Diabetes and You!

This blog is all about diabetes and my experience in managing it, researching for treatment and the products offered in the market and the internet for diabetics.  I will be posting also information from other related sites about diabetes.

But first about myself and my diabetes background. We are three children (all boys in the family) and all are diabetics. My mother is a Type I or insulin dependent diabetic since she was 19 and died at the age of 52 from diabetes complication such as kidney malfunction, pneumonia with water in her lungs, heart disease or in short multiple organ failure and she's not even obese, she is very thin since her high school days. She started injecting insulin when she was about 40.

I discovered my diabetes when I was 32 (I'm now 39), back then I don't believed I had one but my eldest brother brought me a glucometer - a portable blood sugar testing kit. He was using one as he was diagnosed earlier (at age 27). He persuaded me to have my blood tested and behold the result: 9 mmol/L or 162 mg/dL. Yes, it is beyond normal and I am diabetic.

Many thoughts came into my mind such as will I suffer and die like my mom, will my kids be diabetics also and others. I consulted my wife, other diabetics, my brothers of course, a doctor friend and they all told me to have myself checked by a medical doctor.

And so I did. The doctor had me undergo what they call the oral gluco challenge in which they got my fasting blood sugar then had me drink a very sweet liquid, had me wait for two hours and then took another blood sample. The result is 11 mmol/L or 198 mg/dL. So I am definitely a diabetic. The doctor prescribed Avandia (rosiglitazone maleate) once a day. Back then, I was an unemployed father with a wife and kid to support and avandia was and is expensive compared to other blood sugar lowering medicines such metformin or glyburide or glibenclamide and others.

For more information about diabetes, how it affects you, what you can do about it, just read my subsequent post.


Thank you for reading!