#1338 The Facts of T1 Life

October 22, 2024Scott Benner

Sierra shares her experience raising 5-year-old Harper.

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DISCLAIMER: This text is the output of AI based transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors and should not be treated as an authoritative record. Nothing that you read here constitutes advice medical or otherwise. Always consult with a healthcare professional before making changes to a healthcare plan.

Scott Benner 0:00
We're all together again, friends for another episode of The juicebox podcast.

My notes say that Sierra is 32 years old. She's the mom of a type one. Her daughter Harper had a glucagon incident. We're going to talk about that at some point. Sierra's dad had type one as well, but she didn't know a lot about it. This is a good one. You're going to like this. Oh, wow. And look at this. Sierra has a really kind of cool job. Well, you'll find out about that in a second. Nothing you hear on the juicebox podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your healthcare plan. When you place your first order for ag one with my link, you'll get five free travel packs and a free year supply of vitamin D drink. Ag one.com/juice, box. Are you an adult living with type one or the caregiver of someone who is and a US resident, if you are, I'd love it if you would go to T 1d exchange.org/juice, box and take the survey. When you complete that survey, your answers are used to move type one diabetes research of all kinds. So if you'd like to help with type one research, but don't have time to go to a doctor or an investigation and you want to do something right there from your sofa. This is the way t 1d exchange.org/juice box. It should not take you more than about 10 minutes. I'm having an on body vibe alert. This episode of The juicebox podcast is sponsored by ever since 365 the only one year where CGM, that's one insertion and one CGM a year, one CGM one year, not every 10 or 14 days ever since cgm.com/juicebox this episode of The juicebox podcast is sponsored by us Med, usmed.com/juicebox or call 888-721-1514, get your supplies the same way we do from us med. This show is sponsored today by the glucagon that my daughter carries, gvoke hypopen. Find out more at gvoke glucagon.com. Forward slash juice box.

Sierra 2:19
My name is Sierra. I'm the mother of a type one diabetic. Her name is Harper, and she was diagnosed just after her second birthday.

Scott Benner 2:30
How old is Harper now?

Unknown Speaker 2:32
She's five now? Oh, wow.

Scott Benner 2:35
So three years so far, yes,

Sierra 2:37
she was diagnosed on New Year's Eve in 2020, so middle of covid,

Scott Benner 2:44
Sierra, your connection is a little janky. All of a sudden. I wonder why that is. You're you're dipping in

Sierra 2:50
on a mountain, so that might have something to do with it.

Scott Benner 2:54
Oh, well, that we can make allowances for also. Siri. Just thought I said Siri when I said Sierra. So I guess I'm gonna have to be careful about that. Does that happen in your house a

Sierra 3:05
lot? I don't actually have Siri, so I don't have a problem. But if I did, I'm sure I would,

Scott Benner 3:09
yeah, okay, so how high up on that mountain are you? Well, I

Sierra 3:13
can just tell you I am in Crater Lake National Park right

Scott Benner 3:16
now. Oh, this is not where you live. Then you're vacationing. Oh,

Sierra 3:20
no, I work here, but I don't live here and work here like many people do, so I commute in and commute out

Scott Benner 3:28
every day, like on a jet plane. Or how do you get in and out? Believe me, if

Sierra 3:32
there was like, a transportation device that I could just, like, step into and appear here, I would totally use it. I actually have a two and a half hour commute each morning that I spend a lot of time listening to

Scott Benner 3:43
you, but you make $8 million a year, so it's all worthwhile, right? I totally wish I'm trying to understand why you have a five hour daily commute that you're okay with. So

Sierra 3:54
I started my career with the association that I work with at the other park that we work out of, which is the Oregon caves National Monument. And I actually live in the town just outside of Oregon caves. And when my boss retired, I took her role, and I've only been in this position for a year now, moving just hasn't made sense, and I can do a lot of work remotely, so I don't have to come over here every day. It just kind of depends on the timing of the season and what's happening as far as operational changes and seasonal changes, all

Scott Benner 4:34
you had to say was, I'm a hippie. I would have understood if that's what that's I

Sierra 4:39
crossed my mind to introduce myself as a hippie, because I kind of live in a hippie community.

Scott Benner 4:45
Just said, Scott, I'm a hippie. I'm helping the world, man. And I would have been like, okay, yeah, that's right. Keep the green. My car runs on biodiesel that I make out of old vegetables.

Sierra 4:56
I'm not that much of a hippie. Well,

Scott Benner 4:59
then, yeah. Yeah, then Stolen Valor, then Sierra. You have to try harder, darn it. I'll work. Okay, so we'll all remember that you're at the top of the world while you're talking. And we'll, we'll be accepting, okay,

Sierra 5:10
surrounded by snow and beautiful views.

Scott Benner 5:13
Well, you know, it's funny how this happens to me all the time, like things happen in bunches, and it's not on purpose. But yesterday, I recorded with somebody from Australia, and we had to do kind of a similar talk in the beginning for people listening, like, look, there's going to be some glitches in the audio here, but she lives on Mars, and, you know, there's like a, like a tiny string that goes under the ocean, and that's what she's talking on. So let's all like, you know, be under. My mind

Sierra 5:36
was blown when I learned that the continents were connected by wires in the ocean, it's just so crazy to be still.

Scott Benner 5:44
I assume that most people thought I made that up, and then heard you say it too, and was like, Oh my God, is he right about that? It's a real thing. People cabling under the water. It's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. Who thought that that was a good idea? And then I like, when people in their house, they're like, I don't know if I know how to change out this screen door. I'm like, I bet you could figure it out. Anyway. So Harper was diagnosed about three years ago. Normally, we'll tell a bunch of stories and etc and ask you stuff, but you have, like, a specific story, so I like to get to them a little faster when that's the case Absolutely. But let me just learn a little bit before we jump in. So two years old, any other type one in the family, any reason for you to think there would be a diagnosis. So

Sierra 6:26
my dad had so many health issues, but he passed away when I was really young. So I don't have a full like list of what he had, but I do remember him carrying insulin and needing injections. And he would always tell us, if he passed out or became unresponsive, or anything along those lines, that we just needed to get him sugar as soon as possible. We thankfully

Scott Benner 6:52
telling me your dad had type one diabetes, but you never spoke about it that way. I

Sierra 6:56
don't know exactly I asked my grandmother after Harper was diagnosed, and she shook her head at me, and she was in her 90s and wasn't as coherent as she had been, so she she told me no, and his siblings tell me that he didn't have type one, but I like We still have his case that he carried his syringes and vials in.

Scott Benner 7:24
Yeah, so hold on. How old are you now?

Sierra 7:25
I am 32

Scott Benner 7:27
you're 32 your dad passed. How long ago?

Sierra 7:30
When I was eight,

Scott Benner 7:31
he definitely had type one diabetes. What? I

Sierra 7:35
think, too, but he had several surgeries, and he was in a really crazy the car accident while he was working for road construction in California. So I'm not sure if it was like typical onset type one or if he had organ damage that caused type one.

Scott Benner 7:53
Before we move forward, I have to ask you a question about your voice. You sound like the third female character on a sitcom, who's the sexy but too cute to be sexy friend with freckles. The way your voice breaks and cracks. Does it always do that? Are you doing it on purpose? It does okay.

Sierra 8:10
It's me.

Scott Benner 8:11
It's fine. I There's no problem with it. I just You literally like, I feel like you're five, three freckles, dark hair, bob haircut, and you're standing behind the other two actors, and you're just waiting to deliver your line where everybody's like, Oh my God, she's adorable. Like, like, are

Sierra 8:26
you looking at my Facebook page right now? Because you're like, literally, I'm five, two and three quarters, but give dark, nailed it. I do, and it's a bob cut. Hey,

Scott Benner 8:35
Sierra, we talked about this before we started recording. But I swear to you, I don't know what you look like. Tell people what we were talking about before we started recording. Oh, gosh, I don't remember about the Oh, Jesus, here you ruined that.

Sierra 8:49
Oh, you can read people. I'm so sorry. I'm nervous.

Scott Benner 8:53
That's fine. I haven't made you not nervous yet. In seven minutes, I'm slipping. Okay. So, um, yeah. Like we were talking prior about, like, my wife, who does not say a ton of kind things to me, not because she's mean, but because we've been married for a really long time, and she's probably out of stuff. I

Sierra 9:07
recall the conversation. Yes, you are a people reader, and the fact that you can, like, pick out my description is a little creepy.

Scott Benner 9:16
I am so proud of myself right now, like there's a part of me that wants to say, if you take insulin or Sulfonyl ureas, you are at risk for your blood sugar going too low. You need a safety net when it matters most, be ready with G voc hypo pen. My daughter carries G voc hypo pen everywhere she goes, because it's a ready to use rescue pen for treating very low blood sugar in people with diabetes ages two and above that, I trust low blood sugar emergencies can happen unexpectedly and they demand quick action. Luckily, jivo kypopin can be administered in two simple steps, even by yourself in certain situations, show those around you where you. Or GVO kypopen and how to use it. They need to know how to use GVO kypopen before an emergency situation happens. Learn more about why GEVO kypo Pen is in Arden's diabetes toolkit at gvoke, glucagon.com/juicebox, gvoke shouldn't be used if you have a tumor in the gland on the top of your kidneys called a pheochromocytoma, or if you have a tumor in your pancreas called an insulinoma, visit gvoke, glucagon.com/risk for safety information. Hey, Sierra was coming on to tell a glucagon story, but you don't get it now, because this is a perfect episode. And just end it right here, but we'll move forward. But anyway, I don't, I swear to you, I don't know what you look like. I don't think I've ever seen you. If I did, I didn't know it. And you just feel like that character, like the girl that came into the facts of life a few years into the run. That's who I picture. Oh my god, that is who I'm picturing. Hold on a second. I'm not familiar with that. You're young. You don't know the facts of life. Hold on facts of life. Freckles. Is that going to get me there? If that gets me there, I'm going to be really amazed. Uh, no, that just gave me a lot of people with freckles. Hold on character. With dark hair and freckles.

Unknown Speaker 11:23
Come on, Scott.

Scott Benner 11:25
Do it. Do it. She's not here. Oh, man, that pisses me off. Now I look like an ass. You know what I'm saying, because I was so close. Hold on a second. I'm gonna go one more time. Cast, okay, and then we can move on. Do you know George Clooney was in the facts of life? I

Sierra 11:41
am so out of touch with TV. Oh,

Scott Benner 11:43
it's from the 80s.

Sierra 11:44
I'm a hippie. Remember? Oh, you

Scott Benner 11:46
didn't have a TV. You guys were just like, your parents were just like, smoking outside, and you were like, that whole thing was happening. Yeah? Hold

Sierra 11:55
on, sometimes my dad had long hair and braids. Your Dad, wait,

Scott Benner 11:59
your white father had braids, yeah,

Sierra 12:03
and, and he was raised super Mormon, so like a clean cut, shaven student tie. He got away from that as fast as he could.

Scott Benner 12:12
Okay, I'm never gonna think of this actress's name, but there's literally a, I have a girl in my head that I think you look like, All right, I'll figure this out maybe, and put it at the end, but I'm not gonna bore people right now. People are like, hey, jackass, her daughter had a seizure and they needed glucagon. Can you get to it please? And I'm like, anyway, okay, so it sounds like there's diabetes in your background. Is there any other autoimmune in your life?

Sierra 12:37
My siblings have thyroid issues, and I don't know of any others my aunts, there's type two and thyroid that I know of for sure.

Scott Benner 12:49
Are you sure you don't have a thyroid issue?

Sierra 12:53
So funny, you asked that.

Scott Benner 12:55
No, it's not funny. Hoarseness is a symptom of hypothyroidism. Oh, well,

Sierra 13:01
okay, so I had some labs done less than a year ago, and my thyroid was over three, and I was put on some I don't remember the name of it, but it was a thyroid medication. And then it went up over four and then I cut out monster energy drinks from my day to day life, and started drinking a lot more water, and my thyroid levels came down, and my doctor refused to refill my thyroid medication. And then I was assigned a new primary, and she ran new laps, and now I am in normal ranges. What's the range? I know it's under two good because I listened to you. Thank you. Reduced

Scott Benner 13:51
thyroid hormone levels can lead to my ex edema, causing the vocal cords to swell, which affects their vibration and sound production. Interesting.

Sierra 14:00
This has been my whole life, though. I mean, that doesn't mean that that hasn't been a thing my whole life, but the

Scott Benner 14:06
doctor who believes that stopping drinking Monster Energy Drinks makes thyroid hypothyroidism go away. Did he palpate? I'm assuming it was a guy, because it doesn't feel like a thing. A woman would say, did he palpate the thyroid? Did he feel for lumps, goiters, nodules? Nobody's

Sierra 14:21
ever touched it, except for at my annual exam, and that was back in November.

Scott Benner 14:28
Did they say they felt nodules or anything on your thyroid? Oh, I would maybe, if I had insurance, if I was a person like you had insurance, I might say, Hey, is my hoarseness have anything to do with my thyroid? Could I get a scan? And I might ask to get my thyroid scanned. I

Sierra 14:43
actually have an appointment coming up, so I will ask for that, because I never thought of it. Thank you. Relating to sound. Thank you, yeah,

Scott Benner 14:49
no, no, no, I was thanking myself. I don't know what just happened there. I was like, literally giving myself credit, without saying why. That's okay. I have to be honest with you. So that just popped into my head. I was like, wait the horse voice, like I didn't know it first, and the our conversation brought it up to the top of my mind. So anyway, good luck with all that. I would definitely test your daughter, though.

Sierra 15:11
Yes, yeah, she gets, um, her let, well, we had her labs called in, but we have to drive an hour and a half to get them done. So we've been,

Scott Benner 15:19
yeah, well, everything's fine. You should actually get a helicopter, although I think that just killed the president of Iran, and if he can't get a decent helicopter, I'm not sure how you're going to so All right, so the kid gets diabetes. How do we figure that

Sierra 15:30
out? Typical onset, she was drinking a lot of water, peeing a lot, peeing so much. I actually posted on a local mom's group asking about like, recommendations to reduce the heavy wedding and, like, we saw how much water she was intaking, so the how much coming out made sense, but we just didn't understand, like, what was going on. And I was the kind of person that would Google symptoms and learn that I was dying, and, you know, Dread stuff, to figure out that it really wasn't actually happening. And I don't know why, but for some reason, I just didn't Google her symptoms, maybe because covid was in its throes and everything was going to kill you. So she she started out with the heavy wedding. She had been recently potty trained like consistently every night she did not wet the bed, and then she started like overflowing, so we put diapers back on her at night. The mom's group that I posted on suggested that I put in diaper liners that are basically like maxi pads that you stick in, and it adds additional absorption to the diaper, and she was filling those up and her diaper and still overflowing. Gosh,

Scott Benner 16:48
I don't think anybody's ever said the word maxi pads on the podcast, so I think you, you might have just done a first for us. Thank you. I

Sierra 16:55
just did a fist pump because yes, have to get a first. That's

Scott Benner 16:58
kind of like an old word, isn't it?

Sierra 17:00
It is kind of, yeah, but I want you to imagine, like, the biggest ones you can think of, because that's what they were like, okay, she started getting really tired, and she was sleeping through the night, which I was stoked about. I was like, bragging to my sister how my two year old was sleeping through the night, and I was getting all this awesome sleep. And I called her doctor, I listed the symptoms that she was experiencing, I asked them what they thought, and they hesitant to have her come in because of covid. So they told me that if she developed a fever or started vomiting, then they would want to see her, but for now to just hold off and see where it goes. We kept an eye on her, and we were doing home projects, DIY and just trying to stay busy. And she day before New Year's Eve at really late in the evening. So I was like, Okay, I'm gonna call her a doctor first thing in the morning. And then the next morning, she started the Kumul breathing. She was panting and Barry looked over Jake. She barely woke up. She would wake up and drink water and go right back to sleep. And so I called her doctor, and they were like, you know, you don't call unless something is wrong. So why don't you just come in this afternoon? So we got ready, packed bags, hit the road got there, like, as soon as we walked into her doctor's office, her pediatrician was like, We need to get a urine sample, which was really simple because of how often she was peeing. So they brought a little potty training toilet into the room, and we sat her down, and

Scott Benner 18:40
she was like, no problem. Here you go.

Sierra 18:41
Yeah, yeah, exactly. She pulled that sucker up and they dipped it, and then they came back in and told us that she either had pneumonia or type one diabetes that we needed to head to the nearest emergency room without stopping. We were not to get lunch, we were not to do anything, just go. And so we kind of discussed which emergency room made the most sense, and they told us to go to the one that had the pediatrician unit. They told us that they were going to call ahead, and that would actually put us closer to the airport, because they suggested that we would be getting flown to Portland, Oregon, to oasa, O, H, s, u. And so we hit the road and we drove the next 45 minutes to the hospital. And I just actually learned this last month that we went to the wrong emergency room. We went to the one that was actually closer to the airport, but not the one that had their pediatrician unit. So we went inside, we stood in line to register, and we were like, You guys are expecting us. We're pretty sure our daughter has diabetes. And they were like, just kind of shrugged, and

Scott Benner 19:51
no, we don't know who you are, lady, yeah, and

Sierra 19:56
it all makes sense now, but for the past three. Years, I was like, Why did they treat us like that? So we sat in the waiting room for what felt like forever. They finally called us back, and it took them forever to get IVs put in, because she was so dehydrated and so little too yeah, they finally got some labs drawn and they confirmed and her blood sugar was like, 458, it really like, I hear these diabetes diagnosis stories where it's like, off the charts, and I think it's because she was probably still in honeymoon at the time, yeah, going

Scott Benner 20:31
back and forth. My favorite part of the story is when you're telling all your friends, like, Oh, my kid sleeps. I'm getting so much sleep. And she's like, laying there in DKA, probably like, yeah,

Sierra 20:40
looking back, looking back, looking at pictures from that timeline, like her eyes are so sunken and she's so like she looks sick. How did you how did we miss it? But it when it's in front of you, you just don't see it. They told us that we would be flown to Portland. They didn't tell us where. They just said Portland. They said that we were waiting for one of two pediatric jets that service Oregon and Idaho, and the one that was available was about four hours away. And so they, they told me that I would be able to fly with her. And so I looked at my partner cliff, and I, I was like, go home, pack an overnight bag, get what we need, and then come back, and then you'll drive up, and I'll fly with her. And so he runs out, and he leaves, and it's just, I'm like, laying on a gurney with Harper on top of me, and they're trying to get IVs put in, and they're trying to do all of these tests and things in there. It's just not working for them. He gets back and like, right before he walks in the door. I'm not sure what their Mercy Flight staff. I'm not sure what their official titles are, their

Scott Benner 21:53
life, their life flight employees, but I don't know what exactly you were talking about. Yeah, yeah.

Sierra 21:59
So the EMTs, I guess that go on the plane. They were at the hospital. They were strapping Harper onto a gurney to get a ride in the ambulance over to the jet, and they were that's when they told me that I couldn't ride with her because of covid. Cliff walks in, we tell her goodbye, and then we run out because it's a four hour drive. Excuse me, sorry, you're fine. It's a four hour drive from Medford to Portland, normal driving speeds. But when you're racing a jet, you don't drive normal driving speed.

Scott Benner 22:35
Is that how it felt? You were like, I gotta get there before the jet. Yeah, that's amazing. So

Sierra 22:39
we hadn't eaten anything all that whole day. So we, like, ran through a drive through really quick, and then we hit the road. And staff on the jet were really great. They let us know as soon as they landed. They kept into contact with us from every step that they took, because it was like, I think it was like an hour and a half light from from where they were to where they took her, and they let us know when they transferred her over to the hospital. And then the hospital staff started calling us, and they were like, where are you right now? And I would like, tell them the exit number or the mile post. And they're like, You need to slow down,

Scott Benner 23:16
making great time. Yeah,

Sierra 23:18
yeah. And we're like, Um, no. They're like, well, like, you need to make it here in one piece and alive. And we're like, we know, but we're also going to make it there as fast as we can. So, so we made it there two days in the NICU, and then we spent another two and a half days in the ICU. And her a 1c was over 15 and,

Scott Benner 23:45
um, jeez, was it really Today's episode is sponsored by a long term CGM. It's going to help you to stay on top of your glucose readings the ever since 365 I'm talking, of course, about the world's first and only CGM that lasts for one year, one year, one CGM. Are you tired of those other CGMS, the ones that give you all those problems that you didn't expect, knocking them off, false alerts not lasting as long as they're supposed to. If you're tired of those constant frustrations, use my link, Eversense, cgm.com/juicebox to learn more about the Eversense 365 some of you may be able to experience the Eversense 365 for as low as $199 for a full year at my link, you'll find those details and can learn about eligibility ever since cgm.com/juice box, check it out. You've probably heard me talk about us Med and how simple it is to reorder with us med using their email system. But did you know that if you don't see the email and you're set up for this, you have to set it up. They don't just randomly call you, but I'm set up to be called if I don't respond to the email, because I don't trust myself 100% you. So one time I didn't respond to the email, and the phone rings the house. It's like, ring. You know how it works? And I picked it up. I was like, hello, and it was just the recording was like, us, med doesn't actually sound like that, but you know what I'm saying. It said, Hey, you're I don't remember exactly what it says, but it's basically like, Hey, your order's ready. You want us to send it, push this button if you want us to send it, or if you'd like to wait, I think it lets you put it off, like a couple of weeks, or push this button for that, that's pretty much it. I push the button to send it and a few days later box right at my door. That's it. Us. Med.com/juice, box. Or call 888-721-1514, get your free benefits checked now and get started with us. Med, Dexcom, OmniPod, tandem freestyle, they've got all your favorites, even that new islet pump. Check them out now at usmed.com/juice box, or by calling 888-721-1514, there are links in the show notes of your podcast player and links at juicebox podcast.com to us, med and all the sponsors, yeah, wow. Yeah, that's something.

Sierra 26:06
It is. I'm gonna take a sip of water, really,

Scott Benner 26:09
yeah. Hey, listen, while you're sipping water, I'm gonna send you something through the messenger. That's who I imagine you look like. So for people listening, I was imagining Pamela, pretty, Pamela. Pamela Adlon. I know her as an adult from California cation, and it didn't even occur to me that the girl from Californication is was the little girl from facts of life, but it is. It's the same person. Anyway, she talks like you in my estimation or my memory, which then made me think of what she looked like, and that's why I described you. It's just bizarre that you actually fit relatively that description.

Sierra 26:47
Yeah, I'm not as petite, but yeah, that's very similar. She's

Scott Benner 26:54
an actress. She's not allowed to eat. I mean, the Fair's fair. Also that lady's 57 right now. So I don't know what she actually looks like right now. I'm gonna, I'll find out anyway, that's what I was thinking of. And apparently, made a crazy living. If you go to her IMDB page, doing voiceover work and cartoon stuff,

Unknown Speaker 27:15
that's cool. Yeah,

Scott Benner 27:16
you're working too hard. You could be voicing like, you know, a cartoon.

Sierra 27:21
Hey, maybe being on your podcast will get my voice out there.

Scott Benner 27:25
Can you imagine if she finds out about this? She's like, Why was I mentioned on a diabetes podcast? Doesn't make any sense at all.

Sierra 27:34
Oh, too funny. I'm

Scott Benner 27:35
not kidding you. Though she works consistently in animation, she is probably shoveling money into her bank account. I'll be damn why are we working so hard here? I know, seriously. All right, all right. So now we're at the hospital. I'm gonna fast forward you a little bit, right? So we're at the hospital. Everything you know happens the way it happens. I imagine you guys get home, what's your management like at home? So I want

Sierra 28:00
to mention that at the hospital, we had an incredible team who reminded us over and over again that there's more to it than what we're going to be learning okay, and that things are going to be fluid and that they're going to change, and that the next time that we see them, We will know more about diabetes than they do. So I'm thankful that we ended up where we ended up, even though it was the wrong Hospital and the wrong pediatric wing and NICU. But since then, our our pediatrician has actually had another type one onset, and she sent them there instead of to OHSU, like she had intended to send us originally,

Scott Benner 28:43
interesting. Well, you ended up in the right place, then, yes, exactly,

Sierra 28:47
good. So we came home, we were MDI. We were finger sticking our don't die. Advice was to bolus her after she ate. We were supposed to carb count, give it to her, and then allow her to eat for 30 minutes. And then once she was either finished, if she finished sooner than 30 minutes, then we could bolus her, but if she was still kind of munching, she could Munch for a full 30 minutes. And then after that, we would remove any additional carbs and bullet her for what we estimated that she actually ate.

Scott Benner 29:24
So every meal was a 300

Sierra 29:28
blood sugar. Yeah, okay, at least Yeah. I was actually reviewing my my chart notes prior to the meeting to kind of see where we were then. And it was like, I was constantly calling the hospital and telling them that she was like, 366 and not coming down. And the advice was pretty regularly, well, don't correct until the four hours has passed, and give the insulin its chance. And it's I mean by bolusing after the meal, we weren't giving the insulin its chance at all. We. Were giving the food and the carbs such a head start that there was no catching up, right? We didn't have a Dexcom. We had a one month follow up that we in January. We went to back to the office in Portland in person, and they gave us a sample Dexcom and transmitter. So we got a little peek into what was happening, but only for 10 days, because we didn't know what a restart was at the time, I got to see what was happening with our blood sugars and how crazy roller coaster they were, because they told us that we could see patterns on paper. But I'm not that kind of a visual person, and I just couldn't see it until it was on the Dexcom. And then it was like, Oh my goodness. I had been on different diabetes groups on social media, and I started seeing conversations about pre bolusing and the insulin action time and all of those things. So we started dosing half of what we were giving her before she ate. And I don't know that we were really giving it enough time, but we were still dosing her before, and then we were dosing her after. And I remember this conversation with one of the mail in medical supply offices, yeah, and I told them that we were doing between 10 and 12 injections a day, and he was just like, wow, that's a lot for a little one. And it was just like a punch in the gut, because, like, I didn't want to, but it's what she needed.

Scott Benner 31:37
So you have this process that you go through where you're like, This is what you guys told us. Here's what we're figuring out by listening to other people. And that, of course, requires more injections. I do not feel good about poking my two year old this many times. And then you get better and better results. And then the response from the doctor is, wow, you're jabbing her a lot.

Sierra 31:57
Well, he wasn't a doctor, he was just a medical the medical supply, sorry, customer service, dude, yeah, but yeah, that was exactly

Scott Benner 32:04
yeah, okay. And then how did, and that hits you, how? Like, guilt. Oh, yeah, yeah, I would imagine, were you able to push past that, or did you stop injecting as much? Did it push you off of it? No,

Sierra 32:16
not at all. I was like, well, she needs what she needs, and her health is my priority, not, not your opinion, so

Scott Benner 32:23
yeah, or how badly I feel when I'm stabbing a two year old, because I I tell you what I've I firmly remembered what that felt like. And it's, it's not, it's just not fun, like, you know, like you're with little legs, and you grab them with your hand, and then you kind of have to hold them still, and you're pinching, and they're like, get away. And it's just terrible. I told that story before, but like, I can remember, like, running after Arden with, like, a needle in my teeth. Yeah, that's how

Sierra 32:51
it was with Lantis. She did not want the Lantis shot. She knew that one was gonna feel different. And yeah, she would, she would fight us on that one. The meal injection, she adapted too quickly. And she learned how to count to 10 so fast, because we were counting to 10 every time we gave her an injection, she

Scott Benner 33:10
just started talking about, I don't know something bigger, you know,

Sierra 33:14
I know

Scott Benner 33:16
quantum physics or something. Oh, she

Sierra 33:19
is so smart already. But, I mean, if I had that kind of mental capacity for sure, listen, you

Scott Benner 33:26
still think it's a good idea to drive that far to work. So I mean, you're not learning at all.

Sierra 33:35
I'm learning from you. Listen, meanwhile,

Scott Benner 33:37
what I should really be saying is you should all find jobs that are farther away from your home so that you can listen to my podcast more, because that would make me more successful, that I want more than anything. No, no, seriously, what I wanted is for you guys to be happy. This is going to be weird. Arden calling in Hold on a second. Okay, haven't done this in a while. Face Time. She may have just finished her. You have more than an hour, by the way, if we go over, okay, let's see what happens here. Hey, you're gonna be on the podcast. Is that okay? I don't know if you want to put this on the podcast. You don't want this to be on the podcast. Just listen to this real quick. Okay, well, let, let's let Sierra here, but I'll have Rob bleep it out. Okay, okay, I don't care. Um,

Speaker 1 34:25
so I, like, literally slept in because I haven't slept for like, two days, and I wake up and I'm like, let me check my emails, because mom said there's a package for me. And I'm like, looking. And do you remember a couple days ago how I told you they sent out this survey, and I filled the survey out, and I just like it on the school, okay, so apparently, with all the surveys that the school does too, like you can, like, win, like you like, win a prize if, like, your name is picking a raffle and

Scott Benner 34:52
I want a projector, seriously,

Speaker 1 34:55
yeah, it just got an email about it, and the girl in charge texted me. Good afternoon. Your survey response was chosen as last week's prize winner. You can pick up your projector from Bradley Hall. It's ready whenever you are front desk. We'll

Scott Benner 35:08
have it nice. So do you think they're trying to pay you off? I

Speaker 1 35:12
don't know, but the survey I was like, terrible, terrible, terrible, probably worse, terrible. And I just want to protect it from the school. Maybe I should start saying well, listen,

Scott Benner 35:25
either they gave you the projector to try to shut you up, or they appreciated your honesty one way or the other, you got a new projector. That's so funny. Well, good for you. Do you have any classes left? Or you just have to do the thing today? What thing you have to do a presentation? Yeah,

Speaker 1 35:43
that's my omnipodence left. I have that at five, but I have to go like, a half hour before, because we have to, like, practice or something. But I'm gonna start cleaning up

Scott Benner 35:51
my room right now. Okay, I set a higher target for you overnight, but it's over now, just so you know. Okay, all right. Well, I love you. Congratulations on your new projector. Call me later when you get it so I can say it. Okay,

Unknown Speaker 36:05
bye.

Scott Benner 36:09
So in case any of you are wondering if that's my daughter or not, by the way, Rob, you can leave all that in. She doesn't care that she won the projector. She loves the the funny part of it where she would be in the in the survey, and yet she won the projector. It's hilarious. All right, Sierra, I'm sorry about that. Could you hear that? By the way, I could Yes.

Sierra 36:28
It reminded me of like, when you give a one star review on Google and the company comes back and is like, Wait, we'll give you this. If you change your review,

Scott Benner 36:35
would you like a coupon? They were like someone give that girl a projector. She was way too articulate in this response, because she wrote, she read to us what she wrote, and it was not good about one specific instructor.

Sierra 36:51
Really. You have to be honest, or they don't know that. They need to change it. Sarah,

Scott Benner 36:55
listen, every person who sent a kid through college knows there is a semester or a class where you're thinking to yourself, I just paid an obscene amount of money for my kid to Google and YouTube things.

Sierra 37:06
I took a class at a local community college, and I felt like I wasted my time because of how many personal stories he told. Yeah, it was just a waste of time and a waste of money during

Scott Benner 37:18
covid, the teaching went down so significantly at my son's school that I called to complain, and the dean actually said to me on the phone, yeah, the quality of the education right now is not as good, but you'll still have the diploma when it's over, and you can trade off that, my gosh, like he literally said, and trade off that, it's a good school. Use our name, get a job. I'm like, won't he need to know how to, like, actually do the thing? And they were like, they were like, covid. I love how covid was an answer for everything. Like, we don't really have to educate you covid. Keep paying. Covid. Okay? All right, listen, so the kids getting the the MDI treatment. How does she manage now? Now

Sierra 38:03
she's OmniPod five and g6 Okay, and her last a 1c was 6.60

Scott Benner 38:09
good for you with a five year old. Yeah, fantastic. It's hard. No, no, no kidding. Seriously, good job. What kind of glucagon Do you carry

Sierra 38:18
now? We have the is it back? Semi, yeah,

Scott Benner 38:23
back. Semi. I like when people I like when people call it back. Squimmy, yeah, it's my favorite one. I

Sierra 38:29
had to, like, stare at the box and get the letters in the right order. So

Scott Benner 38:33
this is the nasal glucagon with the powder.

Sierra 38:35
And we just switched to that because she is starting kindergarten in the fall, and we want her to have the easiest option on her. Okay, we also have the G voc hypo pin now, because of you, when we had, is this a good time to transition into the glucagon story? Are

Scott Benner 38:54
you producing? Don't worry, I got you keep going. She

Sierra 38:59
was diagnosed New Year's Eve, and then on February 1, so just barely a month, we had the Dexcom. It was screaming that she was over 300 I think our settings were to repeat the high alarm every five minutes. And it was just like overwhelming, how much it was screaming. So I decided to give her a correction dose, which we had been very specifically told not to give nighttime corrections, because they were worried that she would go low at night and that we would be sleeping and wouldn't catch it. Because prior to getting the Dexcom sample, we were still in the waking up at 3am checking her blood sugar and going back to sleep. Some nights, we would do more finger sticks, just to like, if it was a higher activity day, we would keep better track. I opted to give her a correction, and she was at 300 when my. Her their correction and I gave her a unit which was actually less than what our correction factor was. I should have given her a unit and a half, and then we laid down. And I don't sleep when she's not in range. I'll lay down, but I like, can't turn off. So I was, I understand, yeah. So I was watching the Dexcom, waiting, watching, waiting, watching, and she's sleeping at some point below started alarming, and so we tried to wake her up, and we tried to give her carbs, and she just wasn't responding, because she was at that point in her sleep where you just couldn't get her out of it. And so we were trying to wake her up. We were sitting her up. We were like, moving her around, just doing anything that we could to try to get her to be coherent. And we were putting her juicebox straw in her mouth and trying to get her to drink it, and she just wouldn't. And she got down to 46 and I had called the on call endo at that point. Well, prior to that point, their sense of urgency in the situation just wasn't there because it was an emergency in our living room. Yeah, we were panicking and trying to get her to wake up, and she was crying and just upset. And they were just like, okay, why'd you do what you did not

Scott Benner 41:35
now, that's not what we're talking about now, exactly. And

Sierra 41:39
at the time we had the red case Lily, you mix it before you inject it, they were just like, go ahead and give her the glucagon. And I'm like, in full panic. And I have to mention that I have been through Incident Command training through work,

Scott Benner 42:00
and didn't help you that day. No, training is

Sierra 42:03
great until you're in it, and it's your child, and it's an emergency, and

Scott Benner 42:09
that needle looks like it'll go halfway into her leg. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's like, a big needle. Yeah, huge,

Sierra 42:15
yeah. So they told me to mix it, and so I did, and then she tells me to only inject half of it, because she's so small and I don't know where my brain was, other than fight or flight mode, but I mixed the glucagon, I pulled it into the syringe, and then I sprayed half of the glucagon mixture all over our living room. Wait,

Scott Benner 42:45
like on an old TV show,

Unknown Speaker 42:47
yeah?

Scott Benner 42:53
This is your big moment. You're like, I'm on Grey's Anatomy right now,

Sierra 42:57
yeah, so that was how I got the syringe to only have half of the glucagon in it.

Scott Benner 43:03
I'm glad you find that as funny as I do, by the way, hilarious visual. You're like, hold on, okay, there we go. Did you tap it? Too? I bet you tapped it.

Sierra 43:13
I don't remember that detail, but yeah, so, so then I injected the other, the remaining half, and the woman on the phone tells me to put the remainder in the fridge in case we need it later. And I'm like,

Scott Benner 43:27
that's gone.

Sierra 43:28
I don't have any more.

Scott Benner 43:31
I also yelled clear before I did it. I don't know why.

Sierra 43:37
Oh, that needle, though. I just I remember the resistance that she had in her thigh to that needle compared to the insulin injection needles. It was just so different and so big. And they tell they warned us that it was going to burn, and so like she's screaming, because the injection is so different, and then the solution is painful, right? But it did its job, and her blood sugar came up, and she ended up back in the three hundreds. We had another glucagon kit on the hand, so it wasn't like we were completely out, right, but we just didn't have the open one anymore. And I

Scott Benner 44:18
can try to get it off the floor, but I think it's also on the sofa, so everywhere. By the way, the most on brand thing you've said this whole time is my partner cliff. I was like, of course, he's your partner. And like, just the Oregon screaming from you, Sarah, but, like, but, um, but, but, but, what was the post mortem. Like, when you guys talked about it, we've

Sierra 44:42
talked about it a few times, and we were both just, like, in so much fight or flight that neither one of us really knew what to do. And he was trying to console her and, like, get her to wake up and get her to drink juice while I'm on the phone with the on call indo not get. Using the response that I'm expecting. We actually didn't even call an ambulance after we injected the glucagon, which was part of our training, was glucagon ambulance, and then, yeah,

Scott Benner 45:12
did you do glucagon mushrooms? I might have done that like Jesus Christ. Let's go commune in the woods. This is weird.

Sierra 45:21
My goodness, that probably would have been what I needed at the time.

Scott Benner 45:26
Well, listen, at this point, I think there's some major institutions that you can get rid of this PTS day with mushrooms at

Sierra 45:33
just open. Oh, I'm

Scott Benner 45:35
sure they're going to be on every block in Oregon. Don't you worry. It's

Sierra 45:38
it's going to be just like the dispensaries every every half block. Did your

Scott Benner 45:43
dad ever yell at you? Come on in and get high. We'll get rid of it. There's a therapist here. Meet bill.

Sierra 45:50
He'll sit in the room with you. He's gonna talk

Scott Benner 45:53
through your trauma. Don't worry. Bill looks high too. No, he's not. It's fine. Okay. That's terrible. Listen, I have been through a glucagon incident twice.

Sierra 46:06
I have listened to them and they have made me cry. Yeah, no, I

Scott Benner 46:10
bet you they do. They make me cry. What I think about them? We've never actually used it, though. It's just always the irony of it. It's like we've always kind of gotten out of it right before, yeah, but we would have used it the first time, but I couldn't even figure out how to put the lily needle together. It's so complicated. It's not though, but it is when somebody's screaming at you, your kid's gonna die, that's different. Get what I mean? So we had gone

Sierra 46:33
through training both of our moms how to use the glucagon, and we're like, it's really simple. You just follow these instructions on the case. It's not simple in the moment at all. Tell

Scott Benner 46:44
me about your professional training for stuff. What were you saying earlier?

Sierra 46:49
We have gone through Incident Command training. I'm first responder CPR certified through work. When I when my career was at the Oregon caves, we would occasionally have cave emergencies that we would need to respond to, and being in a cave environment, underground and also in a very remote area with limited services, we needed to know how to respond in those emergency

Scott Benner 47:13
situations cave, what was happening? I might have helped you. Yeah,

Sierra 47:17
put put me at work, and I've got my head on straight. Listen

Scott Benner 47:20
to commiserate with you for a second. I have been in burning buildings. I have seen and worked around dead bodies. I've seen a live woman after a car accident folded in half under the dashboard of a car that we had to extricate her from, and when my kid had a seizure, I couldn't figure out how to put that thing together

Sierra 47:39
either. It's such a different situation. It's when it's not somebody who's connected to you. I can keep my head on straight, and I can stay calm, and I can call the shots. But when it's in my living room at midnight with a screaming two year old, that's my screaming two year old. Yeah? No way,

Scott Benner 47:56
yeah. I try to imagine, like, the president United States can't get Netflix to work. You know what I mean? Like, it's probably like, like, three hours earlier, they were ordering an airstrike on something, and now they're like, I can't find this new show on Netflix. Like, like, that's how I felt. Like I was like, because when it was over, I'm like, That's not who I am, you know, am I ugly? My wife was super focused, so she was good, you know, actually, had she had four hands, I'm assuming we would have got the LUCA got it.

Sierra 48:23
I wonder if Cliff had been in charge of it, if you would have sprayed it across the room. Probably.

Scott Benner 48:34
What a ridiculous sight. Anyway, she was okay. Afterwards. You didn't even go to the hospital. It

Sierra 48:38
was fine, right? No, we didn't. We didn't go to the hospital. She had some stomach ache from it. Yeah, she didn't actually vomit afterwards. They what they didn't tell us about was, and I actually haven't okay. I haven't listened to all of your recordings. I've listened to a lot, goodbye, but I haven't heard anybody else mention this either. Is the fact that the glucagon can deplete your liver from its glucose stores, right? And so there were follow up lows for like, the next two days we were constantly like, we got to a point where our endo told us not to bolus for meals, and we reduced our Lantis because her body was just storing the glucose instead of her blood sugars becoming a roller coaster.

Scott Benner 49:29
Interesting. Yeah, I believe this is mentioned in episode 789, important things to know about Chivo, kypophand, and probably in the remastered pro tip, 1014 glucagon low BGS. But yeah, like so the stuff in the needle is not the stuff that makes your blood sugar go up. It's the stuff that makes your liver go Oh. You need glucage in here and take it like it releases it from your liver. And as a matter of fact, you can maybe get away with shooting glucagon twice in a number. Urgency, but there's going to be diminishing returns as you go forward,

Sierra 50:03
right? And that's they did kind of tell us that, like, once you use glucagon, you can't exactly use it again on such a small person, so

Scott Benner 50:13
small. I mean, how big could her liver be? You know what? I

Sierra 50:17
mean? Yeah. I mean, she was just such a tiny little thing, then she still is the follow up after that was just like low after low after low, and we had to change our insulin to carb ratios. We had to change everything and just go back to bolusing after the meal, because the glucose just wasn't there for the insulin to combat anymore. In that time frame,

Scott Benner 50:43
the liver size of a human female at two years old can vary, but on average, typically weighs 300 grams. The dimensions of the liver in a young child can be roughly six to eight centimeters in length. How about that? Not crazy? All this stuff crazy. Yeah, by the way, chat, GPT four. Oh, amazing. I don't know if it's gonna take over the world or not, but until it does, I love it. If it goes to Skynet later, I'll be like, I was wrong, but for right now,

Sierra 51:11
right now,

Scott Benner 51:12
right now, it's legit. Do you think it'll play this recording as it laughs later, as it's crushing our skulls with its metal feet. Probably not,

Sierra 51:21
I hope not. If it's crushing us,

Scott Benner 51:25
it'll be like, I remember when this guy on a podcast said this, and it'll just play it outside anyway. Sorry, it's okay. Sorry, sorry, you went through all that. It sounds like, believe it or not, I feel like you held you handled it really well. I mean, we went to the hospital after the first seizure when she was two. We felt like we didn't need to, yeah, but we gave into the like, well, they told us to, and we did it. And then the next two hours were like, just we sat in the hospital and, like, why aren't we here? Like, you know, I mean, like, so even the people in the hospital we're like, you probably didn't have to come. We're like, well, great, right? Thanks.

Sierra 52:04
Thanks for that. We

Scott Benner 52:04
have this crappy meter and these needles. This is all we have. Like, we don't know what we're doing. You know what I mean, it was 2000 and, like, six, you know what I mean? Point is, I take, you know, I wish we didn't go in that scenario, and I can see where, where you would you know, can I ask? Was she? I know she's only two, so this is why I asked. Was she altered in any other way in the days after? Did you notice her like anything different about her personality? Nothing

Sierra 52:33
that stands out? I just remember that she didn't, she wasn't her. Okay? I guess I should take that back and say that she wasn't herself following up, but nothing that was like extreme. I think it was more like she was recovering from

Scott Benner 52:47
a sickness, yeah, like run down or beat up or something. Yeah, exactly. Arden was really weird after her last one for a couple days, like melancholy, almost. And I don't I never knew if it was psychological or if it was physical or a mix of it, right? But at 18, 1718, years old, she slept in our bed for like three nights afterwards.

Sierra 53:09
I don't blame her. Yeah, that's where I would want Harper and I mean, like, prior to diagnosis, she was learning how to sleep in her own bed, and then I just got her back in her own bed, like, last month, oh,

Scott Benner 53:24
you put her, like, in a nest in your room,

Sierra 53:28
yeah, yeah, till she started kicking me. And now she's no,

Scott Benner 53:33
Listen, kid, this is all well and good, but now I've got a bruise, so you've got to go. I just, I just imagine you building an eagle's nest in the corner of your room, in your tree house that I imagine you live in, if you live in a tree house,

Sierra 53:47
there are some amazing tree houses in the state.

Scott Benner 53:50
What I love about the upper Northwest is that when you make up ridiculous stuff, somebody goes, no, that's here. We have

Sierra 53:59
that. That's true. Yeah. Also,

Scott Benner 54:00
I have to take a couple screens with you so the people try again. Can you be more ridiculous? But I don't know. California's giving alcohol to like homeless people now, so I don't know what's going on. I have to hit you guys once in a while, so the Canadians feel good about how I talk to them. So yeah, I'm still sure they have pet penguins, and they just don't want to tell us, you can take it. It's excellent. Good for you. Yeah, yeah. You seem like one of those tough hippies, not like the sensitive ones. Oh, people are like, there aren't just two kinds of people. And I'm like,

Sierra 54:36
in my head, there are, yeah, it's simpler that way. And

Scott Benner 54:40
in Canada, people have pet penguins. And if you don't like it, don't listen to the podcast. I don't know what to tell you. I also know there are no penguins in Canada, but go ahead, what I would

Sierra 54:50
have a pet penguin if I was allowed to. They smell. But who would I mean? You just have to take care of it, right?

Scott Benner 54:57
Jesus Christ. Okay, my God. My. Dog is so old. I'm like, is this over yet, buddy? Like, are we done? Like, you get up in the morning. He's like, hey. And I'm like, Oh, one more time. All right, let's do it again today. His leg just feels like it's gonna fall off him. And like, Oh, my listen. I want to be clear. It's horrifying. It's so sad. But he is, like, over 16 years old, wow. And you're just like, man, it's all right. Like, you his, he's completely like, cataract over. He's incontinent. He's now his hip. And I'm just like, you look at him. You want to be like, Dude, you gotta, you gotta just, just give up. Like, it's over. You

Sierra 55:40
know what I mean? Like, just go lay in your doggy bed and go to sleep, buddy, the worst

Scott Benner 55:44
thing in the world, because it's gonna be me. Sierra, it's gonna be me when it when the time comes, someone's gonna look at me and say, You gotta do it. And then I'm gonna be the one crying at the veterinarian's office and talking to him and like, I, you know what I mean? Yep,

Sierra 56:03
I actually, I had a childhood dog who she lived to be about 16 years old, and it got to a point where it was like, okay, her quality, quality of life isn't there anymore. So we are lucky enough to have a local veterinarian that will come to your home and do it instead of you having to go into the office.

Scott Benner 56:22
It's the worst thing, like, and, I mean, I don't mean to make light of it, because I'm certainly not, but it's just like, it's, I don't know when to do it, yeah, like, you know what? I mean,

Sierra 56:33
it's such a hard decision to make, and it really sucks when you are the one who has to make that decision and make that phone call and set the appointment. It's all just awful. Yeah, I hate it all, and I

Scott Benner 56:44
want to take it all. I don't want it to be my wife. I don't want her to have to live with it like, I want it to be me, like, you know what I mean, but I like, that's big picture thinking, like, small picture thinking I just look at him, like, if you could just close your eyes, that'd be great, you know, because so peacefully. Yeah, please. Meanwhile, Arden comes home in like, three or four more days, and she knows how bad he is, and she's just like, is Indy gonna be okay till I get home? And we're like, yeah, sure, it's gonna be fine, you know? So we're trying really hard to get him to her return, which is even, that's even another strange thing, like, I don't know why people have kids, because you have to think about all this stuff you don't even like. Is it better for the dog to be put to sleep when she's not here, or when she is here, or like, like, I don't know, like, you know what I mean. So it's gonna work out the way it works out. I guess I don't know why we got through that off of, oh, because pet penguins. Yeah, if the penguin was gonna die, I'd be like, Oh, the penguin died. I think I'd be Oh, I

Sierra 57:39
think it would be so heartbroken. I love penguins. OmniPod,

Scott Benner 57:42
you love penguins. Have you ever seen a penguin? Cute?

Sierra 57:45
They are so they're so awkward on land, and then they are just like, so smooth in the water, and they can fly. They just have to be underwater.

Scott Benner 57:54
I know otters are cool too. Otters are really cool. Yeah, I don't know if that's not what we're talking about, though, but otters are fascinating to watch, like swim and pop out of the water and do apparently, they're very nasty animals.

Sierra 58:04
Oh, we have river otters here. I've seen them a few times in the wild. Yeah, they're

Scott Benner 58:10
apparently not pleasant. Oh, well, I like them. Beautiful to watch, beautiful to watch, hard to interact with.

Unknown Speaker 58:17
Yeah, yeah. I

Scott Benner 58:19
think I just described my wife. Oh, I can't wait to get a review about that. One more misogyny from this guy says his wife's like a river otter. Every once in a while is here. About every six months, I get somebody who can't hear sarcasm, and then I get a review from them. They always make, by the way, those always make me laugh the most. I'm like, Oh, wow, you've misunderstood that significantly. That's crazy. But whatever Are we done talking about this? Do you have any other details that I have not drawn from you?

Sierra 58:55
Since that incident, we learned how to get her to drink juice while she's sleeping, instead of having to wake her up and force her into being coherent, she has had severe lows since, not many, but one time she was awake and coherent, and she was telling me that she felt weak and shaky. And so we did a finger stick, and she was at 26 Wow. And we were able to give her some marshmallows and some juice boxes, and she was able to rebound on that one on her own. And looking back on the glucagon situation, I don't think that we necessarily needed it. I think we were just so new and so panicked that we just took the don't die advice and did what we could. Yeah, it was definitely dramatic, but I look back on it now and I laugh. And I just was recently listening, and I heard that, not scared, prepared episode. And I just, I love that so like as we move in and transition into her. For riding a school bus and being taken care of by school staff. That's my plan. Is to be prepared and not be scared.

Scott Benner 1:00:06
Good for you. Oh, I think it's probably the only way to live honestly and honestly, even with this conversation, I don't know another way to talk about this except joke through it and make stupid. Like, if I actually had you come on here and tell, like, a somber story about this. Like, first of all, I don't think anybody would listen to it. And secondly, if they listened to it, when they got to the end, they'd feel like, you know, throwing themselves in front of a bus. Like, I don't want people to feel that way. Like, I want them to know like, this could happen, and you need to be ready. And here's how it works, you'll probably be fine. Like, get in there. Like, you know what I mean, like, and try not to think about it every day, because you can't live like that either. You know you can't. Yeah, that's why I appreciate when people share these stories seriously like, you know, I keep doing them whenever somebody offers one, just because I think that. You know, it's important to be knowledgeable and not scared, but it's also important to be honest about what it's like and in the moment, it's terrifying, it is horrible. Yeah, yeah. There's no way to sugarcoat it. Like you think someone's dying in front of you and you feel like you have a split second to change it. Yep, yeah. So yeah. And

Sierra 1:01:14
a simple decision in that moment could take you the wrong direction.

Scott Benner 1:01:19
It's hard, yeah, yeah. Oh, no, we'll make it. I don't need this, and that's why I can't begrudge you shooting it then later saying, like, oh, we probably didn't need to do that. I say to that, Oh, well. Like, you know, better safe than sorry in that situation for sure. You know absolutely yeah, but I've talked about this on a couple of others, but you know, I did this in person. Talk one time. There's like, three, 400 people there. They were adults who either had diabetes or were the the spouse of somebody with type one. And they were more newly diagnosed, some of them, but not all of them. And when I brought up glucagon, no one knew what it was like. They didn't know what it was. They didn't have it in their house. They wouldn't know how to use it if they had it, like they were they were like, wait, what? Some people were like, What happens if your blood sugar gets too low? Like, they didn't even know. And I think, like, it's incumbent upon somebody to talk about it once in a while, you know? So, yeah, I appreciate you doing this all the way from, like, whatever mountaintop you're on right now.

Sierra 1:02:16
I'm on a volcano.

Scott Benner 1:02:17
Are you really I am I imagine you make $25,000 a year and you're living off of bread crumbs. Is that true or like, do people do people like? No good. You're being paid reasonably.

Sierra 1:02:28
I'm being paid I wouldn't drive two and a half hours if it wasn't worth it. Is

Scott Benner 1:02:32
it one of those jobs nobody else wants, so they have to pay you more? No, no. Okay, it's

Sierra 1:02:37
It's the great association we fund the education in science here. Nice. I find a lot of pride and joy in it, and I've always loved to be outside. So to get to be paid, to be in a situation where I get to be surrounded by beautiful wilderness, I couldn't ask for a better situation.

Scott Benner 1:02:54
I hope your end doesn't come at the hands of a bear. But other than that, that's really nice. Okay, so

Sierra 1:03:00
before, before you let me go, you got a bear story last I guess it was two winters ago. It was the first snowfall of the winter, and I was the first person at the office at Oregon caves, where I was working at the time, and I decided that I was going to go on a solo hike. It's just a one mile loop up and over the cave, but I found bear tracks in the snow, and I started to follow them. And then my like sense of self awareness popped up, and I realized that I didn't want to die by the paws of a bear. And I turned around and went back. What

Scott Benner 1:03:38
in the hell made you not go the opposite way the paws of the bear.

Sierra 1:03:42
I wanted to see a really clear print in the snow, like they were just kind of like kicked around, like it had come onto the trail and turned around. So the prints weren't like that crystal clear paws and toes kind of look. So I like started following them initially, to get a picture of a better paw print.

Scott Benner 1:03:59
You weren't doing this for a photo for Instagram.

Sierra 1:04:02
I'm not even on Instagram. It was just my own personal self.

Scott Benner 1:04:07
How long did you track the bear before you thought to yourself, oh, I probably shouldn't track a bear. It

Sierra 1:04:12
was probably within like, 10 feet of the trail, and that's when I was like, I don't want to actually die today. It was just a black bear. But still, yeah, I'm

Scott Benner 1:04:21
sure that would be comforting when it was slicing your throat open. Oh, look, it's only a black bear.

Sierra 1:04:30
I could take a black bear.

Scott Benner 1:04:31
I'll just punch him in the groin like it would be like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He'll probably run away. Listen as I make fun of you, I've told this story on the podcast before, but I had somebody do something to me in traffic once, when I was young and I was on a motorcycle, and I got so mad that I pulled off this side of the road and through traffic, went after the person, like, I don't know what I was thinking I was gonna do. They almost killed me, and they did it on purpose. And when I was maybe two width of a car. Away, the driver disappeared and then popped back up from their glove compartment and pointed a Glock at me. Oh my gosh. And I still took more steps after I realized it was a gun, yeah. And I think about that all the time, like, why didn't I just stop? Like, what is

Sierra 1:05:16
just going and your brain was like, stop.

Scott Benner 1:05:18
And by the way, I'm not like, I don't know. I was only gonna yell at him, like, Do you know what I mean? Like, I'm not I listen. I know myself. I physically couldn't manhandle a person to begin with. Like, like, I wasn't like, you know, I just wanted to be like, my god, what are you doing? You almost killed me. And it was crazy. What I was doing. Make no mistake, it was also the early 90s. You were allowed to be crazy, then it didn't really matter. There's no rules. Like, there is now, like, right now, they'd be like, he's insane. Put him down. I'm like, that's how we all acted in the 80s, just so you know. And so it wasn't just me, no, no, no, but yeah, I saw that gun, and I was, like, my brain registered gun, like, enough that I knew what kind of a gun it was, yeah. And I kept going at like, toward like, forward. And then I went in my and then my conscience hit me, and I put my hands up, and I went, sorry. And I just backed away. Oh, my goodness. I feel like that's what happened to you when you realized I shouldn't be tracking a bear, you went like that, yeah, oh, I gotta go. What am I doing?

Sierra 1:06:17
This is not a smart decision. Abort.

Scott Benner 1:06:21
I'm an idiot pretty much, yep, no wonder I couldn't figure out that glucagon. Jesus, God, moron. You and I could have a podcast together. You're fantastic.

Sierra 1:06:37
Thank you.

Scott Benner 1:06:38
You're welcome. I'll never have you back on No, I'm just kidding. I try not to repeat guests. That's all I meant. Yeah, you were really lovely, and I appreciate you doing this and retelling what I'm sure is a difficult story to help people. So thank you very much. Sincerely. Is very kind of you.

Sierra 1:06:58
Thank you. I appreciate it, of course. Hold

Scott Benner 1:07:00
on one second for me,

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