran inside with me.

When we got inside, as she was crying she just started yelling for help. I don't remember what happened next - I think I went unconscious. I woke up later and was in a hospital room, in a bed. The tray table was over me and it looked like the room was full of people. Doctors and nurses were surrounding my bedside. Barely conscious, a nurse poked my finger and then says "her blood sugar is 678!" I was unconscious again. I don't remember anything after that until what must have been hours later. It was lighter in the room, my mom was next to my bedside, on the phone, crying but also sounding mad. Who is she talking to? I thought. Noticing I'm awake, she gets off the phone and talks to me. She hugs and kisses me and holds my hand. I remember she told me she was talking to my dad who was at work, and said he'd be to the hospital as soon as he could. She tells me a little bit about the diagnosis, that I would have to do shots every day.

Not long after waking up, a nurse comes into my room to check on me. It's all kind of a blur, and I don't remember exact conversations. I remember I was in the hospital for a week. I remember there was a lot that I had to do and learn and re-learn. I remember taking walks around the hospital, learning to walk again and gaining back my strength. I had to learn portion sizes and insulin dosages - this was back in the day where insulin dosages were on sliding scales. Like if your blood sugar before a meal was 80-130, you do 5 units of short acting insulin and 8 units of long acting insulin - you mix the insulins together in the same syringe. I remember the day I got to learn how to do injections. They brought me syringes, a bottle of saline, and an orange. I practiced drawing the "insulin" into the syringe and then injecting the orange. The nurse gave the option of me giving my parents shots to practice on them but they declined, hahaha. So I gave that orange multiple shots of saline. I felt confident in my ability to draw insulin into the syringe and inject it - into the orange. Later that day, I did get to give myself a shot and while it was scary, it didn't hurt and I was okay - I was more than okay - I was proud of myself!

I remember leaving the hospital after a weeklong stay. The doctors and nurses gave me hugs and applauded my leaving - applauded me walking out of the hospital, smiling and healthy. Looking back, I don't think many expected me to walk out of that hospital. I was in pretty bad shape when I got there, my prognosis for survival was not good. But I survived. I didn't know it then, but looking back now after having given my life to Jesus, He saved me when I was 6 years old. God had (and still has) bigger plans for me. It may have taken me 30 years, but here I am sharing my story and jumping in with both feet to build a community and make a difference.

Type 1 diabetes is life-long. It's chronic. It's exhausting. It's not my fault I have this disease - I didn't do anything to cause it. It's not because I ate too much candy or drank too much soda. This is an autoimmune disease. When I was in the hospital, they explained it to me like this: I caught the flu. My antibodies, the little soldiers inside my body who fight off the sicknesses, they got confused by the flu and instead of fighting off the flu, they fought my pancreas - the part of my pancreas that produces insulin. So now my body does not make insulin anymore which is why I have to take insulin shots. That's a whole lot for my little 6 year old brain to understand! But, I did. I understood very clearly that I had to do the shots and I had to take care of myself because if I didn't, I wouldn't survive. I knew I didn't want to die.

Stay tuned for next week! I will go into detail about my school years, what it was like being a teenager with a chronic, autoimmune disease, the things I learned and the mistakes I made. Thank you for reading, thank you for being here.

xoxo - Jenny