Recently Diagnosed With Type 1 Diabetes.

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Nelbo

Nelbo

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Type 1
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Hello.
I was very recently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

I knew something was amiss when I started visiting the toilet as much as twenty times a day, and many times during the night.

The thirst was rather insidious; it was very mild to begin with, but as it worsened, I could've drunk a muddy puddle of water I was so thirsty.

I visited my GP after a routine blood test which showed my HbA1c to be 15%; my glucose when checked was 23.

I was sent to my local A&E department who diagnosed DKA. I was hospitalised for 5 days. I had never heard of this condition until then.

It came as a hell of a shock, as there is absolutely no family history of diabetes, type one or otherwise; I was told that anyone can develop type 1 diabetes at any time, regardless of family history.

The diabetes nurses were superb; they showed me in great detail how and when to inject insulin, and how to use the glucose meter.

I also have a Libre Freestyle sensor on my arm which relays my glucose readings to the diabetic clinic via my phone.

I've regarded myself as in very good health before my diagnosis - I used to jog regularly and stay active. I hope to start again when I'm feeling better.

The NHS have saved my life, and I am eternally grateful to them.

I'm getting my glucose level under control now, but I've been told that it can take several weeks to achieve this.

I know a few people who have this condition and they have all given me valuable advice which I am happy to listen to, as this is all new to me.
 
Welcome @Nelbo 🙂 Yes, it can take a little while to bring blood sugars down but that’s best as if they come down too fast it can be a shock to your body. Now you’re on insulin you should be feeling a lot better.

Which insulins do you take? Have you been shown how to carb count?

There are a couple of books often recommended for Type 1s on this forum:

Think Like a Pancreas’ by Gary Scheiner.

And Type 1 Diabetes in Children Adolescents and Young People by Ragnar Hanas (ignore the title - it’s great for adults too).

Think Like A Pancreas is American but I liked the chatty style and it contains some great information, as does the Ragnar Hanas book.
 
Hello Inka.
Thank you for your reply. Yes, I feel so much better now, especially since leaving hospital.

I have been prescribed Levemir and Novo Rapid.

I will have a look for those books; they will help tremendously.

I haven’t been taught to carb count yet, but I am taking note of the nutritional values labels on food packaging now.

I’ve also stopped grazing in the evening/night time.

My glucose, according to the sensor, sometimes drops into the red when I’m asleep. (Between 3 and 4 mmol/L) Do you have any advice for this?

Kindest regards, Nelbo.
 
I’m glad you’re feeling better 🙂 With your nighttime low readings, the thing to do is to do a fingerprick blood test to check they’re actually accurate. There are what are known as compression lows: false low readings when the sensor gets compressed in the bed or by the bedding.

Carb counting is pretty simple. It used to be taught at diagnosis but with time limited, it doesn’t seem to be done everywhere now. To start you off, try noting down the carbs in your meals. A set of digital scales is crucial so you can know exactly how many carbs you’re eating.

Here’s an introduction to carb counting:

The nuts and bolts of carb counting

When you live with type 1 diabetes, carb counting is a great way of managing your blood sugar or glucose levels. It can give you more freedom and flexibility in what you eat when you're preparing meals at home, grabbing food on the go or eating out. Carb counting does take some time and effort...
www.diabetes.org.uk www.diabetes.org.uk

And an online course once you feel ready:


.
 
I’ve attached a screenshot of my overnight sensor readings. It shows where the glucose has dropped into the red. IMG_4276.png
 
Nelbo said:
I’ve attached a screenshot of my overnight sensor readings. It shows where the glucose has dropped into the red. View attachment 29864
Click to expand...
That looks like the sort of dip down and up that I get when I’ve squished the sensor by lying on it. As you’ve probably got good Hypo awareness, I would have expected you to have at least woken up if you’d been truly hypo, and possibly got other symptoms (shakiness, etc, whatever’s normal for you if your blood glucose is low) if you’d been truly hypo.
 
Do you have your alarms set...that way you are woken up and can check if you need to take some glucose
 
@Nelbo, I can see from your graph that thee is a dotted red line somewhere around 4.5 - which presumably is your low alarm. 2 observations:

In my opinion that is still too low at 4.5 and these "alarms" really should be called alerts thus alerting you that your BG is dropping and thus you need to consider what to do. Until you are the "mistress" of your BG (and in practice that takes a long time to even feel that you have got the hang of things) I still use 5.6 as my low alert. I can't be sure or even slightly confident that once in mid 4s I can intercept a potential hypo in time​
​
In considering what to do, if my alert wakes needs me up I just see if I'm feeling hypo and if remotely in doubt I finger prick and eliminate the compression low. Then armed with that fp result I might eat a plain biscuit (nominally 6gm carbs) and go back to sleep expecting those carbs to nudge me up a bit. If I get a second alert then I will repeat. But also after normal wake up I will look carefully at my night portion of the graph and if there is a trend of going down, temporarily stalled by my night snacks I will suspect my basal is a bit too much and giving me too much insulin while I am otherwise fasting.​

There is a principle that when managing the basal / bolus insulins it is important to get the basal right first. If that isn't right the shorter acting bolus is constantly chasing the moving target of the incorrect background insulin. So if the nighttime falling trend occurs 2 or better 3 nights in a row - start by appraising your basal insulin.
 
I really liked your first post! I can clearly recall how much better I felt when I began injecting insulin and that was more than 57 years ago.
You'll be able to run again once you're a bit more sorted. I ran a 23 minute Parkrun at the weekend and a sub 2 hour half marathon recently. I believe being diabetic might make me fitter than many of my contemporaries in that I eat healthily and well and generally take care of myself. You sound very positive at the moment!
They're a very well informed lot on this forum. They've certainly taught me a thing or two.
 
Hi from me too @Nelbo and sorry you've had to join our club!
Just to say it took me a while to settle down from dka last year. I very much hope yours is a speedy recovery but listen to your body (and your doctors if they're good )
Fire away with any and all questions
 
Well - you couldn't actually ever get DKA without the D, could you! hence I'm not surprised anyone just normal without diabetes in their family/friends has never heard of it - and by that token I'm making the cabinet assumption that you seem to me to be a perfectly normal adult. 🙂 Even though of course every single person in the wide world diabetes or not - is definitely different! hence your body won't react exactly the same as someone else's, we usually do have enough shared things that we can compare.

Question - are you taking the Levemir once, or twice, daily?
 
Welcome to the forum @Nelbo

Sounds like you are off to a great start.

Diabetes does come as a shock to many of us, and I too can remember the intensity of the thirst even now 30+ years on.

I think @rebrascora (or @Robin ?) once mentioned knowing something was ‘up’ when they were seriously contemplating drinking from a less-than-spotless horse trough. 😱 :rofl:
 
Nelbo said:
Hello.
I was very recently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

I knew something was amiss when I started visiting the toilet as much as twenty times a day, and many times during the night.

The thirst was rather insidious; it was very mild to begin with, but as it worsened, I could've drunk a muddy puddle of water I was so thirsty.

I visited my GP after a routine blood test which showed my HbA1c to be 15%; my glucose when checked was 23.

I was sent to my local A&E department who diagnosed DKA. I was hospitalised for 5 days. I had never heard of this condition until then.

It came as a hell of a shock, as there is absolutely no family history of diabetes, type one or otherwise; I was told that anyone can develop type 1 diabetes at any time, regardless of family history.

The diabetes nurses were superb; they showed me in great detail how and when to inject insulin, and how to use the glucose meter.

I also have a Libre Freestyle sensor on my arm which relays my glucose readings to the diabetic clinic via my phone.

I've regarded myself as in very good health before my diagnosis - I used to jog regularly and stay active. I hope to start again when I'm feeling better.

The NHS have saved my life, and I am eternally grateful to them.

I'm getting my glucose level under control now, but I've been told that it can take several weeks to achieve this.

I know a few people who have this condition and they have all given me valuable advice which I am happy to listen to, as this is all new to me.
Click to expand...
Hi @Nelbo and welcome to the club. If it’s any consolation I was diagnosed last August aged 56 after losing 10kg in weight and having an insatiable thirst. Your story is very similar to mine regarding no family history, relatively fit, eat well and then boom. I think of it as being short of a hormone that I have to inject into my body and as long as it’s reasonably managed everything should be fine. Got to admit it didn’t feel like it at the time and I thought the world had ended. Now, I’m back doing everything I ever did but just take a bit more care and planning. Once you learn to carb count, it makes it much easier to control doses and keep within the recommended limits.

Any questions, there are loads of great people on here to answer every question. My Libre2 has just stopped working and I’m about to ask a question which is why I’m on here today! 🙂
 
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