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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EllieM" data-source="post: 1669060" data-attributes="member: 372717">I was diagnosed at 8 in 1970.  My mother had been a T1 for 12 years so she diagnosed me really early (did a urine test after I'd asked for water in the middle of the night) and dragged me off to the doctor for some blood tests. I still remember being told that even if the blood tests came up negative I'd have to have another test to make sure, so I naively hoped that I'd be confirmed diabetic so that I wouldn't have to have any more blood tests.... (Just goes to show how naive/gullible 8 year olds are).  I went to hospital for a week to be "balanced", and the doctors decided it would be a good time for my Mum to go in too to be rebalanced, so we were in together, though she was in a different ward. (Obviously the rebalancing was just an excuse so we could be in together).  I remember being proud because the other children had to learn on oranges, but I was a "brave" girl who could do her own injections without starting on oranges.My mother had the reusable syringes, but plastic ones were available, if you paid for them, so I had plastic ones from the start. Diabetes was something that was "normal" in our family, I didn't find out about complications till I was much older, my parents organised things so that I was doing everything that my friends did and I got a colouring book instead of easter eggs at Easter. (Luckily my older brother and I had never spent our pocket money on sweets, so that wasn't an issue.) My first hypo was scary as I hallucinated a bit, but my family knew what to do so I was fine.  And hypos were really really rare in those days, presumably because the only sugar test was those morning and night urine tests.  (I really hated getting the test tube clean after the test.) I remember memorising the blue book of "carbohydate values of proprietory foods" and carb counting with fixed amounts for breakfast, morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, supper. I had two animal insulins, one cloudy (lente???), but I was allowed to mix them so I only had one injection.I never had any diabetic hospital admissions, other than diagnosis, and probably the scariest time my family had was when I was a preteen on a family holiday in Scotland. We all went on a walk and the mist came down.  My mother got worried that we'd be stuck out there overnight and apparently worked out that if the worst case happened she'd got enough glucose so that I at least would be OK, but not her... Needless to say I knew none of this at the time though certainly picked up that she was worried!The biggest change in my diabetic care came when I went to Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge as a young adult. They introduced me to this awesome gadget called a glucometer....  They then got me moved onto the current system of one long acting insulin and varied short acting before meals, which gave me more flexibility.Complications?  Well, my eyes aren't perfect, though they're not bad enough to laser, but that's about it. I suspect my kidneys aren't perfect either. Given my periods of poor diabetic control in the past, I think I'm pretty lucky, but I'm certainly proof that you don't have to have perfect diabetic control to lead a normal life and still maintain good health after nearly 50 years of diabetes.</blockquote>

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