Approaching a Half-Century of Life With Type 1 Diabetes (T1D)

On July 24, 2023, I will mark 47 years of having lived with autoimmune Type 1 diabetes (T1D). I was diagnosed as a seven year old, so not quite fifty years ago, but much closer than I ever really anticipated. When I was diagnosed in 1976, no one told me that I should expect horrific complications or that I ' d die young because threats weren ' t part of the conversation; some may have been due to my age. But there was also no such thing as a certified diabetes educator in 1976; instead, pediatric nurses instructed patients on how to give themselves an injection. In fact, scientists had only proven that Type 1 diabetes had a distinct etiology from Type 2 diabetes in 1973; before that, the presumption was that children usually always developed Type 1 and therefore needed insulin. Older patients were more likely to be misdiagnosed. Unfortunately, that remains true in 2023.The only reason I even have a record of the exact date of my diagnosis is because back in 2007, I ' d blogged about my 31st anniversary of diagnosis, catch that post athttps://blog.sstrumello.com/2007/07/31-years-later.html for more. At the time, my mother was cleaning out her closets and she ' d saved my Baby Book, and that contained a calendar from June and July 1976 with everything I had done. Using that calendar, we did some calculations to come up with what was my T1D diagnosis date. My mother had saved those things because I ' d spent the summer across the country with my maternal grandmother, uncle...
Source: Scott's Web Log - Category: Endocrinology Tags: 2023 50 years half century half-century joslin medal Source Type: blogs