Brian's Diagnosis

My husband is in a growing group of young men who are type 1 diabetics (juvenile onset) but who found out in their 20s. Brian and I met during our freshman year of college. During the first semester of our junior year, he said that he wanted to lose weight. He'd played soccer and tennis from the time he was a child through high school and had put on a few pounds during the first two years of college.

He started losing alright. By the time Christmas break rolled around, he'd lost 40 pounds! The thing was that he didn't know how he was losing so much weight so rapidly. He was constantly thirsty, and he practically lived in the bathroom.

When he went home for Christmas, he finally decided to see his family's doctor because he had a nagging headache that wouldn't go away. When the doctors tested his blood sugar, it was 598!

Yes, you read that right - 598! For those of you new to diabetes, normal is about 90-110 g/dl. Brian's was almost six times the normal range! The doctor called an ambulance. They wouldn't let him drive to the hospital even though it was just down the street because they were afraid he would go into a coma.

Brian stayed in the hospital for 3 days while doctors stabilized his blood sugar. They gave him an initial dose of insulin to bring it down a good bit and then brought it to normal gradually. Bringing it completely down to normal at once would have caused his body to be unstable.

When they got him into normal range, Brian told me that he didn't realize he'd had a headache for so long until he didn't have it anymore.

He went through nutritional and lifestyle counseling, but those sessions were just the beginning of our experience with this disease, which we've lived with now for 5 1/2 years.