I was scanning in old photos the other day for my sister’s upcoming wedding video and I came across so many fun ones from when I was a kid. With Halloween just around the corner, I felt like I had hit the jackpot when I came across pages and pages of me and my little brother (obviously before my sister was born) dressed in our Halloween best each year. The eager faces of collecting all that candy brought back huge floods of memories.
Of all the children diagnosed with type 1 or juvenile diabetes, I feel like I was one of the lucky ones. I didn’t get the disease until late in my teenage years and I had plunged myself into several years of Halloween candy gorging, prior to my diagnosis. Now after living with the disease in my adult life, I sometimes get the comment along the lines of “you must have ate too much candy to get that.” Uhh, no, that’s not true.
It’s often that type 1 and type 2 diabetes gets confused by the general public that just doesn’t know that there is a difference. Diabetes type 1 and type 2 are almost two very different diseases, I don’t think that they should even be called the same thing. But no one asked me my opinion when they were naming the diseases.
Type 1 usually strikes in children and adolescents. That’s why they call it juvenile diabetes. It is an autoimmune disease, meaning the body attacks itself and it’s own cells. Although we are still researching what actually causes the body to attack its own pancreas, it has been said that the trigger to the disease is usually after the body has fought off an infection, virus or some other sort of sickness. I personally remember getting the disease a few weeks after I had battled a pretty good case of the flu and strep throat. Your pancreas, which produces the insulin to fight the high sugar levels, quits working for the rest of your life. And you must take insulin either via daily injections or infuse by a pump to fight the sugar levels in your body.
Type 2 diabetes is known as adult onset diabetes. This usually happens in older adults with a sedentary lifestyle. In this case, the pancreas still works, it’s just doesn’t play nicely with the cells in your body. The cells are locked down by a layer of fat that does not allow the insulin to get in and do it’s job. A lot of times, type 2 diabetics can take pills to open up the locked down layers and let the insulin into their cells. Sometimes they do have to take insulin injections to help supplement the insulin levels. But the good thing about this type of the disease is that it can be cured…most of the time. If you eat healthy and get some exercise you can usually rid yourself of the type 2 diabetes.
But, I am not a doctor, so if you’ve come here looking for medical advice you might want to keep moving along. I am only telling you my take on diabetes so that you know that there is a difference. And so you don’t freak out about you, or your kids, eating too much candy this Halloween. You can’t get it that way.
P.S. Thanks Mom for being a good scrap booker, the photos were fun to look at it. But seriously…what is up with all the face paint year after year?
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I was diagnosed on November 6 when I was 11 and believe me I had a ton of candy left when I got home from the hospital. Mom gave a lot of it to my brothers, hid some of it from me to be divvied out during lows or as a special treat when I had extra carbs to count, but for the most part, i missed out on gorging myself on candy that year. Bummer.