Diabetes runs in my family. Almost everyone on my dad’s side of the family has/had it and many of them suffered quite a lot under it. My dad was diagnosed when he was 44 (he’s 75-now and needs insulin shots multiple times a day) and my brother, who is gonna be 40 next year, was diagnosed earlier this year or last year (not sure if he’s insulin dependent or not). I just turned 41 this September and have been riding the “high glucose/pre-diabetic” test results high-wire for the last decade or so. I used to be much more active (pre-COVID) and ate better in the past, but as I get on in my years, I am worried that this is going to become an inevitability even if I were to resume my previous exercise and nutrition regiments.
I think a lot of us can benefit greatly from hindsight and, even if it can’t help you now, what were some warnings/indications you were diabetic before you actually confirmed it? If you’re up for sharing, what was the final event that forced you to seek help and eventually get diagnosed?
Thank you, in advance, for any information you are willing to share!
Edit: Updated the title to specify Type-2 diabetics. Still, T1 that know how they were feeling prior to are more than welcome to comment, as well!
Night sweats. Insatiable thirst.
This probably sounds stupid, but I just kinda… started feeling diabetic? 😅 Like, how I was feeling matched my extremely vague idea of “what diabetes might feel like”, so I asked for blood tests, and yep.
I don’t think peeing a lot was really part of mine. I just found eating usually made me feel worse instead of better, and I was starting to get occasional tingling in my hands and feet.
Dude.
You nailed the reason for this post, actually. After 41-years, I know what to expect from my body. What prompted me to write this was that I was not feeling the same as before and, like you, I’m finding that eating makes me feel worse, not better. It used to just be a dull, malaise feeling. This post is because it feels much more present than before Thanksgiving. Like a head-rush or from drinking too much coffee. However, my coffee intake hasn’t changed over the years and I usually am done drinking coffee by 9-10am. Eating or not eating leads to slight nausea, a head-rush feeling (as mentioned), and almost like minor movement is slurred or delayed.
Ruling out illness or some sort of late-onset allergy, and given my family history, it got me thinking that these ill feelings may be the indications that I’m tipping more toward the diabetic side of the scale after striking a balance for so many years. Thank you for your reply!
The big ones for me were a frequent, sudden, urgent need to pee and getting up multiple times a night to pee. I also drank a copious amount of water. Like, the whole “eight glasses a day” thing which used to be popular was confusing to me, as I’d drink that much in the first couple hours of the day. I finally went in to the doctor and got a blood test and my A1Cs were well over the “welcome to Diabetes Land” number. With diet, exercise and drugs I’m well controlled now and caught it early enough that I still have good feeling in my feet. Given my family history, and all the shit I ate in my younger days, it’s not really a surprise. I just have to be more careful now, but I have discovered an enjoyment of climbing because of it.
Really, if you have any family history of diabetes, start visiting your doctor on an annual basis and getting a blood test. It’s simple, and catching it earlier is good for preventing problems with neuropathy in your feet.
That’s what I hear, about the catching early, so that’s great to hear you caught yours early. Thanks for the comment!
Mine was found completely randomly - I went in for blood work because I was having stomach issues after returning from a trip and my GP wanted to rule out an infection. I was really surprised to learn it, because I wasn’t overweight nor did I have a family history! But it just happens sometimes, I guess. In retrospect - I was always very thirsty and had to pee much more than a normal human.
It’s been controlled for a while but unfortunately I now have some tingles in the feet, which developed a full year after I started medication and got everything under control. My neurologist believes it’s basically the delayed effects of the previously uncontrolled sugars. Fortunately, it’s been stable for several years since and seems to be every so slowly improving slightly.
I imagine I would have much worse neurological issues had I not discovered it until later.
Sounds like you dodged a bullet (to the foot), so to speak! ;) Thanks for the comment.
I had no early warnings. I woke up one morning with blurred vision after a bad cold, went to the doctor, had a 600 blood sugar, A1C of 12.1, and they had me admitted.
Upon further introspection, constipation.
Early early early weirdness is that mosquitoes won’t bite you.
Get your blood tested annually and be healthy!
I used to make better choices and be more active. I want to return to those ways but things just seem so…hard…and almost not worth the effort sometimes. It’s my hope that by making this post, feeling the way I have the last couple of days, will snap me out of my funk and focus on my health more readily. I’m so much better at helping others get their shit together, compared to my own.
Thanks for taking the time to comment!
Late onset type 1 diabetes for me. The big symptoms for me were suddenly having to use the bathroom all the time and everything being blurry. I got those symptoms all of a sudden after being down with covid for a week. Diagnosed about a month later with an a1c of 10.
Metformin and a low-ish carb diet kept it in check for a bit before my doctor figured out it was type 1 and put me on insulin.
Isn’t that always how it goes. I had high hopes that generative AI could help find cures to all sorts of diseases and ailments, or links between things we previously wouldn’t have linked because of limited scope of info. Then, ya know, capitalism had to do it’s thing and now AI is used to replace the jobs we want to be doing so we can more focus on the jobs we hate! I bring this up to say that if you could put in your symptoms, no matter how detached, and get a decent idea where to look, it could have saved you and countless others that doctor lookup time. Maybe one day that’ll be a thing we can rely on!
It all started in 2022 for me, when my 10,000 trips to the toilet a day peeing habit impeded my sleep. A quick trip to the gp and a stick in a sample later, I was told, yep, it’s the 'beetus. I pee like a normal human being now. But gosh that was exhausting. I was borderline pre-diabetic for a while before that.
Man, I have my diabetes under control now (6.0 A1C) but never stopped peeing all the time. I can’t remember the last night of sleep I got with less than a few bathroom visits. Didn’t help I had to get on a diuretic for my blood pressure.
Before that, did you ever notice any general feelings, like feeling specific ways after you ate, or body process changes outside of peeing a lot? Thanks for the reply!
Wounds not healing, a shoulder injury that got worse over a few years (physio requested blood test that lead to diagnosis), sleep interrupted by peeing, low energy, E.D.
When I went in blood sugar was 17.5 after 12 hour fasting. They couldn’t shove medicine in me quick enough.
Hopefully caught it before I lose vision
Wow, scary! Thank you.
About 3 years ago I started getting tingling in my toes. That soon evolved into pain, and numbness. Eventually, I ended up having a small stroke. During the stroke it was discovered that I had an a1c of nine which is extremely high. I’ve gotten it under control now but the damage is done and I have full-blown neuropathy on my feet.
Are you taking anything for the neuropathy? Are you experiencing any improvement over time? My neurologist seem to think that while recovery as such is not feasible, that at least modest improvements are possible through long term healing and medication. Granted, this sounds like a particularly bad case, and I’m so sorry to hear you’re going through this.
Thank you for sharing and sorry to hear about your health issues. I get my glucose checked at least once a year, but only since talking to my brother about his health issues did the term A1C come up. I don’t understand why my doctor hasn’t had that test on the docket for labs. Seems like a good thing to keep track of given, ya know, the family history and my line-riding of the glucose scale.
If you are stressed about it, I would recommend possibly getting a glucose monitor for your own mental health. You can check it more frequently and see what your glucose does before and after meals, that can give you some more information to go off of if you are trying to get your doctor to order specific tests. I imagine if you asked him he would order an A1C test though! They are simple and quick, and as the other person said, they give you a good idea of how well your blood sugar is controlled over the course of several months. It’s really the way they diagnose diabetes in the first place generally. Activity and diet control are the number one ways to stay out of diabetes, however. Some people’s genetics are so tilted towards diabetes that they will enter it eventually regardless of how they eat, but that’s a pretty rare case. If you are really able to keep yourself in shape and control your diet for calories and carbohydrates and fiber, your chances are become so slim that I doubt your doctor would worry about it much anymore. I know that’s a difficult thing to do though, so as others have said, frequency of urination is often one, especially at night, neuropathic tingling in your toes, slowly healing wounds, fatigue. These are often among the first symptoms, but in many cases people don’t catch it until they enter what is called DKA or ketoacidosis, this is the major short-term risk of both diabetes, it is a separate production your body switches to when it can’t process carbohydrates and it produces an acid that your blood won’t get rid of fast enough, these people have to go to the hospital and stay usually a couple days qqqto get out of it. If you are already tracking it with your doctor, and checking your blood sugars, then you are ahead of the game! There is no real indicator besides your blood sugar and your a1c, and then physiological symptoms you may notice. Even if you do go into diabetes at this stage in your life, IF you are doing the other things I mentioned, and tracking your blood sugar, it would most likely be a an autoimmune-induced late onset type 1 diabetes. Even if that were the case with modern devices like CGM or sometimes even cgm and insulin pump combos. Your health can remain basically the same even after that kind of diagnosis! At this stage in our science, both types of diabetes are completely manageable if you are willing to be VERY compliant with your regiment. The bad parts of diabetes always come from specifically uncontrolled diabetes. The issue is that the molecule of glucose is large and can cause damage in the bloodstream, so when that level gets out of control, those molecules can clump and affect your tiny blood vessels. That is where the worst things come from, general organ damage including eyes and lack of circulation to the smaller ends of your extremities, usually your toes first. There is ALMOST no actual risk to having diabetes if you control it really well, you can essentially have full-blown type 1 diabetes with no insulin producing cells remaining and if you are tracking it well enough and good enough about your diet and exercise and medicine you can live a completely normal life and it won’t even shorten your lifespan significantly. That’s the hard part for people though. Having really good control because it’s a pain in the butt. Source: I’m an ICU nurse
Thank you so much for your insightful comment! I think I’m going to look into getting some sort of monitor just so I can, as you outlined, get some peace of mind. My doctor also suggested in our last visit that I invest in a blood pressure cuff to check for high blood pressure so finding both medical instruments might be worth purchasing together!
I hear you on the uncontrollable diabetes and difficulties for people. My dad, when he was diagnosed, was a consultant and had to move around to various parts of the country a lot. It wrecked his body and lead to the start of his issues. He went from drinking a 6-12 pack of beer almost daily to quitting cold turkey. He probably wouldn’t have made it to mine and my siblings graduations had it not been for his fortitude. Anymore, diet seems to be a huge part in the equation and unless you’re loaded, it’s really difficult to eat well. I wish our system of food processing was better and we didn’t constantly have to fight the battle against proper nutrition and affording other necessities in our lives.
My hope, from this post, is that I can get a sort of “scared straight” result that’ll snap me out of my current funk leading to the harmful, antithetic actions I’ve found myself repeating. Thank you again for your comment!
I also wanted to suggest to you that you go on a marathon on some site like YouTube about diabetic management and prevention. Knowledge is power when it comes to disease! The better you understand, the disease you face and the more you know about it, the smarter decisions you can make for yourself and your own health! Just make sure you are checking your sources carefully! There are probably more bad sources than there are good sources in the the grand scheme of the internet. A good rule of thumb is to steer away from .coms and steer toward .orgs and in the past .gov
and in the past .gov
Ain’t that the truth. Was just telling a friend of mine that we sacrificed so much science and technology for a bunch of red-hat racists and that the GOV sites we used to rely on for accurate and adequate info are all but farcical now.
It is definitely a lot of management, but it may be the disease. I see that is most preventable but also causes the most problems for people in the hospital when not controlled well. Our society does suck that way, but if you can do anything to stick to whole foods like fruit and cook your own meals without added sugar or salt, it can go a long way and sometimes save you money, though I do recognize that cheap as hell, fast food is the cheapest way to eat these days. It is also poison and I think you would do well to steer clear of it as often as humanly possible ❤️ most especially soda, even the sugar-free ones aren’t great, especially for diabetics as they can trick your body into releasing insulin and it’s still taxing for that system in a diabetic. You got this I believe in you!
Thank you, friend! I actually stopped drinking soda with the Supersize Me documentary. Haven’t looked back since. Now it’s just water (and beer, with meals) for me! My son is gonna be 6yo this month and since we don’t have soda, he drinks only water and juice (with no added sugar)! I used to be a lot more stringent on my no sugar diet. Anymore, with a kid, I fear I would have a hard time doing that!
Still, thank you for your replies!
Usually any general blood work includes this test - it tells us the trend of glicemia in the previous 3-4 months. You might see it as HbA1c (glycosylated hemoglobin)
Best of luck to you guys
Thank you. I’ll check the test results page again and see if it was on there but under a different name.
I am assuming you are talking about T2 diabetes? I got diagnosed with T1 as a 3 year old, so i don‘t remember much of it. My parents told me i was always very tired and thirsty, and i didn‘t eat much.
Yes, I suppose I should specify the Type-2. I’ll update the title, now, thanks! And thanks for your reply!!
Sounds similar to the months before my T1 diagnosis at 27. More and more thirsty, less and less hungry. Water would fly through me too, making me suddenly have to pee not long after drinking.
Man beeing diagnosed at 27 must suck. The advantage at getting diagnosed at a very young age is that you can‘t envy the life before.
Yeah this would be useful!
