11/12/2025
It’s diabetes awareness month, and you’ll see a few posts from me about type one diabetes throughout November.
Awareness around type one diabetes is pretty low. Most people think that if you eat better and exercise, you can cure it but type one is an autoimmune disease that is there for life. I’ve even had a well meeting holistic nutritionist suggest that the right Rishi mushroom will cure me. It’s really unfortunate, because those sorts of beliefs are actually dangerous for us. But we know it’s just a lack of knowledge.
The only potential reversal is a complete pancreas transplant, and that is reserved for those who are on dialysis and have less than 10% kidney function!! For the vast majority of us, we simply live with type one diabetes, and 24/7 insulin therapy.
To put it into perspective, my pump failed a few months ago, and I receive insulin for 7 hour. This landed me in the hospital in Diabetic Ketone Acidosis. If DKA happens and is untreated, you die. It sounds so dramatic, I don’t like to talk about it, but it’s simply true. If you don’t take enough insulin, you get sick and can die. If you take too much insulin, you’re done. If I went trekking out in the back woods and got lost and ran out of my insulin, I die.
It’s kind of nuts and I actually try very hard not to think about it that way, it’s intense and morbid and no way to live. So we just move along, making thousands of extra decisions and calculations a day, and live your best life!
