Autumn Jessee

Diabetes is exhausting. I have been living with diabetes since the end of third grade. I am grateful for the support systems that I have and had growing up. My father spent a lot of time doing research and when I was younger could make more accurate treatment decisions for me than my doctors could.

I am extremely brittle, to the point where I have had three separate endos tell me I have both T1D and T2D at the same time. I have used all three pumps on the market. Six months after my initial diagnosis I was put on the Medtronic MiniMed. Two years later I switched to the Omnipod. I used it for three years, and finally it was too painful to wear, and I was tried of trying to control my blood sugar with a system that I had to go through a handful of menus to change the settings on. So, the summer before my Freshmen year of high school, I voluntarily went back onto the shots. It was so much easier to make small adjustments in order to try and keep my blood sugar in a good range. My A1C was still almost always around 8-10, there were a few times I was 7.1 or 7.2. Shortly after Covid hit, I decided I wanted to go back to using an insulin pump. Around this time, I switched doctors, before I was able to decide what pump I wanted to be on, my new doctor had me start using a Dexcom. This was my second time being on a CGM, the first being when I was on the MiniMed, at the time Medtronic had a their own CGM, it was, for me at least, wildly inaccurate, so my time using it was short lived. I was still on the shots, but now I had the CGM to help see more patterns. Around this time, I changed doctors again, this one closer to home, so it was a lot easier for me to have in person office visits when needed. She helped me decide to try the t:slim X2 pump, and it has been a game changer. I was still using a crazy amount of insulin, but instead of a normal day of blood sugars being 40-300, it was now 80-250. So, she put me on Metformin, still I was using an insane amount of insulin. So she switched me from NovoLog, the insulin I had been on my entire diagnosis, to Humalog 200. Things are were getting better, I was able to change my pump out every three days instead of every two, but, I still wasn’t where she wanted me with the amount of insulin I was using a day. My last appointment was about two months ago are the beginning of March, she started my on Mounjaro, the lowest dose. So to add it all up, I am on 2000mg of Metformin, the Humalog 200 totaling about 180 units per day, and now 2.5mg per week of Mounjaro. My A1C is down to 6.7, the lowest I have ever had, my blood sugar is staying around 110, with the occasional 200-220.

Diabetes is a 24/7 mental and physical burden, but since 2008 when I got my diagnosis, the technology and medication in circulation to help monitor and control it has improved so much. If when I was still a child, and still in school, I had the treatment regiment that I do now, I wouldn’t have skipped so many things. I remember the decision I made to skip my 8th grade field trip. I was 15, I remember thinking out much of a hassle it would be to go on that trip. packing my supplies, getting a set of my doctor orders, having extra training with all the chaperones, being 12 hours from home if something were to go wrong. My parent, grandparents, friends, and teachers all pushed for months for me to go on this trip, but I refused because the hassle of going would have out weighted the amount of fun I would have had on the trip. Just like it had for all of the other smaller field trips I had been on since third grade.

The thing that I most take away from being a diabetic for so long and growing up, is that I matured a lot faster than my classmates. My parents were there when I needed the support, but they pushed me to stand on my own two feet with my diabetes, I talked to the doctors and told them what was going on, I gave my shots, inserted my pump sites, and as time went on, made my doctor appointments, and called in my scripts when they were do. I moved out of my parents house at 19, and If they hadn’t have instilled from the beginning, the ability to take care of myself on my own, I don’t think I would have been able to get through it, because even as prepared as I thought I was, I still wasn’t fully ready to be 100% on my own with managing it. I made a lot of mistakes, and learned some hard lessons.

My biggest advice for parents with children that are newly diagnosed, and for the children themselves, is to find a local group of T1D. For me it was the summer camp I attended, Camp Too Sweet. It was a normal summer camp, except every camper was a T1D and we had a team of nurses and doctors following us through camp, with out metes, shots, and snacks. The 1 week a summer I was there was the only time I felt like a normal kid, because there was literally no room for me to worry about managing my diabetes, because it was already done. They counted the carbs for us, did the math for what we needed to dose, they even had a night nurse team that would come in and check your blood sugar for you. Sometimes they didn’t even wake us up. I made friends, and found a group of kids, that were my age and had the same issues going on.