So kind 
Thank you.
@LoloMama53 Hello Lori, and welcome to the JDRF TypeOneNation Community Forum!
I, and many of the Forum Members, agree with you that continuing diabetes is beneficial and necessary - especially in recent years with so many new “tools” and the advancements in management philosophy. i’m in my seventh decade living with diabetes and find I’m still learning. You may find, if you read carefully some of the Community posts, that you will be exposed to some wonderful pieces of “Diabetes Education”.
Other on-going diabetes education is available to you under the “Resources” tab at the top of this page and at JDRF Chapter meetings and TypeOneNation Summits. Visit the “Events” tab, above. Two other sources for good, trusted diabetes education are T1D Exchange [t1dExchange.org] and diaTribe Foundation [diaTribe.org].
Autoimmune diabetes, TypeOne, is for the most part a condition that needs continual self management, and awareness of what our body is doing; you are living in your body full-time every day, an endocrinologist sees you onal a couple of hours per year. Someday, your Endo may be asking you, “what are you going to teach me about diabetes”.
I’m probably a bad person to ask as I work in medicine in clinical research. So I’m constantly reading & aware of trials etc. I’d say sitting with a CDE or RD doesn’t guarantee what you seek. If they aren’t constantly searching & reading they’ll know what reps tell them. If you want to reach out directly I can try to dig up a few options to scan that arrive in a daily email or sites to review Honestly learning on this is on us. I even tell my endo info she doesn’t know yet.
Stay strong and inquisitive.
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Susie @Sqduarte, I agree with you completely. Note the last sentence in my recent post - that statement has been posed to me by doctors in various specialties.
And just yesterday I had a call from an endocrinologist asking me to explain a “fine point” about the t-Slim.
Hi there, I’ve had T1D for 50 years, now in my late 50s. Am very well-controlled with MDI (in range 90% of the time), so never felt the need to switch to the pump. It’s ALWAYS a struggle however and I do get a little down in the dumps sometimes from it. However, I’ve been very lucky as I was always able to afford insulin and other supplies (even if it meant staying in jobs I disliked, in order to maintain health insurance) and have not suffered any serious diabetic complications.
I just watched an excellent film (documentary) called ‘The Human Trial’. WATCH — THE HUMAN TRIAL. It’s about a clinical trial focused on a potential cure for T1D and I highly recommend it. Let me know what you thought of it !
-Joanne
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Hi there, Pinging this thread to see who else might be out there experiencing potential complications. My question is, are my escalating joint problems diabetes related? I’ve been living with t1d for about 30 years now (I’m in my mid-fifties) and it seems like I’m experiencing a lot of soft tissue problems, a little bit everywhere, but primarily in my shoulders. The diagnosis is bursitis and the ‘cure’ is physical therapy, but the PT seems to make it worse. Anyone else having joint problems that AREN’T arthritis? Would like to know (if possible) whether there’s hope of regaining my motion in my shoulders and what to do—it prevents a lot of activities from the most mundane to any kind of exercise that uses your arms. Note my case is NOT frozen shoulder or even weakness, as far as I can tell. I have the range of motion still, if I can bear the pain of moving in those ways. Thank you for any insights or advice!!
Hi @wrkelly10 , and Welcome to the Breakthrough T1D Community Forum!
It is nice having diabetes for the handy scapegoat for everything else that ails us, but diabetes is not always the culprit yet it could be for some of us. I’m about 30 years older than you and have lived with my diabetes since I was 15 and I personally haven’t experienced joint pain. The only joint issues I’ve experienced have been with my hands; lock and trigger finger in my right hand and Dupuytren’s Contracture in left. The surgeon who [wonderfully] fixed my left hand mentioned that this condition appears to her to be more common in people with diabetes.
I hope that you soon find a workable solution for your pain.
Hi @wrkelly10 and welcome to the forum. I’ve had PT for frozen shoulder and other issues but not the one you have. The process has been painful but “no pain/no gain” has always held true and pushing through has been worthwhile. Is pain the issue? Would you mind sharing some detail about how PT makes things worse?
Hello @wrkelly10 in my case I was sure I somehow injured my shoulder. I too was convinced it wasn’t frozen shoulder and I was consistent with my PT. The reduction in motion came 1+ year after the pain. Also. Once the restriction in motion occurred, the pain went away unless I tried to move more than the joint will allow. 10+ years later and I don’t have pain and I did achieve a little better range in my right arm (shoulder) but baseball and golf are right out. So little is known about frozen shoulder that the “therapy “ prescribed ranges between laughable and ineffective to painful and ineffective. I hope that this really isn’t frozen shoulder for you but your story is hauntingly familiar. Good luck. 
Last month I “celebrated” year 60 since diagnosis. Forgive me, but I won’t share my actual age. I am part of the Joslin Medalist study mentioned in an earlier post and I strongly encourage reaching out to them and learning from their published research; their work on long-term survival is unique and encouraging. They also receive funding from BreakthroughT1D (BT1D), so both groups are worthy of our support since each has done so much to make living with T1D easier.
A few additional observations and insights:
- Surviving T1D can teach: resilience through adversity, listening and learning from the signals your body gives you; gratitude for those who have loved and supported your journey; the last is something * ADA’s Standards of Care only recently recognized as essential.
- Technology has made a huge difference in T1D survival, especially insulin pumps and CGM. I have used pumps since 1988 and have strong opinions about the business practices of one manufacturer who I blame for putting 3 pump makers out of business.
- As I have gotten older, one insight from CGM is how my basal metabolic rate has changed due to aging and other factors. For example, I always noticed a “dawn effect” when waking, but age also brought on a similar “dusk effect” that requires more basal and bolus insulin at dinner. CGM can also signal the onset of an infection like the flu or physiological stress from surgery as more insulin is needed to overcome insulin resistance from stress hormones; the same for greater insulin sensitivity from exercise, though exercise is the crucial missing variable in current automated-insulin-delivery (AID) CGM/pump systems.
- I have tried to keep an optimistic attitude about T1D and stay curious about how my body changes as I get older. For example, I have a channel in Apple News on “Type 1 Diabetes” that helps me find out about new research like * Sana’s clinical studies on avoiding immune response to transplanted beta cells.
- While there are more and more of us surviving longer and longer, there is still an unfortunate knowledge, experience, and supply (not enough endocrinologists!) gap in healthcare providers. For me, that has meant encountering doctors who just didn’t know as much about T1D as I do. Sorry if that sounds arrogant. Sad to write this, but some doctors use recipe-like guidelines (sometimes called “* clinical inertia”) that are contrary to the clinical evidence of the patient in front of them. I have had to “fire” a few and also had several whom I outlived their professional careers (they retired), so I had to find new doctors, which is yet another (beneficial) learning experience. I currently have a superb group of doctors who support me and all are younger than me.
- Insurance has always been “one battle after another,” but I’ve come to see it as a rules-based adventure. I have never lost the appeal to a claim denial. The context, however, is that I have mostly worked for large corporations with self-funded plans for which the insurance company was simply a third-party administrator (TPA) spending my employer’s money. As a consequence, I could and did sometimes escalate denials to the employer to get the denial overturned…lessons in persuasion and echoing policy back to management. The same strategy worked for ACA plans and now Medicare.
I could go on, but I won’t. I hope the above was helpful.