Day 3-

Insulin. Oh that wonderful bandaid smelling liquid that keeps me alive,(yes, strangly enough it smells like bandaids). This is pretty involved so please bare with me. So insulin is a hormone that helps your body break down carbohydrates and turn it into fuel so you can hop, skip, jump, run or just plain function everyday to do your everyday things. A body without insulin will start to break down its own tissue and muscle for energy which in return creates acid in the blood and causes ketoacidosis, or other wise known as DKA. As I have stated before DKA can lead to death, and quickly. SO, the moral of the story is we need insulin. Insulin comes as a liquid… and that means shots, or a pump. Most Type 1 diabetics, we are going to call it T1D now, on shots have 5-7 shots a day… yes a day. T1Ds on shots have to use 2 different types of insulin, short acting, which acts within 15-20 min and lasts 6 hours max… and the last 2 hours really taper off, and long lasting insulin which lasts about 24 hours. The short acting insulin if given with meals, a bolus, to break down the food/carbs we eat and yes we have to count carbs, ALL of them, but all that info is for another day. The long lasting insulin is used as kind of a “back drop” which is technically known as a basal rate. That basal rate regulates your blood sugars, or rather blood glucose levels, throughout the day, not involving any food. You see everything you do effects your blood sugar, sitting, moving, breathing. Everything you come into contact with effects your blood sugars, such as weather, germs, temperature… even taking a long hot shower. What a normal body does is release less insulin and the liver releases sugars to compensate you just keep going and never know. If you have T1D and have a fixed insulin level, your blood sugar goes up, or down and you definitely know. So as you can see have fixed levels of insulin is not ideal. I will elaborate more on blood sugars or glucose tomorrow.. Other T1D can have an insulin pump, like me, and use short acting insulin all the time. The pump gives you small micro doses of hourly basal rates every 15 minutes and we will have to use boluses for our meals and that dose gets computed with huge amount of variables into the pump… like when was your last insulin dose, what is your rate of units per carbs you are eating, what is your blood sugar, how many carbs are you eating… You are exausted already right?!?!? It is ONLY DAY 3 folks! T1D with pumps change their site every 2-3 days and use a IV type needle system to get the tube in our body. Another important part of the equation is insulin is injected into interstitial fluid, meaning fat or tissue, NOT MUSCLE or directly into the blood stream, that causes the insulin to act wayyyy to fast.

Lastly, so where does this band-aid smelling wonder drug come from? Well for years they used either bovine or pig insulin, which acts very, very similar to human insulin. In the US now it is very hard to get those now, now it is made to imitate human insulin by irritating bacteria so that is grows and acts like human insulin. It begins with brewers yeast… yes! crazy I know! I am soooooo glad Mr. Lilly figured this all out about 100 years ago so I and other T1D can keep on keeping on and not die… because before insulin was discovered that is what happened. T1Ds died, like all the time…. So I love that bandaid smelling, irritated bacterial hormonal liquid like my life depends on it… because it does.