* Blessings. I too have trodden a hard path from the days of red and black lines, weighing food, metal and glass syringes kept in surgical spirit and boiled once week.. I went to Reading Festival when I was seventeen and people in the Red Cross tent where I went to rinse my syringe and inject were suspicious....
The insulin pen and bolus with long-lasting insulin regime and (breakthrough!) blood testing meant freedom from eating at set times, test tubes and fizzy pills to test your urine (highly approximate as it was an average over the last however-long-since -you last-peed). Diagnosed November 1958 after going into a coma, oxygen tent, last rights at the age of two, I worked hard to manage my condition once I was old enough - 9 to 10 years old. I envy anyone on a pump and blood glucose reader, as diabetes has had to be in the background of my mind all my adult life. Bless my mum (God rest her) for looking after me so well early on. I had a teenage denial, but came round after the said pen/blood testing meant control was more flexible. My only problem has been arterial disease, particularly blood supply to my legs, but then I smoked for some years. (Risks not so well known or understood then.) Brilliant NHS treatment for this. I am also highly gluten intolerant now - brother and sister both T1 and both coeliac.
What am I saying? Some of us, with the same self-care, may be genetically luckier than others. I am relatively lucky, though with 63% blood supply, after surgery, to my legs, I don't walk so far these days. Age 60, I still work three days a week, and I still have to keep testing my blood, calculating by eye or experience the number of units I should take at a meal. It's always there, and it's always highly experienced guess-work. (Does sex bring your blood glucose down? Exercise does!) A certain spontaneity is sometimes missing, but in my case, I deal with expected things with a suitable dose of insulin or unexpected things slightly retrospectively with minor adjustments to insulin levels or some glucose tablets. As experience of yourself and how your body and diabetes tick along in tandem grows, maybe you just grow accustomed. It can always throw up nasty surprises - an infection, cold, flu, operation - and yes, it's more difficult when you have to give over your control to someone else, and it can be scary. But mostly, for me, I am now still enjoying life, 57 years diabetic T1 and still getting better at playing this game of diabetes management. I don't think we know all the rules or have been given all the counters yet, but goodness me, we're better off than we were.
Good luck and best wishes to you.