I didn't have any symptoms at all. But suddenly I found it hard to get up a staircase at work. The more I did it on a particularly busy day Friday afternoon, the more breathless I felt. On the Monday I had a routine prescription appointment with my GP and I mentioned it, thinking he'd tell me to come back another time if it continued. My dad thought it might be asthma as he'd developed that at my age (40). My GP told me my heartrate was too fast, and he arranged for me to go down to the local hospital for a heart reading. An hour tops, he said. It was seven days before I was allowed home. While checking me over they found that I had Type 1 diabetes, even though I had no symptoms and no family history of any kind. And it had nothing to do with the breathlessness. That's what they said at the time, but more recently my consultant said I had DKA when I was admitted. Again, no symptoms...I was put on an insulin drip and woken up every hour for a blood glucose test. Because of the drip I couldn't move and my right calf started to hurt so much it made me cry. In the morning my leg had swollen up to about double the size of the other one, not wee to begin with. So the breathlessness turned out to be a pulmonary embolism from a DVT in my calf. It was all quite a shock. But so was then being told I was a type 2 after they'd been so definite about being type 1. After about three weeks on insulin I had my first hypo, and started to have about 4 a day until they took me off it, did an anti-GADs test and pronounced me a type 2 after all. I had no idea there was even any doubt.
This was all March this year, since then I've lost 60lbs on 500mg metformin twice a day, loads of exercise and cutting out the foods that weren't working for me - sadly the things I loved, like pasta and fruit. My last HbA1c was 5.9, from 9.5 at first. So, although it's been a struggle it did make me change my lifestyle, and I did need to do that. And from reading other people's experiences, I realise I'm very lucky that I was diagnosed quickly and didn't get really sick. It could have all been so much worse.