Just the facts, ma’am

I just got my A1C results in the mail yesterday, so I thought I’d share some of my diabetes facts.

• Type 1 diabetes
• diagnosed July 2003 at age 18
• Age: 22
• Height: 5′ 3″
• Weight: 128 - doesn’t look all that bad, but my BMI is on high side of normal, and I’d like to lose 5-10 pounds

• A1C: 7.2 - not super bad, but not great either

• 17 units Lantus at 10 pm - no pump for me
• 3-7 units Humalog with meals
  • I don’t “lead” my insulin 30 minutes before I eat. Who has time for that?
  • 1 unit Humalog / 10 g carb
  • 1 unit Humalog / 25 points that my blood sugar is over 100 (eg. if my blood sugar is 200, I should take 4 units to bring it down to 100)
• Benicar for kidney protection (not for high BP)

• Freestyle Flash glucometer - <3
• currently test blood sugar around 4 times a day (each meal and before Lantus), but I’m trying to increase that to 6 or 7 times a day (to catch the after-meal blood sugar info)

I hope I got everything important. I’m sure I’ll think of something later and edit this…

Oh, I can dream…

As you may or may not know, I am a Type 1 diabetic. I was diagnosed in July of 2003, and I have everything fairly under control. I just read today about a possible stem-cell cure going on in Brazil. Obviously, it is way too soon to call it a cure, but it’s definitely something to look into. The procedure is currently pretty intense, involving a bit of chemo, and resulting in basically a wipe/reformat of the pancreas using the patient’s own stem cells. What I’d like to see is something more specific that will target just the affected cells in the pancreas. They already do islet cell transplants, so I don’t see why they can’t use the patient’s own stem cells to create “artificial” islet cells. Luckily for me, diabetes research is really hot right now, so I guess/hope that there will be a readily available cure in 20 years or so. Not really that far off, if you think about it.