User:Kirez

User contributions

My diagnosis in September, 1993.

I believe that my experience of IDDM has been extraordinary, in a frightening and damaging way, which is why I want to share some of my personal story.

In my almost 14 years of being an insulin dependent diabetic, I have experienced the familiar rollercoaster, but with frequent and severe hypoglycemic episodes due to giving myself too much insulin. In my case, many of these have coincided with intense physical training, and a tendency to economize on my time -- attempting to squeeze meals and blood-sugar management into a fast and furious schedule that is constantly changing. I have almost no routines or consistency in my life, I have poor time management and organization skills, and I tend to overschedule myself.

This introduction feels understated to me: I have lived through periods including more than 15 severe hypoglycemic insulin shocks a week. The story of my diabetes is a story of how profoundly blood sugar can affect brain function, with frightful effects seen in personality, mood, memory, intelligence, judgment; in the more routinely medical account, including grand mal seizures, self-induced physical trauma, car accidents, countless periods of unconsciousness, amnesia, depression, and simple cognitive mistakes that have thrown unpredictable monkey wrenches into every facet of my life.

I would like to share some of these stories, and among the humor and the horror, to document how devestating extreme fluctuations in blood sugar can be to the human brain, and by implication, to all of one's life.

Fellow diabetics might marvel at me because I can report a most recent HbA1C of 4.8. And further, if they're familiar with my adventures: I've run more than 10 marathons, including a 50-mile ultramarathon; as a freediver I have regularly swum with sharks and in perilous reefs, can hold my breath for more than 4:30 minutes, can swim down to 40 meters. I've been a SCUBA diver, a polo player, a sky diver, a rock climber. Most impressively, I believe, I have hitchhiked across the asian continent, covering the Russian Federation twice from Europe to the Pacific Ocean, and through northern China -- all on a budget of less than $10 per day, wearing an insulin pump, running out of supplies including glucometer test strips and pump infusion sets, adapting to new methods, medications and instruments, sometimes surviving through days of hiking without food or rest.

And in the process, of course, experiencing hypoglycemia in which I forget who or where I am, or -- an example of a horrifying story I can tell: paranoid delusions that the FSB (formerly KGB) who had just been interrogating me, are now following me and staging me in an artificial world. In this episode I openly, ostentatiously, committed several crimes in the midst of a busy crowd in public because I believed the crowd consisted of acting FSB agents who were surveilling me.