Ed Hague
I was first diagnosed with diabetes in 1967. Back then, we used glass syringes and had to sharpen and boil our needles. The only way to check blood sugar was through a urine test that was imprecise and couldn't give real-time data.
Treatment has improved greatly since then, but ultimately, having diabetes can catch up with you. It wears you down emotionally, damages your physical organs and can ultimately lead to early death. After 35 years of struggling to control this disease with up to five injections a day, I needed help.
I'd looked into insulin pumps years before, but at the time, they were bulky and cumbersome. In the 60's, a prototype insulin pump was carried like a backpack. In the 70s, they were like thin bricks. Beyond size considerations, I didn't like the idea of being tethered to something, of dragging around an electronic device that was keeping me alive.
Eight years ago, when I broke my clavicle in a snow skiing mishap, I had trouble recovering from the accident and resulting surgery. I wasn't healing well and my diabetes control was increasingly erratic. My endocrinologist encouraged me to consider alternative treatment methods.
I was at a low point, and I knew I needed to do something, so I agreed to insulin pump therapy and recently, continuous glucose monitoring. The change was dramatic. Within a few weeks, I felt like I had received my life back. Even driving home from the doctor's office, my first day on the pager-sized insulin pump, I told my wife that I felt different. I described it to her as feeling like somebody reached inside me and turned something on that had been off for a long time. My doctor told me it was the insulin. For the first time in 35 years I was getting a steady drip of insulin, every six minutes.
Before I started insulin pump therapy, multiple daily injections controlled my life. The long acting insulin required me to eat at specific times or my blood sugar would drop low. I'm a pastor, so my life can be hectic at times. It was incredibly hard to adhere to such a strict schedule when no two days were alike and emergencies could delay meals unexpectedly. Now, I can skip meals if I need to. I love that flexibility.
A new advancement, continuous glucose monitoring, allows me to check my glucose levels in real time. I can now see my glucose trends graphed out, with a reading showing up automatically every five minutes, so I always know how I'm doing. The insulin pump alarms if I'm too high or low, which at night can literally be a lifesaver.
Before insulin pump therapy and continuous glucose monitoring, I felt like I was at the mercy of this disease. But now, because of the technology available, I finally feel empowered; for the first time I control my diabetes, it doesn't control me.
