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Sue recalls how she felt after taking insulin for the very first time.
Sue:
I remember, I am going to, this is a girly thing and the women will relate to this – when I went in and finally was diagnosed I was probably 30 pounds lighter than I had been in a lot of years. My frame was so thin and I was like model thin and when he told me I needed to take insulin I said, “Will I gain the weight back?”
And he said, “Yes, I am afraid so.” Because being a type-1 when you don’t have insulin opening the receptors for the energy or the sugar to go into your bloodstream then what you are doing, well, it’s in your bloodstream but what happens is it’s not being fed into the cells.
So any kind of nutrition you are getting by way of calories that is just leaving your body and that’s why you lose the weight. It’s almost as if you are starving to death. I had been eating at lunchtime as I was dropping these pounds, one pound a day. I had been eating four slices of bread for lunch.
I would make a sandwich and I was ravenously hungry all the time. That’s another symptom of being a type-1, and I would make another sandwich and I would eat it and as I was eating twice the amount of food I would normally eat, I was losing weight and losing weight and losing weight. So that was manifesting itself in my body, the weight loss, because I wasn’t getting any calories.
So the insulin shots allowed the food to actually go where it’s supposed to go in a normal human being and so the insulin made me feel, I think to answer your question, psychologically it made me feel as if my health could return to me. And it also, and this is the other thing I did not realize, I had absolutely no energy. I thought I had energy. I was still taking care. I was still working. I was working a part-time job. I was taking care of two children. I was a married wife, mother and I did not realize that my energy was depleting.
As the insulin started to work and I did start to gain the weight back which was fine. I think I finally had realized that I was way too thin. After I was given the diagnosis or maybe even after that shopping experience with that young high school girl I really started to look in the mirror and it was almost as if for the first time I saw what I had become as maybe other people had been seeing me but didn’t say anything about. So the insulin was the right thing to do. It gave me back my energy and it gave me back a few pounds as well.
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