Scott Benner 8/23/24 Scott Benner 8/23/24

#1287 Best of Juicebox: Do Hard Things

Anne speaks to Scott about her sons Adam and Alec, living with tragedy, type 1 diabetes and so much more. First aired on Feb 6, 2020.

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Scott Benner 0:00
Hello friends and welcome back to the juicebox Podcast. Today is a best of episode. This is, let's see Episode 303 it was called do hard things. It first aired on February 6, 2020 and it's with an this is a sad story. So ready yourself. This show is sponsored today by the glucagon that my daughter carries, gvoke hypo pen. Find out more at gvoke glucagon.com, forward slash juicebox. Today's episode is sponsored by Medtronic diabetes, a company that's bringing people together to redefine what it means to live with diabetes. Later in this episode, I'll be speaking with Jalen. He was diagnosed with type one diabetes at 14. He's 29 now he's going to tell you a little bit about his story, and then later, at the end of this episode, you can hear my entire conversation with Jalen. To hear more stories with Medtronic champions. Go to Medtronic diabetes.com/juicebox or search the hashtag Medtronic champion on your favorite social media platform. US med is sponsoring this episode of The juicebox podcast, and we've been getting our diabetes supplies from us med for years. You can as well us med.com/juice box, or call 888-721-1514, use the link or the number. Get your free benefits. Check and get started today with us. Med, hello everyone. Welcome to episode 303 of the juicebox podcast. Today's episode is titled, do hard things, and it's with Anne. You're gonna get to know Ann in a second. But today's episode is a little little different than some of the other ones, in that it will handle the idea of tragedy, and we'll be having conversations about loss. Maybe don't listen with your kids. Maybe you want to. You should probably make that decision. You

I'm not sure how long this is gonna go before you make me cry, but let's find out together. But I'm hoping, I'm hoping, no

Anne 2:12
or if I can get through it without crying.

Scott Benner 2:15
100% think we're both crying, but so just you can so that you can be aware of what I'm waiting for. I'm really I don't even know what to say about how amazed I am that you are doing this. I usually start the shows by having people just introduce themselves. Okay?

Anne 2:33
My name is Anne.

Scott Benner 2:37
Okay. Anne, listen. So and I received an email from you, probably going back to the summer of 2019, I think. And I'm, you know, your email started off so much like everyone else's. And, you know, I'm sitting somewhere, you know, doing something. I'm like, Oh, I get a note, I look at it, and I start reading it. I'm like, Oh, this is a nice note. It's going to be about a nice thing. And it was about a really nice thing right up until it sort of wasn't. And then my wife looked over at me and said, Are you okay? And I said, I just got an email. I don't know how to respond to it, so I guess let's start like this. You're married, I am okay. You have children,

Anne 3:31
three amazing boys, okay, the youngest of which was diagnosed with type one diabetes in 2013 and

Scott Benner 3:39
that's Adam. Adam, yes. So Adam was diagnosed in 2013 How old was he? Then

Anne 3:44
he was eight years old.

Scott Benner 3:47
Okay, so why don't we just talk about his diagnosis? How did it go?

Anne 3:54
Sure. Well, we looking back on it, we think that it had maybe been going on for a while. There were many, I mean, as is very commonly the story. There were signs that, in hindsight, we thought, Huh. Wonder how long this had been going on the weekend that we took him, the Monday that we took him to the doctor, followed a weekend in which he had run in a parade. The there's a community parade that we have. The Run was kind of a kick off to the parade. And we would always have the boys run. It's about a mile run. And so all the boys did it. We met them at the finish line, and when Adam got to the finish line, he did the run, bless his heart, but he couldn't. He kind of, he didn't collapse. He just sat down, and he had a really hard time getting

Scott Benner 4:49
up. More so, more so than your other two sons,

Anne 4:52
oh yes. Well, the others too were just, you know, excited. They want to go see the parade. And Adam was just, he couldn't. Get up. So my husband and I looked at each other. My husband actually hoisted him onto his shoulders and ended up carrying him to our next point. But Adam was yeah, we just it didn't we knew that it, something didn't seem right. And so that was a Saturday, Monday. My husband and I had decided that we were going to take him in just for a checkup. And our amazing pediatrician, I think, listened to some of the things that had been going on, and immediately had him did I did a urine test, detected sugar in the urine, and at that very moment, diagnosed him with type one diabetes. Prior

Scott Benner 5:42
to that, how long do you think you were seeing symptoms?

Anne 5:47
Well, it's really funny, because so this was Adam second grade year, and earlier in the year, I want to say the fall the his teacher had asked me, he said, Is Adam getting enough sleep? He seems really tired. And, you know, I thought, wow. And apparently the teacher at one point had a conversation with Adam, and Adam said, at the time, all three boys were sharing a room, or we had four bedrooms in the house. The boys shared one of the downstairs bedrooms. We had one of the downstairs bedrooms, and the upstairs we were using for a guest room in an office. And Adam told the teacher, he said, Yeah, my brothers keep me up talking at night. And as soon as So, the teacher relayed this to me, and I immediately, I mean, within a very short time following that conversation, we ended up doing away with the guest room in the office. Moved both of those things to another location, and had each of the boys had their own rooms. So, which I just thought was interesting. There was there were also a few instances of Adam having, that year, some unexplained stomach pain. And I don't know whether that was related to the type one or not, but we took him in a few times. It's the point where he was literally crying and doubling over and vomiting. He was diagnosed when we took him to the ER at one point with constipation. And I don't know whether that was a sign or not way whether that was, I don't so hard to look back and figure it out, is it, it, is it, is, but it was early on in his second grade year that, I think, you know, as far as our look back, it's when we kind of realized that huh probably was happening for a while longer.

Scott Benner 7:35
Wow, that's, that's crazy. So how did the the first couple of, you know, days and weeks ago, after you were diagnosed, how did you find the transition?

Anne 7:48
We were in shock. His diagnosis day, of course, was what we used to think of as the worst day of our lives. It was towards he was diagnosed in May, and it was towards the end of his second grade year, and so in my mind, I thought, Okay, I'm I thought I would go to his school every day, because the school wasn't going to do any of his shots. So I thought I'll go to school every day and at lunch or, you know, just be on call. I didn't live very far away, and it was, would have been easy for me to just pop up and do all the shots and so. And I, you know, we thought, okay, over the summer, we'll kind of transition him into doing this on his own. Well, we had an amazing school nurse who, at one point had bribed Adam to do his shots on his own, unbeknownst to me, he ended up actually within, I want to say, the first week back to school following the diagnosis. He ended up giving himself his own shots and learning how to do it much more quickly than I had anticipated. And you know, bless his heart, he just he stepped up and and did what he needed to do. And so you know that obviously it was a time of shock, I guess, to a little bit, but we transitioned very, fairly well, as far as you know, getting him to do the basics on its own right. It's

Scott Benner 9:21
interesting, isn't it, that a person who's a little disassociated from the whole thing is he, it's a much easier path for them to say, look, just give yourself the shot. And you're probably trying to protect him from whatever it is you're scared of in your mind, or, you know, like making him grow up too fast, or blah, blah, whatever it is we try to protect our kids from I guess it's very cool that the nurse was able to just say, Look, you know, you're probably gonna have to do this, so let's do it.

Anne 9:47
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We greatly appreciated that support, right?

Scott Benner 9:51
Did you guys have? Did you transition to a pump at any point, or glucose monitoring or anything like that? Yeah?

Anne 10:01
The glucose monitor and pump actually did not happen until after I started listening to your podcast in 2016 we had ordered a Dexcom in following the highest A, 1c that I'd ever we'd ever had with him in I want to say it was December of 2015 and we we didn't have great support from his provider. The provider's office is actually two hours away, where it was two hours away from the community that we were living in at the time, and so there wasn't a really, there wasn't great support there. They had briefly. They had mentioned to it following the the one visit that we got into where they told us that Adams a 1c December of 2015 ish, was, I think, 9.5 and I remember feeling shocked when I heard that.

Scott Benner 10:59
Was that a jump up? Had it been lower and it jumped on you? It had

Anne 11:02
jumped. It had jumped. And there were, I think, a few things that had led up to the jump, but, yeah, it had jumped. It was higher than it had ever been, and it was kind of an afterthought. It wasn't even the provider herself. It was a one of the dinners that was kind of checking us out of that appointment. She mentioned, kind of as an afterthought. She's like, well, you know, there is, you know, this continuous glucose monitor that you could try. And I just said, you know, I'm willing to do anything at this point. And so we ordered the Dexcom. They shipped it to us. And I remember thinking at the time, I wish I had read so much more. I mean, again, hindsight, but I remember thinking at the time, gosh, this is going to be something that actually sticks on him. It goes into his body. I don't want to. I didn't feel comfortable going through the process of putting it on him myself. And so I we received it in December of 2015 I waited until April of 2016 when I knew I could get an appointment and drive across the mountains without, you know, worrying about snow and bad roads. I waited until I could get an appointment at the Children's Hospital to be able to do a class to learn how to do it with someone else right there holding my hand so I had gold sitting on a shelf for five months.

Scott Benner 12:28
You know, there's been a number of people on here who have talked about their insulin pumps being in drawers or their CGM still in the boxes. I don't think that's incredibly uncommon. Yeah, but you look back and you think, Well, geez, you know, I'm interested. I'm interested in through those first number of years where you feel like you're doing it's a very common thing for people. They feel like they're doing well, right? Because people are taking their shots, they're counting their carbs and but they're not having the results they're looking for. But they don't feel like I can't. I always have trouble making sense of that feeling of, oh, we were doing great. And like, I was talking to somebody the other day who said, you know, my a one sees nine, but my doctor always tells me I'm doing great. And I wonder, like, there's a disconnect there for me. But I do think they're doing great in one respect. I don't know why the sentence isn't usually, hey, you're doing great. You're doing the things you were asking you to do, and everything. But here's what we could try to do, blah, blah, blah, to move forward. Like, I don't know why that part never comes, you know.

Anne 13:32
Yeah, the parts that always seem to come up in the visits with the Arn P would be, you know, meeting with her, looking back, okay, six weeks ago from today, at 415 Why do you think we had this spike? And I, you know, I just

Scott Benner 13:48
like, I don't know.

Anne 13:51
Yeah, yeah, I It's

Scott Benner 13:54
too retrospective. Maybe, maybe it's they just don't have enough, I don't know. They're not able to make that, that moment to moment decision, right, right. All right, all right. And have we? Have we gotten to the part where we're gonna start talking about why you're on the podcast? I think, I think we have, I think we are. So you find the you find the podcast. You I'm assuming that gives you kind of the courage to put the Dexcom on them. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Anne 14:23
Yes. So I had taken the boys during our spring break to visit my brother in Nebraska, and my sister in law kept kept saying I heard on this podcast, and she would go in and tell me something kind of fun, and she kept saying that over and over and over. And over and over. And I was kind of like, okay, Jessica, what's the deal with your podcasts? And she showed me how to look at podcasts on my phone. And so it was that spring break trip where I'm like, hi, I wonder if there's any podcasts on type one diabetes. And I immediately found yours. Yours is the first podcast that I set up on my phone. I listened to dozens. Of hours, and this was beginning to mid April, and I knew I had the Dexcom sitting on our home. I knew that we had an appointment at the end of April to go to the Children's Hospital to take a class and help get that set up. We, yeah, I mean, we got it set up. I got him set up with the Dexcom, it continued to listen to your podcast. I guess. Sorry, I'm getting Terry already thinking about,

Scott Benner 15:32
I feel like I'm gonna vomit if it makes you feel any better. So I've never been nervous making this podcast one time. So I'll help you a little bit. So you you Adams a 1c was like, up in the nines there, and you got some you listen to podcasts for a while. You started getting his a 1c coming down. And it was really a turnaround for him. His health was was moving in the right direction. And you felt excited about it. And and and how long did did you have that feeling like, How long were you able to live in that that space

Anne 16:09
so late April of 2016 we got him set up with the Dexcom, and for the next several months we had the most success that we had ever had since the time of his diagnosis, I came to be able to figure out things that you would talk about on your podcast, like, oh, when he's playing competitive sports, his adrenaline is skyrocketing, and hence, his blood sugars would tend to go up to I'd start identifying things like that. I started playing with his basal insulin, you know, being able to just make tweaks to give him the best shot for success. We actually ordered an OmniPod as well that came in late October, and so he had been using both the Dexcom and the OmniPod for about two months, and we had his next follow up endo appointment on December 19, which was the first day of Christmas break, we lived 30 minutes away from the office where we were going to be seen by the doctor. It was actually a telemed appointment, because the doctor was in a children's hospital in Seattle. So on December 19, we got in the car. It was supposed to just be Adam and myself, but I worked in the community that the appointment was in, and so the plan was Adam was going to spend the day with his cousins. And my middle son, Alec, had begged and begged and begged to come with us. He the cousin dame. The cousins are very close. I relented. I let Adam, or let Alec, come with us as well. So I had Alec and Adam in the car with me. We were en route to his endo appointment. I was very excited. I knew that his a 1c we had had it checked in September. It had dropped. I was looking forward to seeing yet another job. Now that he was on both the Dexcom and the OmniPod, we were having great success. We did not make it to the appointment. The last thing that I remember is we were driving, and my car all of a sudden was not going straight. One of the boys asked me something. I have no memory of anything until I woke up in the hospital. I don't even know what day of the week it was, and I remember somebody telling me that we'd been in an accident and the boys had not made it,

Scott Benner 19:03
I'm sorry. How long was it between the accident when you woke

Anne 19:10
up? The accident took place on a Monday, and I don't I have no memory of being in the accident. I have no memory of being picked up by an ambulance and being taken to the hospital. I think that my family said that they had tried to tell me several times. I you know, obviously they had me pretty well medicated. I think it was the next day. I honestly don't know. I honestly don't know how long it was. That's just the first memory that I have after the boys weren't with me anymore. What

Scott Benner 19:46
were your injuries like?

Anne 19:54
The I had fractures, basically from head to toe, but they were all able to heal on. Their own. I didn't have to have surgery or anything like that. I had a brain bleed, just very sore. I was in the hospital for about a week, a little over a week, but everything, you know, everything healed up. There was some nerve damage to my face. I still, the left side of my face is still a little bit numb, but nothing in compared to, you know, I,

Scott Benner 20:32
I don't know how to talk about it with you. I, I feel like, what, what happened to you is probably, I mean, it's got to be one of the worst things that could happen to a person, right? Person, right? I don't, I can't as a person who has children, I I'm hard pressed to imagine something worse. I don't know how you sent me that email or or how you found the courage to come on and want to talk about this. I thought that it was a beautiful idea to talk about Adam and Alec a little bit. And, you know, try to try to remember and give perspective to to that sort of thing. So I'd like to do as much of that as you're comfortable with. And if you can't answer a question, just say, pass and we'll keep going. I guess it's been, it's been over three years now. Is that right?

Anne 21:27
Yes, it was three years this past December. Does

Scott Benner 21:30
it has it so far lessened in, in, in, I'm assuming, how painful it is. Does that get better.

Anne 21:43
You know, grief, I think, is just a very interesting thing. I cry just about every day, still not to the point where I can't function. I, you know, I, I'm fortunate I have a job that I really love. It's good to be able to throw my mental energies into something that I'm passionate about and that I enjoy doing. But, you know, has it lessened? In a way, it seems like it was still just yesterday that this happened. There are moments where I just feel overcome. And I think the day that I sent you that email, I just was having a moment and I but I just was overwhelmingly grateful as I was thinking about it. I thought, you know, Adam, we struggled with managing his diabetes. You know, up until April of 2016 I guess. But I was just so so, so grateful for the information that I was able to get through your podcast that I felt helped us give him the best chance at living in the best way possible for what we had no idea at the time would be his last few months of life. So does it get easier? No, has it lessened? I feel like I'm moving forward without as much shock, maybe not as much in a fog. But there are still moments where, you know, I think, and I think any parent who's lost a child would say, you know, and I anticipate this is going to be on, going on for the rest of my life, where you just you're overcome. You're overcome. How could this happen? You

Scott Benner 23:32
know, my son leaves for college, and for weeks and weeks after he leaves, my wife and I will kind of comment to each other. It's hard to put into words, right? But the The house feels different, I guess, is the way people put it. But there's, there's a palatable sometimes it feels like air pressure to me, or I don't know how to describe how being in a space where he is or has been recently feels different than being in a space where he hasn't been recently and and it's, I'm assuming, that's as close as I can come to understanding what you're saying. You know, can I ask your you have a son, a third son who's with you still?

Anne 24:23
Yes, Andy was not in the car at the time, and I think the only reason that he didn't come too is because he had basketball practice that day. He is now. He was 15 when our accident happened. He's now 18, and he's a senior in high school, and so he will be going off to college in a number of months with you tied to his belt, I'm

Scott Benner 24:44
assuming a three foot rope, right? Is that lady behind you? Andy, oh, it's my mom, and she'll be in class today. How? I guess, you know. How did it impact? Impact him.

Anne 25:03
Andy is the most even keeled child I think that exists. He obviously, you know, going from a crazy fun house full of energy to being the only one difficult for him, obviously, but he is. I used to

Scott Benner 25:29
hate ordering my daughter's diabetes supplies. I never had a good experience, and it was frustrating. But it hasn't been that way for a while, actually, for about three years now, because that's how long we've been using us Med, us, med.com/juicebox, or call 888-721-1514, us, med is the number one distributor for FreeStyle Libre systems nationwide. They are the number one specialty distributor for OmniPod, the number one fastest growing tandem distributor nationwide, the number one rated distributor in Dexcom customer satisfaction surveys. They have served over 1 million people with diabetes since 1996 and they always provide 90 days worth of supplies and fast and free shipping us. Med carries everything from insulin pumps and diabetes testing supplies to the latest CGM like the libre three and Dexcom g7 they accept Medicare nationwide and over 800 private insurers find out why us med has an A plus rating with a better business bureau at US med.com/juicebox, or just call them at 888-721-1514, get started right now, and you'll be getting your supplies the same way we do. This episode is sponsored by Medtronic diabetes. Medtronic diabetes com slash juice box, and now we're going to hear from Medtronic champion Jalen.

Speaker 1 27:01
I was going straight into high school. So it was a summer heading into high school.

Scott Benner 27:05
Was that particularly difficult?

Speaker 1 27:07
Unimaginable. You know, I missed my entire summer. So I went to I was going to a brand new school. I was around a bunch of new people that I had not been going to school with. So it was hard trying to balance that while also explaining to people what type one diabetes was. My hometown did not have an endocrinologist, so I was traveling over an hour to the nearest endocrinologist for children. So you know, outside of that, I didn't have any type of support in my hometown. Did

Scott Benner 27:35
you try to explain to people, or did you find it easier just to stay private? I honestly,

Speaker 1 27:40
I just held back. I didn't really like talking about it. It was just, it felt like it was just a repeating record where I was saying things and people weren't understanding it, and I also was still in the process of learning it, so I just kept it to myself. Didn't really talk about

Scott Benner 27:55
it. Did you eventually find people in real life that you could confide in? I

Speaker 1 27:59
never really got the experience until after getting to college, and then once I graduated college, it's all I see. You know, you can easily search Medtronic champions. You see people that pop up and you're like, wow, look at all this content. And I think that's something that motivates me started embracing more. You know, how I live with type one diabetes,

Scott Benner 28:19
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Anne 29:32
the one that I feel like gives us strength, in A way, gives me strength. You know it he's and I think I look back on it too, and I think, gosh, you know, the first couple years, especially, I was so wrapped up in my own grief. It took me a while to realize I've I need to be more present for him. I didn't. Only know how to do that. He has been nothing but gracious in dealing with my shortcomings through that whole process. But he is continuing on, and he knows that both of his brothers have left a legacy, and he is very intentional about wanting to live to honor those legacies. And so I just, I couldn't be prouder of who he is and who he's become. It's, you know, something that has happened to him, but he's written, you know, in some of his personal statements for college essays and things like that, that it's not something that defines him. It's, it's always going to be a part of his story, but it's not he's he's not victimized. He obviously is going to be living with a big gaping hole for the rest of his life, but it's not anything that defines him.

Scott Benner 30:55
So the three of you are supporting each other, because each of you has a different tragedy. Really, it's, it's as I'm sitting here thinking about it, he lost his brothers, and then contact with you for a while, probably there's just an overall change in what his life is. But then at the same time, you're dealing with losing Adam and Alec, and you're dealing with, I'm assuming surviving an accident that they were lost in, like, that's got to be has to weigh on you as well, does it not?

Anne 31:29
Yeah, yeah, it absolutely does.

Scott Benner 31:33
Yeah. I don't know if there's more to that question. It just, it's occurring to me, as you're talking that, you know, that's got to be the next thought, which is, you know? I mean, it's survivor's guilt, right? Like it's why me? Why them, not me, you know, etc, like that. Probably, yes,

Anne 31:47
that's a question that plagues me. Has plagued me every day for the last three plus years.

Scott Benner 31:52
It's just random. Do you seek, um, have you in the past, or are you now? Do you talk to somebody, or do you kind of go back to your family for that support. How do you handle that?

Anne 32:01
Yeah, I did do some counseling for the first two years. You know? I think that that kind of ran its course. I have some amazing friends who continue to be just a wonderful support.

Scott Benner 32:26
Can I interject and ask you, before you tell me about your journaling, is it just, honestly, something that no one else can really understand except someone who's been through it? Yes, is that what you found through the counseling? That's kind of what I got in your pause, like, what am I gonna talk to a therapist about that? You know what I mean? You know, because I find myself in the same situation right now. I'm like, I have nothing contextually to compare to what you're talking about, nothing. And so I would think that trying to have that conversation with people who don't have that context must feel frustrating and fruitless. And you know, it's lovely to think that everything in world, in the world can be, can be explained away or gotten through or coped with. But, I mean, I don't know, like I I follow, don't know if you've ever heard the episode with a woman named Lynda Haller, who came on years ago, and yes and her her son passed away at school from you know, and I follow her on Facebook still, and she's very proactive about remembering her son. And at the same time, I just feel like this is, this is something that fundamentally changes your perspective on life, and I don't see anything else that could bend you back to where you were before. I don't and I can't tell that that's a bad thing or not. I don't actually think it is. I think it's maybe sad right from the outside, but for you, I'm assuming you're not looking to forget your kids. And isn't that what feeling better feels like?

Anne 34:14
Yeah, and that's funny, because I I have always thought, I mean, since this happened, I don't want to feel better, you know? And it's not even anything that I can really say. I need to make I need to be able to make sense of this. There's, there's nothing to be made sense of. I, you know that that was part of what I kind of thought as I was going through the counseling is, you know what? What is the point? I mean, I just need to be able to put one foot in front of the other. I want to live well. I want to live in such a way that honors their memories, that would honor them, that would make them proud. I. But really, they're, you're absolutely right. It's impossible to for, I think, for to understand this. I mean, you think somebody that this has never happened to, you know, you think, Oh, this is the worst thing imaginable. And it is, you know, I think that sometimes, you know, people will look at me and they'll be like, Oh, you're so strong or so courageous. And I don't have a choice. I mean, I but I think it's I have come to know more parents than I would like to know who have experienced this type of thing. And I think there's just an instant bond that you have with people who have also lost a child or lost children. There's just you relate to them on a just a level that you know people other people are not going to be able to understand. So people can sympathize. Go ahead. Does it feel

Scott Benner 35:58
like you're parenting their memories?

Anne 36:03
That's a great question.

Scott Benner 36:04
You know what I mean? Like? I guess from my perspective, I feel like a really connected parent. I really enjoy having children, and so when they're with me or they're not with me, I'm always in some sort of a fluctuation of helping them or watching them for what they need next, and trying to figure out how to help that or, you know, and no matter what that means, if it's just listening or being there, saying something or actually interjecting, like whatever it ends up being, I feel like that keeps happening. And when Cole went to college. I thought maybe that would happen less, but it doesn't, and I can't imagine I'm gonna feel any differently when he moves out, or that I would feel any differently if he passed away. I can't imagine that I would feel any differently about that. And it just feels like that's what you should be doing, right, like shepherding their their legacy and and still being parents to them. I don't know what else My life is for at this point, it's a very strange thing. I enjoy the things that I enjoy very much, but I don't know how I would feel if you could somehow flip a switch, take me, take me being my kids parents away from me, but leave me the memory of my kids. I'm not sure what I would do with that. So I think that whatever gets your one foot in front of the next one is valuable. I think that you should, 100% live a really long life with as much happiness in it as you can find, and be a terrific parent to Andy and and I'm assuming you and her husband are together. Yes, we are. And be, you know, be in that love and that relationship and all that other stuff. But I mean, I would think that there'd be a way to live well even, but I don't think there'd be a way to live like, forgetting, you know what I mean, like, I I've had a lot of terrible things happen to me that I don't think about anymore, but I don't think this one could be one of them. I'm, by the way, not for nothing, but how much better this am I than your therapist was

Unknown Speaker 38:21
right? I was gonna say you should go into grief counseling or something. Swear to God, I

Scott Benner 38:25
was like, I should at least get 40 bucks for this. I just found myself thinking, and I've, by the way, and found a way to put a laugh in the middle of this episode, which really is a bigger skill.

Anne 38:36
That was, that was, and that was amazing. I'm gonna

Scott Benner 38:39
blow my nose. Now, there you go. Okay, so, so I'm gonna go back to your note for a second. I'm assuming that as the days and the weeks pass and and people feel like they want to help you, I want to ask first, before we get into what actually happened to you, you know, and how community and friends and family got around you. But for anybody in this situation, on the other side of it, what do people say that they think is helpful? That really isn't gotta be a couple sentences and stick in your crawl, right? Sure. Can I guess one everything happens for a reason, is that one of them

Anne 39:27
that would be one, God must have needed them.

Scott Benner 39:32
They're in a better place.

Anne 39:34
They're in a better place. Yeah, yeah, those, yeah, I, you know, and I that's the other thing, is that, you I probably said stupid stuff like that. I don't know other people, yeah, to other people. Before this happened to me, I don't know what I would have said or what came out of my mouth, or, you know, I think you, i. Least

Scott Benner 40:00
it's not cancer. We all say that about diabetes. So, right, right? And what is that? That's people in a moment, uncertain of what to do with really well intended, people trying to very well intended,

Anne 40:13
yeah, and that's what you just have to give grace, because people are they're trying to make you feel better. They're trying to say something as inappropriate as it might be, they don't recognize that, and that's not their intent. And you know, this has taught me to give a lot of grace throughout the last three years, but you know, I truly am appreciative of the way that our friends and our community family have just rallied around us and continue to rally around us, you know. So, yeah, there are definitely some things that you don't want to say too, grieving person.

Scott Benner 40:54
So what is the right thing to do if I were to have met you in the weeks and months after that, what would have the right thing to do have been, do you think, what's the best thing you could imagine, what what happened to you that, at least didn't make you think, Oh, don't say that, because I'm assuming nothing makes you feel better, right?

Anne 41:14
No, right now, no, there's no, nothing could be said to ease any of the pain.

Scott Benner 41:20
So it's a, it's, it's just probably the quiet, right? A hug, like a hand on a shoulder, a glance, like those kinds of things are probably the only thing people should even be and, and who are they doing it for? Are they doing it for themselves, or are they doing it for you? Right? Exactly.

Anne 41:39
You know, it was even hard to have we had so many people around us in the beginning. And I just, you know, at the very beginning, when this happened, I was just in a lot of physical pain. It was sometimes hard to have too many people around just I just, I have my memories are so foggy of those first few weeks. And I think in part because I had a bad concussion, I was on some medication. I think it was making me a little loopy. I just the whole first month was just, I have very little memory of it. Honestly, I do remember a lot of people. We had a lot of meals, we had a lot of visitors, and I I just, I was on autopilot during that time. I think that probably the most helpful thing is I, as I look back on it, the most helpful thing was hearing memories of the boys, hearing what people remembered about them. And we had a number of, you know, cards and letters and that I've saved to this day and will probably never get rid of. I think one of the most meaningful things was Alex, fourth grade teacher sent us a, I don't know, two or three pages of just memories she was she was a first year teacher, the year that she had him, and she had journaled very consistently throughout that first school year, and she sent us Two or three pages of just memories of ALEC. And, you know, I think, more than anything, you know, somebody asked me, What, what's the most helpful? Tell me what you remember about my boys? Yeah, because

Scott Benner 43:32
there's this, like, right now you're, you know, right now, everyone we know is right now, somewhere else living a different life, like, even if it's for an hour or while they're at work or while they're at school, they're having these different interactions. They're making memories with other people. And if you stop and think about it, there's probably an infinite number of those memories out in the world that you're not aware of, and so and so, for people to come tell them to you a story is, is? It sounds wonderful, like, I It's no different than when you haven't seen someone in a while, and you're like, hey, what have you been up to? You're asking, like, you know, what have you been doing? Well, I haven't been in your physical space, you know, exactly, right? I'm interested, you know. And so, so when all those people come in and offer those things, that's the comfort, but not in the beginning, right? Like, we're not looking for a heartfelt Alex story in the first week or something like that. We're looking for people need to realize that this is, if they're going to be involved in your life still, which you hope they would be, that this is a this is a long haul situation. It's not, you know, do you find that people just wanted you to feel better. And like, did you have that feeling, or could you not even feel that from other people?

Anne 44:47
Oh, no. We felt the grief and the shock and the prayers and the love and, I mean, we we felt, yeah, we felt everything, and we continue to feel that, I think sometimes, now that we're so. Removed. I think some people think, Oh, I shouldn't mention it. I'll make her sad. I'll make her cry. And that's really the complete opposite. I want to hear their names spoken. I want to hear what people remember about them. I want to hear the stories. I don't want them to go unmentioned at Christmas dinners and Thanksgiving dinners. And because

Scott Benner 45:21
even if you do cry that those tears come from like it's a happy memory, then, right? You're not thinking, you're not in that moment, thinking they're not here. You're thinking, this is a happy memory. Exactly

Anne 45:31
nobody's making me more sad.

Scott Benner 45:36
Is it fair to say? No one could do that to you. But like, add to your sadness, like it is what it is, right?

Anne 45:43
It is fair to say that yes.

Scott Benner 45:45
So I have a couple of difficult questions. Not that every one of these hasn't been difficult, but I have two difficult questions. I don't know if I'll even before we kind of move on. I want to hear about how how Adam's family at school spoke about him, but it feels to me like I don't I'm not really interested in digging into this, because I don't think it's what we're talking about. But I feel like if I don't bring it up, people listening are going to wonder, but how did this has this or how has this affected your married relationship?

Anne 46:16
Yeah, well, I there's, there's no greater trial that I think a marriage can go through. And that said, you know, my husband has been amazingly supportive. He is the rock, as has always been the rock of our family. We both it's hugely interesting to see how differently we process grief. I am very much always wanting to see pictures and videos, and it's too painful for him to see them. As far as our relationship goes, you know, it's still, I think we, we understand each other in a way that nobody else can it. You know, we're not, we have not been without our have without our trials, but we're, still hanging on. Will have been married for 20 years this March. You know, there are days when wonder how much longer it's going to be, but I

Scott Benner 47:34
will. The reason I asked is because it was happened to me early on, when, when I became a stay at home dad and I had this little baby in front of me, and I just I recognized in my wife's eyes that, you know, like I never really thought of it prior to the baby, right before the baby, like we were these two people who met each other and fell in love. We were like the most important things to each other. And then as soon as the baby came, I realized that I was a guy she met. That was her son. You know what I mean? Like, it's, you know, I'm saying and, and you see that? Like, if it I always felt like, if I really screwed something up, I don't know how she would, you know, forgive me. Now your thing was an accident, obviously, but it still takes a large amount of intellectual maturity to remember that I would think that that's that's just how it occurs to me. I think it's very it's very cool and and, and it makes me feel good that you guys are together and that you're working and that you're realizing that, like, this whole thing is just a, you know, it's another process, and you can't rush through it, just like you can't rush through grief or, you know, you can't, you know, not to be ham fisted about it. But there are people who, sometimes I get notes from all the time. They're like, I just started listening to the podcast last week, and my blood sugars aren't exactly where I want them yet. And I was like, yeah, we've only been out of only been at it for a week, you know, like, it's gonna take more time, like you have to live in it to see where it goes. I would think that that would be, you know, worth doing,

Anne 49:14
I guess. Yeah, yeah. We've people ask us that a lot, actually, because, you know, they I don't know what. You know, how many marriages survive after a tragedy like this? I don't know what the statistics are, but you know they you know people will ask say, hey, you know they don't have much of a chance now.

Scott Benner 49:36
Hey, listen, some of them do, right? You could be those people. We all live like that. Like, you know, it's so funny when, isn't it great when you watch people get married and they're all just like, so happy, and they're young, and I'm like, one and two, one and two, one in every two marriages ends in divorce. Like, yeah, you know, and so, and that's from stuff like, he wants. To watch Netflix, and I want to go dancing. A lesser, a lesser conversation, but, but it would be, it would be, um, it'd be silly to ignore it in this conversation, like you're not unaware of your life, and, you know, I'm not unaware of being married. So I was, I was interested to know, and I wish you a ton of success. I hope it, I hope it goes the right way. You know what I mean? Yeah, of course. So your note, which, with your permission, after you're not with me anymore, after you're off the recording, I'm gonna, if it's okay with you, I'm gonna read your letter. Is that all right? Sure, okay, but I can't do it while you're here, just so you know, and I don't think you'd want me to, and I just it's not, it'll be less ugly if I do it while you're not on the recording. So, but I wanted to get your, I wanted to get your, your Okay, before I did that. So a number of months ago, when this letter came, some people might remember that I sort of very cryptically mentioned that we should try to do hard things, and that came from your letter. So I'd like you to tell me about that a little bit.

Anne 51:10
Yeah, so Adam was in sixth grade when the accident happened, and he had an amazing math teacher that year, their class in November, December, had been studying, I guess, learning how to plot x and y coordinates. And the teacher had given them, I think it was intended to be kind of a fun, light hearted assignment. It was in the month of December, he asked them to plot a cartoon character on a graph with the information that they had learned from this assignment or from the from the lesson. So Adam, there were a number of choices, and the students had to go to the teacher and then get the information to plot based on the cartoon character that they wanted. So Adam was he wanted Mario. He wanted to plot Mario. And the teacher initially was reluctant to give into that. He I don't think he thought that Adam couldn't do it, but he wanted it to be kind of something fun and quick and you know, that wasn't going to be very time consuming. This one involved like quarter points or half points on the grid. So it wasn't just it wasn't a straightforward character. So Adam asked. The teacher initially, said no. He asked again. The teacher said, No. He asked a third time, and the teacher was like, wow, Adam, okay, here do Mario? So? Adam did Mario. A few months after the accident, the teacher had been reflecting on that interaction, what had happened, and he put together. They framed Adam's drawing, or the the final product that Adam had done, the Mario they framed that. They framed the instructions that were very, very detailed, much more detailed compared to the other cartoon characters that the other students had done, and they had everybody sign it. They presented an amazing wall week. It's now hanging on our front and center in our living room wall. It basically says, do hard things. That's the lesson, as the teacher reflected on all of this that, you know, he thought, Adam didn't just settle for a super easy cartoon character. He wanted the hard one. He did the hard one, and he did it well. And the teacher knew, of course, of Adam's challenges, extra challenges with type one diabetes, what that presented. And, you know, he, when he presented this to Arturo and to Andy and I, he basically said, you know, we're learning from Adam. This is going to be his legacy for our class. He didn't shy away from doing hard things, neither with his diabetes, nor with this Mario drawing. He knew what he wanted. He was determined. And the teacher just said, you know, remember that as you go through your high school years, as you go through life, don't back away from doing what's hard.

Scott Benner 54:37
It's rewarding. I'm looking at it while you're talking, and the message is rewarding. And I mean, I to take it a little farther. I feel like you have to, you have to know somewhere in the back of your mind that you know none of your time is guaranteed. Like we all sit around talking about, like, Oh, I'll make it till I'm 80. Or, you know, like, Baba, you know that every. Has that feeling. But the truth is that not everyone does, and you're not going to know who you are in that scenario ever, right? So, whether it's, you know, Adam's years that he got, even at the end, where maybe was just a few months of him feeling better because his blood sugars were were better off, right? Like, maybe that was, that was lovely, you know it, and it would have been terrific if that went on for 100 years, but it was terrific that it went on for as long as it did. And you know, with all of us either living as the parents of children with type one or or people living with type one themselves, I think you have to want for yourself for however many days between one and a and a bazillion that you get, you know you should want better for yourself, and it's not going to be easy, right? Like it's, it's not going to be easy you have, you have an extra challenge every day, and some days, they're a lot worse than others. But I mean, I mean, unless you're not paying attention and told you already one foot in front of the other one, right like you, just every day is not great. Every day is not what you want it to be. Doesn't make it not incredibly valuable. Doesn't make it not beautiful or worth doing or worth living or sharing with someone else, even if it's for your memories or for what you might accomplish today. But you have to honor people like Adam that don't have the chance anymore, right? So do it for them. Yeah, that's just how it occurs to me. It's how it occurred to me when I read your note and I didn't know what you were gonna say, like, I didn't know what I was gonna be able to say to you, I got incredibly nervous about 15 minutes before we were supposed to start talking. And I mean, you I don't, I haven't been nervous doing this podcast once, and you know, I just didn't want to. I didn't want to. I just felt like there's so much here. I wanted to make sure we unpacked it correctly, you know, because at the end of your note the I mean, not that all of it isn't absolutely uplifting and soul crushing to read on the on the other side, like, you know what I mean, like as I'm sitting and reading it, but when you got to the end, and I don't know if you still do this or not, but you still listen to the podcast

Anne 57:16
I do, all right,

Scott Benner 57:19
now I'm going To cry. Hold on a second, god damn it,

Anne 57:24
well and go ahead, you know, well, this, you know, this is very interesting. And you know, obviously, when you know, in the three and a half years that we were working with Adam and helping him to manage his type one diabetes, you know that, I mean, it's, it's undoubtable. It's, of course, hard. It's very, very difficult, you know. And there were a number of sleepless nights I can recall when I would be sitting down right outside his room when we got the pump, and I was playing with the the basal rates and trying to figure out, okay, from two to three o'clock, his sugar is going high, or from, you know, four to five, it's going low, and trying to, trying to make those adjustments and those tweaks to just to make it just perfect. And, you know, it obviously is hard. It's something you wish that was not a part of your life. But strangely enough, you know, I think after everything, i i I grieved the diabetes. I grieved not having that. And I, I, I don't know that we're completely done with it. And I, you know, we've, I've thought about, you know, maybe fostering a child with with type one diabetes. I just, I feel like I have this knowledge. I I have some tools. I obviously not perfect, but I know what to do. And, yeah, and listen,

Scott Benner 59:00
I gotta tell you something. You're killing me, okay, ripping my heart out here. I, I, I'm just gonna for a second, because I don't know another way to couch the conversation. I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it about me for a second, please. The people who think that I do that already, just shut up. We're doing something here. Okay. I thought maybe the podcast would help somebody right like I thought maybe it could. I was hopeful that it would. It started proving itself out that way. It does every day. I never thought it was going to help you with that. You know what? I mean, like, like, it just, I could not have planned for that. It just would have been no way. Do you know, try to imagine, you know, five years ago, me thinking I'm going to try to take my blog and, you know, expand it into a podcast. Because, you know, next year, some person's gonna find it, and then their son's gonna pass away, and then she's still gonna find connection to him through a podcast about diabetes. Like, like, there's no, there's no way to imagine that. And so when I was reading your note, like, that's the part that really, really got me, like, I just was like, This is how are you still listening? And then when you explained it, just now, I'm like, oh, that's how, you know, like, I couldn't, I couldn't quite understand it in the note, but I 100% understand it while you're saying it. Diabetes sucks, but it was a thing you were doing with Adam, right, like you had this connection to him through this thing. It was different than with your other two sons and with anybody else in the world. It's a it's an it's so easy to bemoan it, I guess, and for 1000 good reasons. But you have a different perspective than most of us, and I am, obviously, we don't wish that perspective on someone else, but it's still a viable perspective, and I've the closest I've ever come to it. I think I wrote about it years ago was that as much as I hate sneaking into Arden's room and testing her blood sugar when she's asleep, you know prior to CGM, for sure, I realized one day that I get to hold her hand every day, and I'm watching it get bigger and and older, and it was a very small experience that most people don't have with their kids. And so I tried to find some sort of trade off in, you know, from beauty to annoyance, right? And, and I did, I think it's one of the things I'm really grateful for. I lift her hand up. I know what it feels like, and how heavy it is and and how it's different from the day before. And you have all those connections too. I just, I couldn't imagine that. It's, it's, it's lovely, actually, wow, damn it. Hold on an I'm blowing my nose again. All right, yeah, listen, we're up against an hour. One of us is gonna have a stroke. So um, let's, let's, let's make sure. Let's make sure that, nothing's left unsaid. There's nothing that you really wanted to say, you know, before, before we start saying goodbye,

Anne 1:02:32
yeah, you know I, I just My encouragement. I mean, I, I love meeting people who have connections with type one. My biggest encouragement to everybody in the type one community is, you know, keep doing the hard things and be grateful that you still get to do them. You know, like I said, I don't, I don't know that type one. I don't know that we're completely done with it, and I don't know how, or, you know in what way we might continue to be involved. But I'm just I'm grateful, extremely grateful for the time that we had. I'm really grateful for what I learned through listening to hours and hours and hours of your podcast and how to help Adam live well and in his last few months of life, I would give anything to be able to Go through and have sleepless nights again, every night. I give anything, but I think, you know, Adam was definitely a like his teacher pointed out, you know, he had left a legacy of doing hard things. And I hold on to that, and I continue to go through as a grieving parent, and get up every day and do the hardest thing of going through life without them.

Scott Benner 1:04:11
That is the strongest thing that I've ever heard anyone say or can't imagine. So I think that, I think that's wonderful. I hope everybody heard that, and it leaves them with a meaningful feeling that they don't escape. And you know, if you want to see, you know the impact that how diabetes is always around while you're saying this beautiful thing. Arden sex team, hey, it's lunchtime. Oh, she's like, and I'm listening to you and and she's like, I'm not that hungry, so what should we do? And I was like, just like, I think maybe we should do this and this. And she's like, Okay. And then she and then I asked you to have some juice earlier, and she didn't. And so. Her blood sugar hasn't gone up the way I wanted it to, but it hasn't gone down. So she's admonishing me in the text messages while you were saying these beautiful things. She says, she says, I never had the juice, by the way, I knew I didn't need it. You should listen to me more often. And I'm gonna tell you, by the way, she did need the juice. What she just means is her blood sugar didn't get any lower than it was. And so now she's just look at her. She just, she won't stop, like I'm about to text her, just go eat and leave me alone.

Anne 1:05:38
Oh my goodness, yes, this is remind me quite a bit of my text exchanges with Adam.

Scott Benner 1:05:45
I got one from her this morning. I'm just like, like, Arden set this. You know, I'm trying to get her to set, like, a decrease in her basal, and she's just doesn't answer me for 20 minutes. Then finally I get the what back, just what. And I was like, if I didn't need to say it to her so badly. I would just say, What do you mean? What? Like, I'm always like, just scroll up a little bit. Like, couldn't you just scroll and go, Oh, look, he just said it right before I said, What? She won't do it. She makes me say it again. I think it's my punishment. Somehow. I want you to, if you see fit. First of all, please accept my my love and admiration and my good wishes and share them with Artur and Andy if you feel like that's appropriate, and don't if you don't, but I just really, I can't imagine that you said yes to this I and I want to want you to know why I asked it was because I thought maybe it would be helpful for you to just be able to tell other people about Adam, and you're going to tell a lot of people this way. So it just, it just, I thought you'll say, I think I even said my email, like, please say no, if you don't want to do this, don't feel any pressure to do it any time frame. It could be years from now, like whenever you want or don't want, and I you weren't going to do it at first, but can you tell me, as we're kind of saying goodbye, what changed your mind?

Anne 1:07:07
You know, I just thought, what a way to honor Adam. And I think, you know, any parent who has lost a child will jump at the chance to honor their child's legacy, to talk about their memories, to hear their names. And I, you know, I, I guess I came into this phone call not really knowing,

you know how it would go, or what could be said, or you know what of value that, that I would have, but, you know, I, and I don't know that there has been too much value, but I, you know, I guess I keep going back to what I wouldn't give to go through the hard times all over again, of

Scott Benner 1:07:58
I believe there is value in it, and and I, we're gonna find out very quickly, because I'm just putting this out. I can't stare at this in my folder. It'll just, I can't, I'm not going to so I just, I'm gonna, it's going out right away so that I can, I can, sort of, you know, just let it move on to somebody else and see what, you know, what they can take from it? I mean, I would, I would bet that, that there's a lot of good that comes from you sharing this in not just for you, and any cathartic feeling you might have experienced over the hour, but, um, but for people who are going to hear it, I just, I think the message is there, like, right? Like, what wouldn't you do to to have those experiences? Still, even though five minutes earlier, they weren't the best experiences of your life, you described the day you was diagnosed as the worst day of your life, right up until something else proved out to be more impactful on you. So yeah, that's really something else. Okay, you're good. You want to tell a story? Or I'm not trying to make you say anything. I just want to make sure you're good, right? How? Yes, I am. All right. Excellent. I genuinely appreciate you doing this. Thank you very, very much. Sure.

Anne 1:09:14
Thanks, Scott. You

Scott Benner 1:09:25
a huge thank you to one of today's sponsors, gevok glucagon. Find out more about G VOK hypo pen at gevok glucagon.com, forward slash, juicebox. You spell that, G, V, O, k, e, g, l, U, C, A, G, o, n.com, forward slash juicebox. Jalen is an incredible example of what so many experience living with diabetes. You show up for yourself and others every day, never letting diabetes define you, and that is what the Medtronic champion community is the. About each of us is strong, and together, we're even stronger. To hear more stories from the Medtronic champion community, or to share your own story, visit Medtronic diabetes.com/juicebox and look out online for the hashtag Medtronic champion. This episode of The juicebox podcast was sponsored by us med usmed.com/juice box, or call, 888-721-1514, get started today with us. Med, links in the show notes. Links at juicebox. Podcast, com,

hey, thanks for listening all the way to the end. I really appreciate your loyalty and listenership. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back very soon with another episode of The juicebox podcast.

#1286 Other Shoe

Jamie has type 1 diabetes and ADHD. We talked about amylin, methylated foliate, brain issues and lots more.

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Scott Benner 0:00
Hello friends and welcome back to the juicebox podcast.

My guest today is Jamie. She has ADHD and type one diabetes for 34 years. She works in orthopedic surgery, and this is her story. Please don't forget that 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 or becoming bold with insulin. Don't forget to save 40% off of your entire order at cozy earth.com All you have to do is use the offer code juicebox at checkout. That's juicebox at checkout to save 40% at cozy earth.com 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. The Diabetes variables series from the juicebox podcast goes over all the little things that affect your diabetes that you might not think about, travel and exercise to hydration and even trampolines. Juicebox podcast.com, go up in the menu and click on diabetes variables.

Did you know if just one person in your family has type one diabetes, you are up to 15 times more likely to get it too. So screen it like you mean it one blood tests can spot type one diabetes early, tap now talk to a doctor or visit screen for type one.com for more info. This episode of The juicebox podcast is sponsored by the contour next gen blood glucose meter. Learn more and get started today at contour, next.com/juicebox this episode of The juicebox podcast is sponsored by the only implantable sensor rated for long term wear up to six months the ever since CGM, ever since cgm.com/juice, box.

Jaime 2:14
Hi. My name is Jamie. I live in New Mexico. I have been a type one diabetic for almost 34 years.

Scott Benner 2:21
Wow. How old are you?

Jaime 2:25
I will be 45 in slightly less than one month.

Scott Benner 2:28
Okay, so how old were you when you were diagnosed?

Jaime 2:31
I was 11 June, 11, 1990 okay,

Scott Benner 2:36
you were 11 in 1990 Yes, okay. I got it diagnosed out of the blue. We were always

Jaime 2:45
very much I think I maybe had like a stomach virus or something, a month or two before my diagnosis. Maybe it wasn't a stomach virus, maybe it was just my pancreas crapping out on me, I will never know, but I rapidly became very sick not very long after school let out for the summer and ended up being diagnosed in a fanfare of DKA and near death experiences. So

Scott Benner 3:11
oh my gosh, do you have brothers or sisters? Were your parents together?

Jaime 3:15
Yes, they were, and I they were until my father passed away two years ago tomorrow, as a matter of fact, oh gosh, I have a calf brother on my dad's side who's 12 years older than me, and I have an older sister and a younger sister. We are all about 18 months apart.

Scott Benner 3:33
Are you the only type one? No, who else.

Jaime 3:36
So my older brother was also diagnosed at age 11, and that would have been 1978 and my younger sister is also type one, and she was diagnosed just about two years after I was so we were all around age 11 at diagnosis. Wow, yeah,

Scott Benner 3:58
this is your dad's side, right? Because you have a one of those.

Jaime 4:00
Just my brother is my half brother. My sisters are my full biological sisters.

Scott Benner 4:06
Yeah, but I'm saying, if your brother is a half and he has one

Jaime 4:10
too, if it's genetic, yes, we have a lot of autoimmune diseases in our family on my mother's side, just none of it is type one. My dad's younger half brother, his father's son, in his second marriage, was a type one diabetic. He passed away in 1994 from complications of diabetes. You

Scott Benner 4:32
know, there's times I think, as I'm talking to people and I'm going like picking through their like their family trees, it really does feel like if there's some autoimmune, doesn't have to be type one, but some autoimmune on both sides. For the parents, it really seems to ramp up. The likelihood, you know what I mean,

Jaime 4:47
I feel like you're right, you know? And as a nurse, I see that a lot. I work in orthopedic surgery, and I see a lot of patients having surgeries because of rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. Or both. Sometimes Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, which isn't really an autoimmune disease, but it seems like people with EDS often have ConCom auto immune diseases. So it's really interesting to see all the different sides of that. And I have more than one auto immune disease myself, as does most of my family. So what else are you packing? I was just diagnosed with Graves disease in December of 2023 and I have some other stuff going on that we aren't quite sure whether it's auto immune or not. I have some pretty significant symptoms of pots syndrome that have worsened in the last few years, and so I have pretty moderate joint hypermobility, which i i believe may be associated more with with my ADHD than anything else, but it does cause me some issues. My rheumatoid factor is high when I get blood work done, just not high enough to diagnose me with RA, thank goodness.

Scott Benner 6:03
What's the connection there between the RA and the hypermobility,

Jaime 6:08
not Ra? ADHD, no,

Scott Benner 6:09
that. I'm sorry. I misspoke. I was thinking. I was thinking ADHD. And said, ra, sorry, yeah,

Jaime 6:15
I have ADHD. I was doing some research. I think just a friend kind of happened to off hand mention to me, having seen some kind of article about joint hypermobility and ADHD and I started digging into that. I love researching things. I'm kind of a research junkie. Just don't ask me to write a paper. I might do it the night before it's due. It'll be really well written, though. So I had read some studies where a pretty high percentage, like 60 to 70% of persons with ADHD often also have some type of joint hypermobility disorder, and from what I can remember reading, it's related to how the prefrontal cortex in the brain functions, as well as there's a specific part of the brain that kind of tells your body what to do with things that are in your bloodstream, like vitamins, minerals, things like that. And there is a study going on at Tulane University where they're showing persons the you know, persons who have ADHD also tend to have higher levels of vitamin K in their bloodstream, and the reason is because whatever part of the brain that is affected by ADHD is also happening to be the part of the brain that tells your body how to absorb vitamin K into your soft tissues. And it doesn't work, right? So you tend to have those higher levels of vitamin K because they're not being absorbed into your soft tissues and telling them exactly how springy to be. And so they're hyper mobile, which leads to frequent injuries, frequent dislocations, you know, and then as you age like me, you get stiffer and more likely to injure yourself, whereas in my youth, I was extremely flexible,

Scott Benner 8:10
and they're just treating these people with folate from the very beginning, your kids mean everything to you. That means you do anything for them, especially if they're at risk. So when it comes to type one diabetes screen, it like you mean it. Now up to 90% of type one diagnosis have no family history, but if you have a family history, you are up to 15 times more likely to develop type one screen. It like you mean it, because type one diabetes can develop at any age, and once you get results, you can get prepared for your child's future. So screen it like you mean it type one starts long before there are symptoms, but one blood test could help you spot it early before they need insulin, and could lower the risk of serious complications like diabetic ketoacidosis or DKA, talk to your doctor about how to screen for type one diabetes, because the more you know, the more you can do. So don't wait, tap now or visit screened for type one.com to learn more. Again, that's screen for type one.com and screen it like you mean it the contour next gen blood glucose meter is the meter that we use here. Arden has one with her at all times. I have one downstairs in the kitchen, just in case I want to check my blood sugar. And Arden has them at school. They're everywhere that she is. Contour, next.com/juice, box, test strips and the meters themselves may be less expensive for you, in cash out of your pocket than you're paying currently through your insurance. For another meter. You can find out about that and much more at my link. Contour next.com/juice, box. Contour makes a. Number of fantastic and accurate meters, and their second chance test strips are absolutely my favorite part. What does that mean, if you go to get some blood, and maybe you touch it, and, I don't know, stumble with your hand and like, slip off and go back, it doesn't impact the quality or accuracy of the test. So you can hit the blood, not get enough, come back, get the rest without impacting the accuracy of the test. That's right, you can touch the blood, come back and get the rest, and you're going to get an absolutely accurate test. I think that's important, because we all stumble and fumble at times. That's not a good reason to have to waste a test strip. And with a contour next gen, you won't have to contour next.com forward slash juicebox. You're going to get a great reading without having to be perfect.

Jaime 10:50
That's one of the things they were talking about in the article. Forgive me if I can't recall all of it, probably six months since I read it, but it's very interesting to see. Yes, so the different ways to approach that. You know, I've noticed that I have more orthopedic issues because of my hypermobility now that I'm in my 40s, especially since I'm an active, athletic person, to be really careful about what I do sometimes, one time, it saved me from severely breaking my ankle. I'm pretty sure my my knee doc that I work with seems to think that the reason it didn't break is because I was so mobile that it bent and just resulted in an absolutely horrible spring. It was during a dance performance a little over a year ago, came down the wrong way and the ankle bent like a hockey stick, but it didn't break, and I couldn't believe it,

Scott Benner 11:43
huh? Also, it's interesting, this folate that they're using in the study is methylated, is

Jaime 11:48
it? Yeah, okay, I didn't, I don't know. I don't even know if I got that far, at least, don't remember. I've slept since then.

Scott Benner 11:55
I've been picking through, like, trying to understand methylated vitamins and folate a little more. This is very interesting to me. I'm so glad you brought this up. Well, I

Jaime 12:06
was reading about this before I found out I had graves, and then that diagnosis explained a few things that had been going on, you know, probably for at least the six months prior to my diagnosis. And I thought, oh, gosh, that makes a lot of sense now, but I never would have thought it was graves. I just happened to have an endocrinologist who looked at me at during an appointment and said, we need to do thyroid labs. And I said, Yeah, it's probably about time for that. And she said, Yeah, but I don't like the way your hands are shaking and I don't like the way your eyes look. She said, Doesn't somebody in your family have grave disease? And my older sister has graves. She is the one of us who is not a type one diabetic, but she does have Graves disease, though she had a radioactive iodine ablation in 1998 I believe. And so we did my labs, and there it was. I mean, just very thyrotoxic, extremely, extremely suppressed. TSH, it was crazy how suddenly that happened, and your

Scott Benner 13:03
your eyes were bulging.

Jaime 13:04
She said, I had the stare. And look, I didn't think that. I mean, I've always had kind of big eyes, and so I thought I'm fine, but I wasn't fine. And now, now looking at pictures, I can see something was a little bit different. It was not severe. So I do have some exomos. She did send me to see a thyroid eye specialist, and that was confirmed. And she said, you know, that generally gets better after a while, once you start treatment. It's not real obvious, though, so I couldn't really tell. Interesting. Yeah, it's, it's been, I was not expecting to get that diagnosis at my age. Why? Why did you think I feel like most people who have graves are diagnosed much younger in life, unless they have Hashimotos that converts to graves. Now I have listened to the entire thyroid series for juicebox podcast. I had long suspected there might be something wrong with my thyroid. But on the other end of the spectrum, my mother also has Hashimotos, and so does my younger sister, who's type one. And just the tiredness, the extreme fatigue that I mean, you literally feel like you're dying sometimes, you know, and you can't straighten that out. It's you know, you already have one auto immune disease. And you're, you're, you know, got all this stress in your life, and there has been plenty of stress in my life over, over the years, so you don't really know how to sort that out. And at the time, you know, they'll check your thyroid every year when when you have an endocrine disorder. But you know, as well as I do that your hormone levels can look normal on paper and not be normal for you. You know, the way it was with your wife and with your daughter, like, will it kill you to put them on a little bit of thyroid hormone? No, well, then maybe we should try that. Yeah, and hey, look, it works. And so sometimes I wonder if I had Hashimotos that flew under the radar for a while and now and then it came back, converted to graves, because that's what happened to my mother. Oh, okay, yeah, she she converted to graves right before she retired of El, six years ago, and had a had a radioactive iodine ablation. So

Scott Benner 15:21
you feel like, for you, there was so much going on, you didn't have more space to look into other things,

Jaime 15:28
right? And I never thought to, I didn't know they could do antibody tests and other things to look at that. They were just checking, you know, my t4 and my TSH, I gotcha, that's interesting, which really, by themselves, are not that reliable for anything, right, right.

Scott Benner 15:45
How about that? Okay, so I have a couple of questions here. So I'm looking at your notes. You left a very long note which is helpful weight issues through your life,

Jaime 15:56
yeah, not really, until I was in my 30s. But yes, it became very difficult for me to lose weight, you know, once I hit about 35 or so, and especially after I had my daughter, who is nine. Now, I've struggled with my weight a lot since then, and I always felt like I had to work abnormally hard to even lose like 10 pounds, and I really needed to lose like 30 or more,

Scott Benner 16:26
right? You think that was thyroid, or you think it's something else it

Jaime 16:30
could have been. And I still wonder if there, you know, like I said, if maybe I had Hashimotos, and that's why some of that was so hard for me. It just seemed really abnormally difficult that if I wanted to lose weight and keep it off, I had to exercise every single day, and I had to stick to a diet every single day. And that gets hard, yeah, to do when you have a small child, and then, you know, other stuff going on. Of course, I did finally manage to lose about 30 pounds in 2021 prior to that, I had been, you know, at pretty much the heaviest I'd ever been. I was carrying weight around my middle, which always makes me nervous about heart stuff, because that runs in my family too. Beginning of 2021 I was probably at the heaviest I had ever been in the 170s I'm only five foot three, and most importantly, I was carrying weight, or too much weight, around my middle, which made me worry about heart problems, because that does run in my family, okay? And you know, my cholesterol was tending to run higher, and, you know, then they start wanting to talk to you about statins and all these extra medications. And, you know, I had yo yo for a while. I think, you know, when my daughter was preschool age, I was running a lot and had managed to lose about 20 pounds. Then I went back to work and started slowly putting on weight again. So we come to 2020 when we have a pandemic, and I'm a nurse, and things are stressful and horrible and crazy, and my husband was starting to have some major medical issues, and so I put back on a lot of weight. So enter 2021 my cholesterol is high again. My endocrinologist starts talking about putting me on a statin. And I said, Well, my cholesterol is not that high, and I don't really want to take a statin, because historically, I haven't seen people in my family do very well on them. They made my mother very sick. No matter which one they've ever put her on, she's had some permanent effects from that, and so I wanted to avoid that at all costs. And she said, then, what do you want to do? Because you can't stay like this? And I said, I want to treat the root cause of the issue. I need to lose 40 pounds. So she sent me to a weight loss doctor and a nutritionist who was just the right nutritionist that you know you you and I both know that doctor patient relationships, and any healthcare practitioner patient relationship is not always a good fit, and you have to find the person who does it for you. And this lady was amazing, and she helped me figure out what my basal metabolic rate was and how I needed to feed my body, not somebody else's body, not stick to this diet on this paper that we give generically to 16,000 people, but how I needed to eat to lose weight and maintain weight. And he put me on phentermine, which wasn't my favorite thing, but that was when I started to realize maybe I should get treated for my ADHD, because the stimulant is really helping me focus. As soon as I went off the fender. Mean, I started to gain weight again, and we did a trial with ozempic at the time. In about August of 2021, my doctor's office was able to give me some samples, and it really helped my insulin sensitivity. I was taking a lot of insulin, and I was told that that probably. Wasn't doing me any favors helping me lose weight, either, because it likes to store itself in fat cells, and so I think we just had this whole storm of things going on that was making things very difficult, and suddenly I was less insulin resistant and was able to drop a little bit more weight without even trying. And that was about the time that I started doing more research on things like, why am I hungry all the time? Yeah, and I finally learned about amaline. No one had ever explained that to me in by then, the 30 plus years that I had been type one that the reason I wanted to eat constantly was not just because I have ADHD and binge eating is an issue because it is sometimes, but also because my islet cells don't work and I don't make insulin, but I also don't make Amylin. And Amylin is what keeps you feeling satiated and keeps food in your stomach longer, and that's why I could eat breakfast and five minutes later feel like I hadn't eaten since the day before, and dump all this food really quickly instead of digesting it properly. And then my blood sugar sky high, and it's it's just a cascading issue, and so I really feel strongly that GLP ones are helpful with that, yeah, because they kind of do the same thing that Amylin does, which is slow your digestion enough that you get your food and nutrients kind of the way you're supposed to, and then it helps you be less resistant to insulin, and things start working a little bit better. And I think we're just now, maybe at the time where there are a lot of studies going on with type ones, trying to get these medications approved, not only for type two, but also for type one. Now I think it's easier to get insurance to cover for type two things, because insurance will cover them for weight loss now, where even two years ago, when I was doing this, they didn't, yeah, because we go, V wasn't a thing just yet. And now there's a weight loss version of Mount Jaro as well. I'm using it, I know, yeah, so, so I'm now on tours appetite as well. Okay, so when we did this try, I should backtrack a little. I'm sorry I warned you about the ADHD thing. I'm going to drag you all over time and space. Can

Scott Benner 22:26
I tell you something? Jamie, I'm going to put you in the TARDIS. I'm always amazed, because people with ADHD are like, I know I'm all over the place. You're not all over the place. Okay, you might feel like you are, but you're telling a very linear story. You're fine. Okay, that's great.

Jaime 22:41
So we were trying ozempic In 2021 I was thrilled with it. I really wanted to stay on it. My insurance wouldn't cover it. And the doctor that I was with at the time, you know, and I find this, our medical system is terribly overwhelmed, especially the medical system in the state of New Mexico. Healthcare here is difficult because specialists do not stay here. They leave Okay, or they are so overwhelmed by their patient base, because we have a high type two diabetes population here, that they just don't have the time or the inclination or the staff motivation to go to bat for their patients about stuff like this and figure out how to get the insurance to cover it. And so I sadly had to go off of it, and I did really well maintaining my weight loss. I just didn't lose as much weight as I would have liked to, but I was happy with where I was, and I felt healthier, and I felt fit and I felt better. So that was fine with me. It was like, Okay, I don't need to be a particular clothing size. You know? What I need to do is not binge eat, not and not want to binge eat and and ozempic really helped with that too. Yeah, you know. But, but when I was off of it. It was an issue. And, you know, it made me think more and more about just getting my ADHD treated so I could get that under control, because ADHD and binge eating disorder tend to go hand in hand. And I saw, saw this in my dad as well. Isn't it

Scott Benner 24:16
fascinating that the picture you're painting, how it all just connects to each other

Jaime 24:20
well, and the crazy thing is, is that I didn't start putting this puzzle together until the last two years. So one of the things that didn't help my weight loss journey a whole lot was after I finished losing all this weight in 2021 my husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Scott Benner 24:38
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Jaime 26:00
is different from regular cancer, because whether a tumor in your brain is benign or malignant, it's always brain cancer. Because brain tumors, they can start out as a low grade benign tumor, which is fortunately, what he has, but over time, nine times out of 10 that without treatment, they will keep growing. For one thing, because even though they're benign, they grow and then they will convert to something malignant later, either some anaplastic, fast growing form of what they are, or glioblastoma multi form, which is a quit killer. Yeah, that kind of segues to the stress level in my life. So before that, I met my husband in our anatomy and physiology class when we were doing pre reqs for nursing school, and he was about four and a half years post combat injury at that point, and we started talking because he just fascinated me, because I didn't know anything about him. He was in my lecture, and he was staring at me all the time, and I was in school, and I didn't want to date anybody, and I had, I had been divorced for a few years, and had also just gotten out of a relationship, and really wanted to focus on nursing school, and I wouldn't sit next to him because he was always staring at me.

Scott Benner 27:24
He thought this was kind of late to you, not concentrating in school, right? Yeah, or

Jaime 27:28
just like something else I really didn't need in my life at the time, you know, I was like, Listen, I'm trying to just be by myself here. Leave me alone and stop staring at me like that. I ended up having shoulder surgery and making up my lab, because my lab was on the day of my surgery, and I went to a lab on another day, and it happened to be his lab. We were doing anatomy of the skull that week, and I had seen in class that His arm was, his left arm was really messed up, like really messed up, and he had a huge scar along part of his hairline, and just the way he looked, with the tattoos and the side burns and the, you know, at the time, the Hot Rod shirts and stuff, I figured he had a motorcycle accident or something, and he was talking to the lab instructor. He's got this plastic skull. Huge piece of it is missing, and he's talking to the teacher about it, and I can kind of overhear part of the conversation and her turning it over in her hands and saying, and this is yours.

Unknown Speaker 28:31
And I thought I didn't

Jaime 28:33
even know somebody could live without that much of their skull, right? Literally, like half of it is missing, the entire right half. And so of course, he comes and sits down right next to me, which is what I was trying to avoid. But at that point, I was so curious that I just had to ask. And the first thing, the first verbal exchange between us, was me just turning to him and saying, I'm sorry if I'm being rude, but what the hell did you do to yourself? And

Scott Benner 28:59
he said, Oh, thank God, I finally got this girl to talk to me. Right? Probably, probably did. He would have led with that if he knew it was going to work that fast, right? Chicks dig

Jaime 29:10
scars, it's true, especially chicks who are going to be nurses and are fascinated by orthopedics. So he told me his story. He was a Marine. He did a tour in Iraq in 2005 and was almost to the end of his six month tour when he got thrown out the top of the Humvee. He was the turret gunner and landed very hard, yeah, and shattered his left elbow and fractured the right half of his skull so badly that it couldn't be saved. So he was immediately taken to Balad Air Base, where he was stabilized, I believe, by Air Force physicians, thanks to them and all of those Navy corpsmen who threw them on the hood of the Humvee and drove him right to a helicopter pad. They did an emergency. The decompression right there at blood. They didn't even take him to launch tool to stabilize him, because it was too emergent. They removed almost half of the right side of his skull because the brain swelling was so rapid, and then they flew him straight to Bethesda, Maryland, where they kept him in a medically induced coma for about two to three weeks, and then slowly brought him out of it. During that time, he had surgery to try to fix his left arm. His left arm is basically a limb salvage. He had median nerve severely damaged, and ulnar nerve pretty much severed, so he only has maybe 50% of the function in that hand, and that's all gross, no fine motor function at all. And his elbow is just kind of a solid chunk of bone, so it'll move a couple of inches, but it kind of just hangs there. He's missing all the muscle in the back of his arm, you know. And then there's that remarkable half his skull is missing. And fast forward four years, and this guy is sitting in an anatomy and physiology class getting ready to go to nursing school. Wow, fascinating. And I'm thinking, holy, and I thought I was a survivor, yeah, you know, because prior to that, I had, I've seen some shit. Well,

Scott Benner 31:16
you know, you've a couple of times alluded to having been through some traumatic things, but you haven't said what they are yet. I

Jaime 31:22
will get to that, because that all affects my diabetes care too. Of course, I'm thinking, how are you dysfunctional, you know, and the reality of it is, and any doctor who's ever seen him will tell you he's not supposed to be alive. Yeah, they told his mother he would probably never speak in complete sentences.

Scott Benner 31:44
Oh, geez. What did they do to make up for the part of the skull that he lost? He

Jaime 31:50
has a beautifully engineered plastic plate.

Scott Benner 31:54
Wow. They 3d printed him a skull. Yeah,

Jaime 31:58
they did. So that skull that he had when we first met, that he was showing to our anatomy teacher was a 3d print out of his skull. They did us. He was one of the first people to get a plate of this, a custom made plate of that type. Yeah, it was a military thing. And his brain surgeon a couple years ago, saved that plate and put it back because he said we could never give him one that nice. That's, that's definitely a military grade thing, gotcha. They did a series of CT scans, I think he said it was probably over 100 different scans, different angles, you know, basically to be able to build that 3d model of his skull on a computer. And this was the early 2000s that was some huge technology at that time, right, and were able to basically print out his skull in 3d and then make a plate that fit his craniectomy as closely as they possibly could. So there are some cosmetic issues like, you know, around his cheek bone. There's kind of an over build of bone. He didn't have a plate there until about nine months post injury, because they had to let all the swelling go down. And then, because the military is the military, it got sent to Bethesda, thinking he was going to have the surgery done there to put it in. But by then, he was already in California at the new brain treatment center at the Palo Alto VA, and then they sent him back to camp Pendleton, and they couldn't find his plate. So he should have had the surgery maybe five or six months after his injury, but it was nine months because they had to find the plate, and it was on a dusty shelf somewhere in Bethesda. And then they sent it to California. I bet you,

Scott Benner 33:39
while that was all happening. He never thought this is going to get

Jaime 33:41
me late eventually. No, he probably did not think that at

Scott Benner 33:45
all. But there we are. That's crazy, yeah, insane like and that did it drew you to him. Is so interesting. How long ago was that?

Jaime 33:54
That was in June of 2010 so we have now been together almost 14 years. I told him we could study together, but it was not a date. I was very insistent about this, Jamie, okay? And I'm sure he thought I was hilarious. He finally, I think a month later, I finally was like, You know what? I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. So I left a pretty mentally abusive marriage in 2007 I'm sorry. And so for me, it was always like, He's too nice. He's too nice. This is love bombing. He's too nice, because I know about this now. And so I just hung back and waited for the other shoe to drop. Oh, that makes more sense. Okay,

Scott Benner 34:39
I get you. Yeah, you know, he

Jaime 34:41
was like, walk straight out of the 1950s holding doors, and it's 1030 I better get you home. And I'm like, Who the hell is this guy? What's wrong with you? So nice. Lull

Scott Benner 34:51
you into a feeling of complete comfort, and then, you know, take you out in the woods or something like that. Yeah, or

Jaime 34:58
just be terrible. Turn out. Be a complete a hole, like my ex husband, you know? And so I just kind of hung back and waited, and then I think I finally reached a point where I was like, I might be stupid if I don't go out with this guy.

Scott Benner 35:13
Seems like it's very consistent for such a long time. Yeah, yeah.

Jaime 35:17
So, you know, almost 14 years later, here we are, and he's still just an absolute sweetheart. Hey,

Scott Benner 35:25
does his tumor have anything to do with his injury?

Jaime 35:29
I don't think it has anything to do with his injury, but I do. I do firmly believe that it has something to do with things he was exposed to while he was overseas. Gotcha? Um, it's, it's actually very common. Oh, oh, I see, for people who were exposed to jet fuel and burn pits and god knows what else over there to have brain tumors. I he's not. He is not the only one I see. He's just lucky that it wasn't glioblastoma, which happens, that's what they see a lot of.

Scott Benner 35:57
I think we might call this episode other shoe, by the way, okay, I think that sounds good. I mean, something might happen,

Jaime 36:03
and there are a lot of other shoes. It's not just about relationships, it's about all these traumas that, you know, I've mentioned. So there was that, and like, relationship wise, we've had a wonderful life together, you know, we we both got through nursing school, okay? You know, he started having partial seizures and had a couple of grand mals several months after his injury. Okay, so, you know, there's a lot of scar tissue in his brain. He has a lot of what's called encephalo Malaysia, which is brain tissue that has kind of just shrunk back and atrophied in the right half of his brain. You know, it's pretty obvious on on scans that, you know, there's some deficit there, but it never really caused him any more than just like some memory stuff now and then, which I think all of us have. So it wasn't really a whole lot different than than you and me when it came down to it, and he didn't have any frontal lobe damage or anything. So it didn't really affect, you know, like, violent or super impulsive, or, you know, anything like that. And there was a point I want to say. When it was, it was around 2015 or 2016 our daughter was born in December of 2014 so, yeah, this would have been 2016 because she was about to that his seizure started to change. He was on seizure medication, and always had been. And so his seizures were never more than what's called simple partial where he would just kind of, you know, smack his lips a little bit, but he would be conscious the whole time and even able to respond to you, you know, probably could have even driven, you know, because he knew what was happening and didn't have any memory loss or anything. And he went from that to complex partial, which is more he's really checking out, and then for a few minutes afterward, he doesn't remember the seizure. He is completely checked out while it's happening. And I watched this happen over a period of about six weeks, and I was like, something's going on. This is different. This isn't the same as it's always been. And it's really sudden. What

Scott Benner 38:16
was the frequency of them before the change? Oh, gosh,

Jaime 38:20
not very often, once every few months. And they were always like in the evening, you know. So he was allowed to drive, and he did fine, you know. There were never any issues. And then one day during that six week period, he was on his way home from work, and he hit two parked cars and had no memory of it, and I hear the doorbell ring, and I'm thinking, God, he's really late from work, and there's four cops in my driveway telling me that he left the scene of an accident and he could possibly be arrested. And I'm like, Oh, my God, I think I know what happened. The officer who came to the door was a DUI officer. They called him because they thought my husband was impaired. He's been sober since he was 24 years old. He's not impaired. And he said, Well, that's obvious to me, so I'm trying to understand what happened here and why he can't remember this. And I said, you know, I explained what happened. I said he had a seizure. And he said, like, you know, a grand mal seizure. And I said, No, he probably had a complex partial seizure. There are about six or seven different kinds of seizures you can have, but he has been having more of them, and they've mostly been at night, you know, and we're waiting to see his neurologist at the VA. He's 100% service connected disability, so all of his care is through the VA, especially for the brain injury. He did not get arrested.

Scott Benner 39:43
Yeah, it sounds like the cop was on the right track right away.

Jaime 39:46
He was the other one. That was wisdom, wasn't but he's inconsequential. He didn't even want to come to the door and talk to me, you know, and I have a sister who's a cop and a brother who's a retired law enforcement. Uh, you know. So for me to be like, Dude, you're part of the problem, you don't say that either. Yeah, we did see his neurologist, and at the time, nursing was like a second career for me. So I didn't graduate from nursing school until I was 33 I had my daughter when I was 35 and I stayed home with her and finished my bachelor's in nursing before I went back to work in 2018 so at this time, I was still a fairly new nurse, and I wasn't real good at arguing with people, yet really good at that now, like, try me now and you'll be sorry you ever said no to me. But back then, you know, she explained to us that he does have a severe brain injury, and that the tissue will atrophy over time, and that the seizures and other issues are likely to get worse because he's also at a pretty high risk for dementia. And I said that being said, if we're talking about how his brain is going to change physically over time. At that point, we had been together seven years, and he had never had a brain MRI. I remember him having a CT scan because he went to the emergency room one day because he didn't feel right. But that's it, yeah, and I thought this guy has a brain injury of such magnitude that people who call us on the phone from the VA who have read his file and never met him before asked to speak to his caregiver.

Unknown Speaker 41:31
Oh, how about that?

Jaime 41:32
And he's not having regular MRIs,

Scott Benner 41:36
maybe we should pay closer attention. Yeah. So

Jaime 41:40
don't you think, with the likelihood of these changes happening, that he should be having an MRI once a year to monitor this? And she said, No, I don't think we need to do that right now. We'll just switch up his meds a little bit and see where we're at in six months.

Scott Benner 41:55
Thank you. Great help.

Jaime 41:58
And anybody out there listening who deals with the VA knows that that means I don't feel like doing this, so we're not going to do it. And, oh well, it's

Scott Benner 42:09
never happening, just so you know,

Jaime 42:10
and it's never going to happen. Yeah, right. So if I had been the nurse then that I am now, I would have said, how about I did all my internships here, and I know your system, and I know how easy it is to check a box and order that test. So how about nobody's leaving this room until it happens, because he's missing half his skull for your freedom or whatever, yeah, and he's 100% service connected. So how about we just do that? But I didn't, because I stupidly thought, well, we'll come back in six months, and if this is still an issue, then we need to do something. I see, and I really wish that I had pushed for it harder, because he had the tumor. Then,

Scott Benner 42:47
okay, yeah, how long was that before you actually found out about the tumor?

Jaime 42:52
We found out about the tumor in 2021 so it was four years, four or five years

Scott Benner 42:58
you carry guilt about that.

Jaime 43:00
Me, you know, but his doctor should, yeah,

Scott Benner 43:03
no, for sure. I just heard you say, I wish I would have pushed harder. And I was just wondering how you

Jaime 43:07
felt. Oh, I mean, I wish I had, I regret that, but it's not my responsibility to order that test. No, of course not. As a neurologist, you would think that they would have wanted to see that, but I guess not. I'm a little sore with the VA in general, a because of this and B, because that type of negligence also killed my father,

Scott Benner 43:29
yeah, so it hits harder.

Jaime 43:31
But how did you it'll be two it'll be two years tomorrow. So that's kind of fresh. Yeah, we he did pretty well with the med changes, and he was even able to go back to driving for a while, and things went really well for a long time. And so he never got an MRI. And then in 2020 right after I got furloughed from my job, he had a grand mal seizure on our bathroom floor when I hadn't seen one of those in seven years. And he went into Status Epilepticus, which is a seizure that doesn't stop, and if it doesn't stop, you will die. And I thought he was going to die right there on our bathroom floor. Oh gosh, part of my job is airway management, so I was able to do that while I called 911 our five year old daughter was out on the couch while this was going on in the bathroom, and I had to call 911 i i waited, you know, not too long, but, you know, because I knew how to handle it, I didn't call 911 right away, because when it stops, it stops, and you really don't need that. But it went on, and then I thought it was stopping, and then it would just cycle right back in again. And at the time that I saw it start to happen, I was like, Okay, it's over now, it's over now, it's over now. And he started kind of going postictal, and then it started again. And I thought I'm calling 911, so it took an ungodly amount of benzodiazepine. Seen to stop that seizure more than I've ever seen a patient get in one sitting, certainly more than they ever get for anesthesia, I'm a post anesthesia nurse, and a CT scan was done at the hospital to make sure that he didn't have a brain bleed, but there was no MRI. And I'm like people, they'll get away with the cheapest thing first. That's just how medicine works. But I knew something was wrong at that point, and there was a different neurologist assigned to him at the VA at that point. So we saw him, and he didn't like that that had happened. And you know, he wanted to do some med changes too. But again, nobody talked about an MRI or anything, but we were in close touch with him, and he seemed to be much more concerned about my husband than the previous neurologist had been, and so over the next few months, he ended up having another grand mal seizure. Three months later, we tried a different medication, and that was an absolute nightmare. He started going into these like, two hour long Alzheimer's episodes, like, literally, like somebody with severe Alzheimer's disease had no idea where he was, what he was doing. He started throwing things at us, like, just, I don't know what he was seeing. He doesn't have any memory of it, you know? And I really think that that's the brain tumor, okay, that was causing this. But we obviously took him off the medication immediately, because this started happening within days, and he went right back on the Keppra, you know, we continued to just keep in touch with the doctor, and he had told us at that point. He said, I am a general neurologist. I am not a seizure specialist, and I need you to see somebody who can help you the way you need to be helped. Hallelujah, finally, somebody who thinks that he needs more than he's getting, and he said, we're going to be getting one after the new year. There is a doctor who's coming here from North Carolina, from a university where they do a lot of of seizure and brain stimulator research, and she's going to come see patients here once a week, and I want to get you in with her as soon as possible. And he said, if things keep trending downward, then I'm going to get community care to let you to see her at the University of New Mexico. But if we can hold off until she's here at the VA it will be better. So things got better. Settled down. He was seizure free for six months. He was driving January of 2021, out of the blue, has a seizure while he's driving with our daughter in the back seat, and totaled our Subaru. And at that point, I said, you're never driving again. We're done now. And he said the same thing because he was so overwrought by what could have happened. Luckily, he just clipped a truck. It totaled our Subaru, but it did its job. It kept everybody safe. No one else was hurt, yeah, and that's a sensitive spot for me, because one of my traumas is being hit by a drunk driver on the interstate and losing one of my best friends, and so I never want anybody close to me to be the cause of something like that. You know,

Scott Benner 48:10
you were hit as a younger person, and you lost a friend in that accident. Were you driving? Oh, geez, yeah. Well, yeah, get a maneuver like gift card or something,

Jaime 48:21
right? Yeah, yeah, no, he, he hasn't. He doesn't drive anymore. He still doesn't. I don't think at this point he may ever be able to drive again. He stopped driving, and we called the doctor, and the doctor said the epileptologist starts seeing patients at the VA in two weeks. Here's her nurse's number, call yesterday and get an appointment. So he was one of the first patients to see her, and she was just this absolutely wonderful Chinese lady who had gone through cancer herself, and she had a heavy accent. So it made it even funnier when she got angry because she said, When was your last brain MRI, and I said, we've been together 11 years, and he's never had one, right? And she got so upset, I would imagine she she almost started yelling. She said, What do you mean? You've never had a brain MRI, why not? And I said, I've been asking the same question for 11 years, and no one has been able to tell me why they won't just order one. And she said, Well, you're having one now. And she ordered an MRI. He had one about a week later. And we came back for a follow up visit, and she said, There's something concerning here. She said, you have this nine centimeter something in your right frontal lobe. And the radiologist in the report had said, you know, it could be a tumor. It could be scar tissue build up, or what's called gliosis. Gliomas are brain cells. I thought

Scott Benner 49:54
that was something you got when you watch Glee too much. I was like, Oh, right.

Jaime 49:59
So GL. This is like a thick scarring of brain tissue and brain cells, and it tends to form lumps in the brain, and it can act like a brain tumor. It can cause seizures and stuff, but usually, if they're able to resect it, you go back to normal. And she said, I really think that it's probably just scar tissue, but we need to know, so we need to do a special type of MRI with a special metabolite that will tell us if this is tumor tissue or not. And she said, we have to coordinate that with the university, because they don't have the capability of doing it here at the VA. So we need to get you in with community care and start, you know, and she wanted him to stay on an epilepsy monitoring unit. She said, We need to figure out where your seizures are coming from in your brain, so that you know if we can do a resection surgery of some of this scar tissue and stop this from happening, or implant a stimulator that will stop the seizures before they start, you know, and this is what we were on track for. So he did go and stay on the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit. They did get the information they needed, and this was in July. So it took a long time he had the first MRI in March of 2021, and it took until July for the VA to coordinate with the university and get that MRI set up correctly, which is absolutely ridiculous, but we were also in the middle of a pandemic, and things were backed up to kingdom come, as it was. So he had this MRI. We went for an appointment to follow up on the results from his stay on the unit, as well as the MRI, and she said, I thought we were going to be having a different conversation today, but I'm very sorry to have to tell you that this is a tumor that's terrible. Two days later, boy, you say brain tumor, and then they move fast. That gets people moving, does it finally? And I feel like maybe they kind of knew it was their fault too, right? So two days later, we were at the university, and all his care was switched to the University of New Mexico, and we were sitting in an office with a neurosurgeon from Monday to Wednesday, and he spent an hour and a half with us. It was a team of two pediatric neurosurgeons, and he spent an hour and a half with us talking about the biopsy that was going to happen very soon. And then as soon as the pathology came back, probably a tumor resection. And he said that the one thing that made us lucky is that it was in his right frontal lobe. He said, we call that the neurosurgeons gift from God, because you can take the entire thing out with virtually no permanent effect on the patient, because the left frontal lobe will take over. He said, if it was in the left that's that we'd be having a very different conversation.

Scott Benner 52:46
That's amazing, isn't it, that the brain can do that? Yeah, well, so,

Jaime 52:50
but the left frontal lobe is so functional compared to the right,

Scott Benner 52:55
well, then that's, that's what you focus on. Then right,

Jaime 52:57
the tumor pretty much took up his entire right frontal lobe a little bit in the right temporal lobe. By the time they found it, it was nine centimeters, and it had grown into the corpus callosum in the middle of his brain, which they cannot touch. They will disconnect the two halves of your brain and destroy you. And so that small part of the tumor was left. He had a biopsy just a couple weeks later, I think we we were supposed to go visit my family in New Jersey for the first time in 25 years. And we did. They told us to go ahead and do that, because stuff was going to get hard and we needed to go have a good vacation. So we did. My mother is from from New Jersey, and my I still have family there. We came back, he had his biopsy a few days after we came back, and he had a grade two, which is a low grade or benign grade one and two are usually considered benign oligodendroglioma, so that type of tumor affects the oligodendrites, which are the cells that insulate your neurons and prevent unwanted electrical activity in the brain. So one of the most common signs of an oligodendroglioma is seizures. So that's why his seizures had gotten so much worse and so uncontrollable I see. So he had a resection in October of that year, and I was still maintaining my weight loss pretty well, and that was after I tried ozempic and really liked it. So this is all kind of happening on the same timeline. We had both been working really hard to lose weight since the beginning of of 2021, and we were in a good place at that point. And I'm really glad he was so physically healthy when all this happened, and that he had managed to lose, you know, I think about 100 pounds at that point, since we had gotten married. What

Scott Benner 54:44
did he do for that? Well, he

Jaime 54:47
just ate right and exercise. Scott,

Scott Benner 54:51
well, it works for some people, and it usually

Jaime 54:54
works for men better than women. Yeah, that all went very well. And then he started Radio. In December, and he weathered radiation really well. He had 28 treatments between mid December and the end of January of 2022 and eight days after he finished radiation, my father died very sudden, suddenly,

Scott Benner 55:15
sorry, oh, Jamie, I'm sorry. No, I've heard you almost cry four times so far today. So it's fine. Out of the blue.

That really sucked, though, yeah, oh, I bet he

Jaime 55:27
didn't have high cholesterol. He died of a massive heart attack because he had a blood clot in one of his cardiac arteries. As it turned out, we had no idea how to congenital malformation that made his left circumflex artery, his primary circulation where it's usually your right cardiac artery. Somehow, we don't even really know why, a huge blood clot formed in that artery, and he lost the entire bottom half of his heart, and it was pretty bad. And when they reperfused and got the clot out, and his blood pressure rose, it blew out his ventricular septum, and there was just no surviving. So yeah, it's hard being a medical professional, and at the time my older sister had my older sister also worked in surgery and did open hearts for about 13 years, and my husband's aunt is a retired cardiothoracic surgeon, and so it's tough to know things sometimes, because when this started happening, you have just an overwhelming feeling that you're about to be hit by a train, because you know too much, and we didn't even know how bad It was. And once we saw the medical records, there was just no way that he was going to survive that unless his doctor at the VA, a month before, had listened to him about the back and shoulder and arm pain that he was having and sent him for a cardiac workup. So I have a bone to pick with the VA. I imagine, at any rate, that was hard. My parents met here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and they were living at the time in El Paso Texas. My mother is still there. My older sister's husband had passed away when I was pregnant with my daughter, and they have a plot at the cemetery near my house, and my parents bought the plot next to theirs, and had made pre made all of their funeral arrangements. And so they had expected to be living with us up here when they died, and I had to figure out in 24 hours how to transport a body over state lines. And I basically had, you know, I took charge of the funeral because I live here, and I could plan the mass and deal with the funeral home and everything. So that's a lot of stress when your husband just finished radiation for a brain tumor, and I started binge eating to cope with my grief and stress. Over the course of 2022 I put back on even more weight than I had lost, and by the end of the year, I was completely miserable with myself, you know. And everybody kept saying, give yourself grace. Look at the year you've had. But that's just one more disappointment, you know, in a whole string of them. So about two weeks after the funeral, my husband started chemo. He did pretty well with it at first, but it started affecting his bone marrow pretty badly, and we ended up having to stop at four out of six cycles, because he was going to end up needing a bone marrow transplant if we didn't.

Scott Benner 58:29
Yeah, did he have all that bone pain too? Afterwards?

Jaime 58:32
They did have to put him on some stimulators, but he did pretty well. This guy is Chuck Norris, I'm telling you. Sounds like it. He beats his way through life. I mean, there is no other explanation for how he could a recover from a brain injury of that magnitude the way he did, and become a successful registered nurse. Passes NCLEX the first time he took it. I mean, normal people can't do that. And, you know, and then do this too, like he's freaking amazing. Yeah, I married Chuck Norris. There's just, you know, so, you know, it's just, there was a lot going on, and that was in 20 March of 2022, that my daughter, who was seven at the time, finally convinced me to sign her up for Irish dancing lessons. And I was just in the frame of mind. I was in that YOLO frame of mind because my father had just died, my husband had, you know, a 12 to 15 year prognosis. And it was like, You know what? Sure, let's do it. And while we're at it, let's put the down payment on this educational trip to Canada to see the northern lights that we've been wanting to do for four or five years now too. So we did both, yeah, because you'll be done with cancer treatment by

Scott Benner 59:45
then, Jamie, that's the thing, right? Like you, everyone plans for a really long life, and then suddenly, when you have that feeling of finite, and then your father passes, so it really kind of, yeah, digs it in, you start thinking, well, let's, like, live right now. Yeah. That

Jaime 1:00:00
was like, the fifth time, because, you know, I went into asystole twice when I was in DKA At age 11.

Scott Benner 1:00:06
Yeah. No, you've had plenty of chances to come to Jesus, a heavy

Jaime 1:00:10
thing to be faced with at 11. I don't think I really completely understood that until I was, like, in my 20s, yeah, but it happened I momentarily died. And then, you know, the I mentioned the drunk driver, I was hit on St Patrick's Day in 2002 Yeah, I was driving my friend and his brother home to Deming, New Mexico, which was about 75 miles away from El Paso, where I was living at the time, and my ex husband and I were together at that time. We were all in the vehicle together, and a drunk driver hit me, and we rolled six times off the interstate.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:44
And no,

Scott Benner 1:00:45
yeah, my over in a car once, but I didn't roll.

Jaime 1:00:48
Yeah, I was conscious the entire time, and that's not something you want to remember very well, but I do yeah. So you know, that was the first time I had to rebuild my life. I had just turned 23 and I lost my medical insurance and my endocrinology care and diabetes was real hard for a few years after,

Scott Benner 1:01:07
yeah, yeah, no kidding. I want to ask you about that a little bit, but I want to share something with you that you don't know happened while we've been talking. Okay, so you kind of offhandedly brought up this thing at Tulane University about, I can never say it right? Ears. Dan los, how do you say? Yeah, errors, Dan Ehlers,

Jaime 1:01:25
Dan los, Dan

Scott Benner 1:01:27
los syndrome, okay,

Jaime 1:01:28
eds, it's okay,

Scott Benner 1:01:30
okay. I thought that meant erectile dysfunction, so I wasn't sure. I don't

Jaime 1:01:34
know that's just Ed, you have to add the x on the end, otherwise, something different.

Scott Benner 1:01:39
So Ed, right? And I googled it because, and I've said this in the podcast a couple of times, but it's just so interesting how you can, kind of like, start putting puzzle pieces together. I saw some people on Reddit one time saying that their EDS symptoms were getting much better on GLP medications. And it just stuck with me, like, I was like, That's interesting, like,

Jaime 1:01:59
I have not seen now, I'm gonna have to do some research well,

Scott Benner 1:02:02
and I was gonna ask you about it, but I just, I never got around to asking. Plus, you're, you're a dedicated storyteller, so I don't want to cut you off, right? So I am. So I Google that, and as I my eyes run over it, I see at the bottom, oh, how do you how are they looking at treating this? And that starts talking about what they call the motherf gene, the mth fr gene, right? Which means you can't process folate correctly. And I was like, oh. And then, you know the article, like, I'm again, I'm just skimming. The good news is treatment already exists methylated folate. And I was like, I was looking into methylated vitamins for my kids recently, that's interesting, right? So I google one more time, because you said something about digestive issues, and I have some digestive issues, and my son does. And so I just Googled EDS and stomach issues, and it got me to a gastroparesis,

Jaime 1:02:58
is a common diagnosis with Ehlers Danlos. I myself do not have Ehlers Danlos. At least I don't have a diagnosis with it. And I don't, yeah,

Scott Benner 1:03:08
you just said you're a little extra stretchy, yeah. And so I'm a little stretchy,

Jaime 1:03:12
and it causes me some problems, but the people I know with Ehlers Danlos have a lot more problems.

Scott Benner 1:03:16
No, no, yeah. And I'm not saying you have it. I'm saying this to got my mind moving so I found an EDS support Web page in the UK about gastrointestinal problems and EDS and I'm like And by the way, constipation, heartburn and reflux. I have reflux delayed gastric emptying or dumping, right? And my digestion has been much better since I've been on the GLP medication. Now my doctor describes it's because of the slowing down of Hold on. Let me find this email. I'm gonna roll this all together for you. You're gonna be pretty impressed what I was doing while you were talking, hold on, a second, and I was listening to you, which is pretty impressive too.

Jaime 1:03:59
But this is how I operate, because I have ADHD, so I totally understand this. I understand what you're doing right now.

Scott Benner 1:04:06
Yeah, the most likely reason this is for my doctor, for the urge to have a bowel movement immediately after eating is due to something called gastro Oli, the gastrolic reflex, because the GLP drug is decreasing how quickly your food moves through the intestines, the reflex has no chance to have an effect while you take a GLP medication. So why does my digestion seem to get better on a GLP she says this. So now I'm like, I'm texting these links to Jenny, because Jenny and I have been talking about methylated vitamins, like privately and stuff like that. And I was like, Hey, look at this thing here, about the EDS the Tulane study. And she's like, well, look at that. And then we started talking. Then I sent her the other things, and she's like, I have a lot of thoughts about digestive conditions relative to this. And I was like, All right, so I know that means we'll talk about

Jaime 1:04:55
it later. Sweet, we're gonna get an episode out of this. I know you're definitely getting an episode out. This

Scott Benner 1:05:00
also, I ordered the methylated vitamins and nobody and I, and I just sat on them. So I am gonna, like, go downstairs after this, and I'm gonna look at my son and go, hey, guess what? You're taking these for two months, right? I'm

Jaime 1:05:12
gonna start taking methylated folate, like, tomorrow. I

Scott Benner 1:05:15
mean, I was like, get the hell out of here. Now you can get a genetic test for it, but it's not a vitamin that's dangerous to you, so I figured, take it right. See what happens.

Jaime 1:05:24
Folate is good for you. You should have enough folate in your diet, right? And most people don't. So anyway, not a bad thing. All

Scott Benner 1:05:31
that is coming because of a couple of things you said. And I really appreciate that,

Jaime 1:05:36
just because I mentioned something, yeah, and my brain was like, we've been thinking about the kind of puzzle pieces that I started putting together. And it's funny, because I, like I said, I work in orthopedic surgery, so I know all the best doctors, of course, because I work with them. And our group is a wonderful Orthopedic Group, and I have this hand surgeon who's just a really awesome person. You know, he's done a few surgeries on me because I've had some ongoing issues with my hands over the last few years, and, you know, ruptured a ligament because of, probably because of hypermobility. And one time, I jokingly sent him a cartoon, and I said, you should start conversations with your new patients this way. And it was like, you know how to start, start a conversation with someone new by asking an open ended question, and the one duck is asking the other duck What the hell is wrong with you. And so that became this huge thing. I would come to see him at the clinic, and he'd say, What the hell is wrong with you, what the hell is wrong with you today. And every time I come see him, what the hell is wrong with you now. And so when I started putting all these crazy puzzle pieces together about the ADHD and the hypermobility and the diabetes and the how it all lumps together, and I came to him and I said, Dr Steve, I think I finally figured out what the hell is wrong with me. Yeah, and it's amazing, like just all of a sudden, things just start, click, click, click, click, click, and it's like dominoes. And here we are. Like so many things are a direct result of these one or two things that I've had my whole life and just really had no idea how much they were affecting me. Yeah. Well,

Scott Benner 1:07:14
hey, listen, listen to this within the human body. Methylation plays a role in DNA expression, embryo development, cellular energy production, neurotransmitter synthesis, hormone production and metabolism, inflammation and immune response. Conversions of the amino acid called homeosistine into other amino acids called I don't know. This helps keep cholesterol levels balanced and reduce the risk for cardiovascular problems. It helps with conversion of import nutrients from one's diet into vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, which, by the way, I have trouble absorbing some nutrients. I

Jaime 1:07:50
do too. I don't absorb vitamin D. I have to go out in the sun either. Do a lot of us, I know, and I loved that episode where Jenny was talking about that. I was like, Thank God someone's talking about this because they years ago, my endocrinologist thought I had celiac disease because I had hyper hypovitaminosis D for like, 10 years. I think maybe 2020, 2021, was the first time my vitamin D levels were finally at an acceptable level, okay, because I had to start taking it. I take sublingual vitamin d3 that is in sunflower oil. Okay, so because it's a fat soluble vitamin, and it was actually my hand doctor who told me that he said, take it with fat. If you have a problem absorbing it, it's likely that you may have an easier time absorbing it if you take it with a fatty meal or with something fatty when you take it. And so I started doing that, and then, lo and behold, my vitamin D level was high enough. I also started spending a ton of time outside, riding a bike and hiking. And, you know, I enjoy those things anyway, but we were in like, hyper drive during the pandemic, because there was nothing else to do, right, right?

Scott Benner 1:09:02
Listen, this methylation thing is going to, like, fall into the category of bro science for some people, but the Tulane study and then the EDS support talking about it made me feel like I'm just going to leap over the whole bro science thing here and keep going, like, looking into this, because well,

Jaime 1:09:18
and it's not, I mean, this is how big things get started, and this is how we find things out, you know. And I really feel like GLP ones. There are a lot of off label uses for GLP ones. They can also reverse liver damage. You're

Scott Benner 1:09:34
seeing people getting pregnant all over the place, on them too. They haven't been able to get pregnant their whole lives. So, yeah, there's, I mean, hormonal stuff.

Jaime 1:09:42
I have, I know somebody who struggled with infertility and accidentally got pregnant twice on a GLP, one accidentally

Scott Benner 1:09:50
twice. That's nice. There's the other shoe dropping when they took their pants. Just,

Jaime 1:09:54
you know, really unplanned, I guess I should say, not accidentally. It's not an. Accident. You didn't fall.

Scott Benner 1:10:01
You stepped on my best joke of this whole conversation. I'm sorry. I'm gonna do it one more time. There's the other shoe dropping when they took their pants off, there you go. That's what I got.

Jaime 1:10:11
Boom, and it hit the floor. Okay,

Scott Benner 1:10:13
thank you. I was like, damn it. Now, ADHD is messing up my humor.

Jaime 1:10:18
I'm sorry. Actually, it's I have a knack for that. It's my scientific speciality, ruining the joke, because I can be so literal sometimes. ADHD, you know, it's a form of neuro divergence and normal, weird sometimes. Well,

Scott Benner 1:10:35
yeah, hey, by the way, don't start Googling methylation and bipolar.

So, no, yeah, I

Jaime 1:10:41
don't need to go down that rabbit hole. Yeah. So,

Scott Benner 1:10:43
like, there's, I'm telling you, there's something going on. I'm gonna tell you a secret. I bought the vitamins and I sent them to Jenny too. I was like, here, you take these

Jaime 1:10:51
two. Okay, cool. I probably appreciate not having to do that herself. I

Scott Benner 1:10:56
was like, give it a shot. We'll talk about on the podcast. And she's like, all right, but, but, Jamie, I'm so sorry. Like, I have to button up to get on another call soon. So I want to, like, make sure we hit all the points that you meant to. And at some point in this conversation, I didn't think it was right to stop you from talking about your husband, because it felt very therapeutic for you, but I would,

Jaime 1:11:15
it's just it's been a big stressor in my life, too, and all of these things don't really help control your diabetes very well, yeah, and so that's kind of where all of that segues into, is that, you know, dealing with multiple situations like this in your lifetime. You know, a stressful divorce from a not great person, losing my medical insurance and therefore good diabetes care, when you know, a drunk driver hit me through no fault of my own, and I lost my job anyway, because I worked in an at will state, you know, my a, 1c probably those first few years after that car wreck, I floated. And I'm still so thankful for this person, and I wish I remembered their name. I floated on free insulin pump supplies that a Medtronic rep was sending me because I could not afford them, and I had been on an insulin pump since 1995 and I didn't know what to do without one very nice Medtronic. Yeah, you know, and they do have all I feel like most of the pump companies have a program like that where people can donate supplies that they no longer use, and I have sent them back supplies when I switch to something else or whatever, because I know full well how helpful that was for me, you know. But my a 1c was like between 10 and 13 for those years, and then when I finished graduate school, I got a master's in public health in 2006 and I moved back up here to the Albuquerque area, was when I started seeing, and I do feel the need to mention this person's name, Dr Robert Ferraro. He runs a diabetes program up in Artesia now that deals with multiple community communities. He left to Albuquerque to do that after, I think I had been with him about 12 years. At that point, best endocrinologist I ever had. He was like my dad. I used to call him my diabetes dad. You know, he got me through my pregnancy. He got my a 1c under control. He handed off his practice to a younger endocrinologist who was lovely to work with. And then my insurance quit working with her, and now I'm with a concierge provider, because that's just who is able to pay enough attention to me for the type of diabetic that I am, because I'm not a typical diabetic patient at all. My podiatrist still pokes my feet and is like, Are you sure you don't have any nerve damage after 33 years? Hey, listen,

Scott Benner 1:13:33
we use the concierge agenda, you know, for Arden and just

Jaime 1:13:38
became necessary. I worked with a nurse practitioner student at my surgery center who was doing clinicals with her, and suggested that maybe I would want to think about it if I could afford to do it. And, you know, make a payment plan. And I haven't been sorry. I actually know somebody in the group who has, you know, seen her as well. And, you know, I'm not sure how that relationship is working out. But for me, that's what I needed. She knew how to get my insurance to cover the GLP one. She basically diagnosed me as a type one slash type two because I have the insulin resistance of a type two. And type two runs in my family, so it's like a double edged sword there. And we know that's a thing. We're

Scott Benner 1:14:17
very lucky that our insurance actually we can pay the concierge and then turn it in, and we're, I think we get covered like 90% so it's really, actually very like, Oh, that's awesome. That's not common, yeah. And then the other thing is,

Jaime 1:14:32
I can deduct it from my taxes, though, has a medical expense. Well, I'll

Scott Benner 1:14:36
deduct the other 10% if I can. But the other thing I wanted to mention, and I because I've been bringing it up more in the podcast, I'm going to talk more about I'm going to talk more about it through 2024 and moving forward, because I'm starting to have more people on who are type one using GLP medications, off, you know, off label, and often having to pay cash for it. But the insulin reduction is insane, and so much so that we're doing it with Arden. She's. Been doing it for about two months. Now she's only shooting a quarter of a milligram of ozempic a week, and her insulin needs have dropped so far that I believe she's going to use like 12,000 or more, or over 12,000 fewer units of insulin in the next year. So

Jaime 1:15:16
yeah, and that was the one thing, even just on the point two, five dose that I noticed immediately was that my insulin sensitivity, yeah, it was crazy. It skyrocketed. So I was on ozempic From February, and I started out getting it at a compounding pharmacy. I had it prescribed to me for weight loss because that was getting it compounded was the only way I could afford it. But when I started seeing this new doctor, she said, No, we're going to get your insurance to cover this, and this is what we're going to do, and that's what we did. So I was on ozempic Till, I think, August of 2023, and then I was on one milligram a day. By then, doing pretty well with it. The one thing that it did to me was really increase my gag reflex, and I didn't love that, because when I would brush my teeth,

Scott Benner 1:16:00
yeah, you got to get past the first, the first, like, three or months or so, like, I might,

Jaime 1:16:05
this was like nine months in my food. Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:16:09
that's terrible, although a lot of those side effects people say are don't exist with manjarna, or does that bounce?

Jaime 1:16:15
Maybe they don't. For me, I know that it's not. I mean, no two medications, you know, nothing affects everybody exactly the same, and some people have really severe side effects with ozempic. And I never the worst thing was the gag reflex thing, and it made me really, really tired. And the the fatigue was pretty bad throughout, but I managed to learn how to time my dose so that the worst of it was over like I would take it at night after I was done with my Irish dance class on Tuesday night, so that I wouldn't just want to sleep before class and have no energy to get through class because that stuff is hard.

Scott Benner 1:16:52
I plateaued on ozempic, and I did too, and then I started the zeppbound, and I've only been using it now for maybe six or so weeks. But I plateaued on ozempic at like, 196 and I'm 188 now.

Jaime 1:17:06
So I think when I plateaued on ozempic, I was, I didn't have too much further to go. So I started at about 175 pounds, you know, which, if five foot three is the best, especially carrying it around the middle, like, you know, you know, I think mine and your concerns were the same as, like, I don't want to have a heart attack. I don't want to have clogged blood vessels and balloon angioplasties and all this other stuff. I think I got down, like, in like, the high 140s maybe, okay, and, and I still, you know, would have felt comfortable losing a little bit more weight, but also I my insulin sensitivity plateaued. And I said, I think we can do better than this. And she said, Do you want to try mountjaro? So we tried mountjaro. Literally within two days of my first dose. I had to decrease my insulin again. I've gone from, I think, close to 70 total units a day, which I know isn't actually that bad for somebody with insulin as good as good or bad, but, yeah, definitely, you know, I guess it really your insulin needs are so different and like, I don't know what my insulin needs are when I was a growing 13 year old, either, but now I think my maximum is like 26 units a day. That's crazy.

Scott Benner 1:18:19
Arden's insulin sensitivity went from one to 42 to one to 63 and her basal is point four lower an hour. And like and her insulin to carb ratio is is weaker. And like everything she just

Jaime 1:18:36
everything has changed. Everything for me has changed. And I I think that my my rate my like the you said, one to 42 one to 68 I think mine changed about the same way hers

Scott Benner 1:18:48
did insane, right? She's not even on what they would consider

Jaime 1:18:52
and then, like when I, when I go into manual mode, I'm on the the OmniPod now, because a tubed pump got harder to manage with when I became a competitive Irish dancer last year. I don't love the algorithm as much as I loved the tandem algorithm, but it is what it is. It's just it makes my life easier. And, you know, truth be told, I don't pay enough attention. I forget to bolus a lot and do stuff, and the tandem is just that. Tandem algorithm is just better at dealing with my mistakes. I gotcha. I understand. But when I go into manual mode, I had to knock my my basal rate from like 1.4 an hour all the way down to like point eight. Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:19:32
that's my expectation. Where do you hear episodes I have coming out with like, one? It's like a kid who's almost not using insulin at this point. They had type one for three years we're like, going off, yeah, it's amazing. I'm not saying it makes the diabetes go away, but it just changes the sensitivity so much, so it's crazy, and

Jaime 1:19:48
it helps a lot, and it probably helps you maybe not become insulin resistant, and it helps you with the digestive issues that I feel like nobody was talking to me about, a lot of comorbidities. The word I want to use, but they're not necessarily other diseases that come with type one, you know, and I've heard a lot more about that, like from the episodes with you and Jenny and, you know, learned a lot about it in the podcast group. And by the way, if my husband had never been diagnosed with a brain tumor, I probably never would have known about the juicebox podcast, really? How does that happen? Because my husband's nutritionist at the cancer center is a type one diabetic, and she actually was in an ad for the OmniPod, and she told me about it and told me to join. And so I did. And you know, maybe a year later, here I am. We were seeing her because he was so cachectic After he finished chemo that he's six foot four, and he got down to 177 pounds, and at the time, I was 174 so we went to see Kelly,

Scott Benner 1:20:52
Jamie. We have to find a place to stop this, because I've got to jump. But I could talk to you forever, and that's that's a good sign, absolutely. So I actually have some notes here. I'm going to talk more about the MFR gene on the podcast and Amazon. I'm going to bring up you're actually the second person to mention Amylin to me this week, so I'm going to find a way to jam that in there too, in the podcast. But overall, I'm just making it, you know, part of my mission to tell people about the GLP medications and the type ones, because you would have never looked at Arden and thought, you need to lose weight. But she's lost weight, and she looks healthier, right? And like just her insulin sensitivity is way down. Her spikes are fewer. They're not even as big. They weren't big to begin with, and they're lesser. Now, even if she really screws up and her blood sugar goes to 200 it's back down in like, 45 minutes, and that's the algorithm handling it, not her. A lot of positive I'm seeing with this. I've lost almost 50 pounds. My wife has lost, God, I don't even I've lost 40 at this point. Yeah, my wife's lost a lot of weight. She looks like a different person. Yeah,

Jaime 1:21:55
I think where was I hiding that? Yeah, I know it was. It was in my belly. Case you're wondering, because I never really felt like I looked as heavy as I was, but I wasn't. I wasn't happy with how I looked, but more importantly, I wasn't happy with how I felt. Oh,

Scott Benner 1:22:08
Jamie, besides the felt and the healthy part, what I've learned about your expectation about what you actually look like, I've learned so much about that this year because I had an incorrect vision of myself every step of the way.

Jaime 1:22:23
I think I always have to. And, you know, it's just one of those things. And I, you know, it's especially common, unfortunately, with women, but I think it is more common with men than we realize, too.

Scott Benner 1:22:34
Yeah, oh, hell, I thought I was fine, and I lost the first 20 pounds. Was like, I don't even look like I lost weight. Like, what am I taught? And it's not like body dysmorphia. I was If I had body dysmorphia, it was before, when I was looking at myself fat and going, I'm fine. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. So I

Jaime 1:22:49
do have a little bit of body dysmorphia. So I struggle to see myself in a positive way sometimes, you know, which I'm very careful about, about around my daughter, because I think I Yeah. You know, my mom struggled with anorexia when she was younger and and all that. So it just, it's, it's something that you fight because you don't even realize how much just seeing somebody else look in the mirror and say things about themselves has an influence on you. Yeah, listen,

Scott Benner 1:23:17
I saw myself positively. That wasn't my problem. Was I wasn't seeing myself accurately.

Jaime 1:23:22
You know, that can be a problem too. I'm fine. I'm fine.

Scott Benner 1:23:26
I have wide shoulders. I'm carrying it well, people don't notice. I had some my my sister in law told me yesterday I saw it for the first time in a few months. She goes, I've never thought of you as heavy. I pulled out a picture I showed her from last year. I'm like, look at that. And she goes, Oh. I was like, ish, because

Jaime 1:23:39
I can't believe the difference that I see in photographs now to and, you know, and especially with the dancing I was very unhappy with, with how I looked, you know, in my performance attire. And it's really important, especially with competitive Irish dance, and when you're out there performing for the public, that you feel good, yeah, you know. And you want to feel confident and beautiful. And it's not just about your size or your shape, but I didn't feel healthy, and I felt sluggish and tired, and I didn't feel like I could get through my dances. And I don't really think that that had as much to do with my weight as it just did with I was depressed, and I didn't feel as healthy as I felt the year before. And I really wanted to get a handle on these insulin issues, and, you know, so many other things, other than just I want to be skinny, because it's not really I'm not skinny now. I'm muscular, and I actually, I feel like for the first time in my life, I'm almost 45 years old, and when I look in the mirror, I'm happy with what I see.

Scott Benner 1:24:36
I have, I'm gonna actually let you go after this. But I was on stage speaking a few years ago, and the photographer from the event approached from the floor level, and I was on a riser, and I, while I was speaking, put my hand out and went, do not take my picture from there. Wow, don't shoot me from up. Are you out of your mind? And I was a terrible angle. I was like, No. And I made it into a joke. And the thing I'm like, Yeah, I said, if you want to take my picture, I said, Go get a 10 foot. Matter, climb up on top of it and take it from there. But you're not doing it from here. And then a poor guy had to go to the back of the room. And then, by the way, in the videos later, from that were done, from the thing, they kind of kept me out of it, wow. And I was because I was like, Oh, do not take my picture like this. Okay, you know. So I felt like I was okay. But then when you ruin push came to shove, I was like, Oh, hold on, no, no. So anyway, my life is immeasurably better at the moment than it ever has been as an

Jaime 1:25:27
adult. Same here. My health is better and my dancing is a lot better. You know, just because I've been able to build muscle and get stronger and strengthen the right parts of my body and not get injured again like I did last year when I was just not at my peak performance.

Scott Benner 1:25:42
I have been overweight since I was five. Just the littlest thing I'll tell you about last night, I had to, we were like I said, it was at a family function. I had to run outside to the drive, to the driveway of this house, to grab something out of my trunk to give to somebody else who we'd brought something to give them, right? And I get outside, and it's cold out, and, you know, I say goodbye and everything, and I put the thing in her trunk for and I turned to the house, and I'm like, I'm chilly. I'm gonna go faster. That's all my brain said. And I started jogging, and I was bouncing when I was jogging. I was like, I can tell how much light are I am. Yeah. Like, that's insane.

Jaime 1:26:18
Obviously, you know, it's much easier on your join so,

Scott Benner 1:26:23
Jamie, you'll come back on. We'll have you back a year from now. We'll do it again. Okay,

Jaime 1:26:28
yeah, we'll see where we're at in a year. Yeah, I

Scott Benner 1:26:31
hope you're in a good place all of you.

Jaime 1:26:33
I hope I just have kind of an uneventful year. I mean, last year was definitely a better year for us. We got to concentrate on happy things, and we did, you know, do our Northern Lights trip and nice, compete in Irish dance, and that's pretty much all we did last year. And it was fantastic. Good

Scott Benner 1:26:49
for you. Good Well, please send my best to your husband. And I really appreciate you. I really appreciate you coming on, sharing all this with me sincerely.

Jaime 1:26:56
I appreciate you having me. And, you know, dealing with my ADHD conversation,

Scott Benner 1:27:01
mine. You ran me over a couple times. I don't mind. I know. I know the game. It's okay.

Jaime 1:27:06
I told you. I told you I was gonna do Yeah, don't

Scott Benner 1:27:09
worry. I was ready. All right, let me think of my image up on this other thing. Hold on one second. Thank

Jaime 1:27:13
you so much. Thank you. You

Scott Benner 1:27:20
I want to thank the ever since CGM for sponsoring this episode of The juicebox podcast, and invite you to go to ever sense cgm.com/juicebox to learn more about this terrific device, you can head over now and just absorb everything that the website has to offer, and that way you'll know if ever since feels right for you, ever since cgm.com/juicebox, Arden started using a contour meter because of its accuracy, but she continues to use it because it's durable and trustworthy. If you have diabetes you want the contour next gen blood glucose meter, there's already so many decisions. Let me take this one off your plate. Contour, next.com/juicebox getting older means a world of change, but some things still stay the same, like being at risk for type one diabetes, because type one can happen at any age. So screen it like you mean it. If just one person in your family has type one, you're up to 15 times more likely to get it too, and 50% of type one diagnoses happen after the age of 18. So screen it like you mean it. Type one diabetes starts long before you need insulin, and one blood test could help you spot it early and lower the risk of serious complications like diabetic ketoacidosis, known as DKA. So don't get caught by surprise screen it like you mean it, because getting answers now can help you get prepared. The more you know, the more you can do. So don't wait. Talk to a doctor about how to get screened. Tap now or visit screen for type one.com to learn more. Again, that's screen for type one.com and screen it like you mean it. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back very soon with another episode of The juicebox podcast. If you're not already subscribed or following the podcast in your favorite audio app, like Spotify or Apple podcasts. Please do that now. Seriously, just to hit follow or subscribe will really help the show. If you go a little further in Apple podcast and set it up so that it downloads all new episodes, I'll be your best friend, and if you leave a five star review, ooh, I'll probably send you a Christmas card. Would

Unknown Speaker 1:29:42
you like a Christmas card?

Scott Benner 1:29:43
The episode you just heard was professionally edited by wrong way, recording, wrong way, recording.com, do.

#1285 False Start

Laura was misdiagnosed as T2 at age 59.

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Scott Benner 0:00
Hello again, friends and welcome back to the juicebox podcast.

Laura was misdiagnosed with type two diabetes. She, of course, has type one. You'll hear about that story, and she was eventually diagnosed with Hashimotos. We're going to talk about type one, misdiagnosis, GLP, medications, weight loss and so much more. Actually, at the end, what do we find out she was in an ever since trial? Oh yeah, we talk about that at the end. Please don't forget that nothing you hear on the juicebox podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan or becoming bold with insulin. When you use my link, hungryroot.com/juicebox you will save 40% off of your first order@hungryroot.com go check them out if you're tired of making meals but want something healthy. 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. I know that Facebook has a bad reputation, but please give the private Facebook group for the juicebox podcast, a healthy once over juicebox podcast, type one diabetes. Dexcom sponsored this episode of The juicebox podcast. Learn more about the Dexcom g7 at my link, dexcom.com/juice box. This episode of The juicebox podcast is sponsored by the insulin pump that my daughter wears. OmniPod. Learn more and get started today with the OmniPod dash, or the OmniPod five at my link, omnipod.com/juicebox this episode of The juicebox podcast is sponsored by cozy Earth. Cozy earth.com use the offer code juicebox at checkout to save 40% off of the clothing, towels, sheets, off of everything they have at cozy earth.com

Laura 2:14
Hi. My name is Laura. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I have had type one diabetes for three and a half years. How old are you? Laura, I am 59 and a half. Oh, by the time this airs, I'll be, I'll be the big six zero.

Scott Benner 2:32
Is that a dig at me? For how long it takes me to put out the episodes? Or Absolutely not. Is it just close to your birthday? Wow. So you were diagnosed when you were what, 55 656. Yeah. Hey, did you live your life with auto immune issues?

Laura 2:46
Nope, nothing. Not a Zippo in the family, anything. My older sister has quite a few. She has Hashimotos, and she has vitiligo, and she has something called Burning tongue syndrome.

Scott Benner 3:04
I just had somebody on the other day who told me they have geographic tongue. And I was like, what is that burning tongue? I thought that was a music festival, but

Laura 3:19
it that would be fun. She said her tongue feels like she burned it on pizza

Scott Benner 3:24
all the time, ongoing or recurrent burning in the mouth with no obvious cause. Yeah. Does she have it constantly, or is it off and on? I'm not sure. Well, lucky her. It's very rare. Fewer than 20,000 cases per year. Wow,

that's got to be a bummer, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, 20 like one in 20,000 and it's not a lottery ticket, it's this, you know what I mean, right? Great. Thanks a lot. Any other siblings for you?

Laura 3:51
I have other siblings. I have a brother and another younger sister, and they are all fine. Parents are fine. My dad's everybody's fine. No celiac, nope.

Scott Benner 4:03
You got a bipolar brother in law, anything like that? Brother? No, some people say not diagnosed, which I always find amusing. Okay, wow. Okay, well, then what the hell? Tell me about how you figured it out.

Laura 4:19
Well, I was fine. Everything was fine, and then covid happened, and I own a small business, and that was very stressful, like I had to lay everybody off and close the place and figure out what we were going to do. And that happened when end of February, beginning of March, 2020, right? And in May, I was thirsty all the time. And, you know, I mean, there was a lot going on, and you couldn't really get to the doctor, and so I didn't really think about it. I was like, Huh? It's weird. I'm thirsty all the time. And then you. You know the classic symptoms, I started losing weight, and I had leg cramps and heartburn, and my hair was falling out and my skin was dry, and just all these things, but they didn't seem related. Yeah, looking back, clearly they're related. But at the time, I was like, well, that's weird. Well, now I need more potassium, whatever, I'll eat a banana, right, right? I'll just eat a banana. It's fine on an empty stomach. That's great all by itself. But your

Scott Benner 5:30
sister has Hashimoto. So did any of those symptoms like make you think that? No,

Laura 5:34
no, okay. No, I did. I did look it up and it kept saying diabetes. And I'm like, I there's no way. There's no text to in my family at all. My a 1c has always been fine. There's no way that can't be it. Well, it was so well, you know,

Scott Benner 5:52
what? Can I ask a question before we move forward with that? Can you maybe put a little more context to the pressure you felt having that small business and having to do all those things.

Laura 6:02
Well, I employ 13 people, so we had to lay everybody off and figure out how to keep the business alive. So, you know, in the first two or three weeks, I spun up a website to sell like a web store, which we did not have before. I did all the legwork for making sure that they could get their unemployment and get the benefits for that. We did all the things for a PPP loan. We I did a like a fundraiser hoodie that I turned that out in like two weeks. My partner was working from home. So while we were home, he was working, so I, like, couldn't really do it wasn't, like, happy, fun time. Woo hoo, we're on vacation, right? Yeah. It was just really, really a lot of stress, yeah, pretty much vibrated for three months.

Scott Benner 6:57
No, I hear you so you weren't ill during that time, just the stress Gotcha. Well, it could do it. So, yeah, you're living proof. All right. So okay, I'm so sorry. So you've having all these symptoms and but what pushes you to say I need to seek medical attention? Well, it was

Laura 7:15
the weight loss, which I have always been overweight my whole entire life. So I was like, Woohoo. I'm doing great. Because I was trying. I had lost like 20 pounds before this happened, before the pandemic happened. Okay,

Scott Benner 7:29
so you were on that process already. The podcast is sponsored today by the place where I kept my oh gosh, my sheets, my towels, some of my clothing, a lot of the things that I stay warm or comfortable with. Cozy earth.com I'm wearing a pair of cozy Earth joggers right now. I've recently gotten another pair in a different color. I sleep on cozy Earth sheets. They are so comfortable and soft and temperate, temperate, meaning I'm never hot or cold, which is really saying something, because my wife loves to turn that giant fan on, but they keep me nice and warm without making me like, sweaty or moist. You know what I mean? You don't want to be moist while you're sleeping. And then, of course, the waffle towels I use every day to dry off my bits and parts after I've showered. Cozy earth.com. Use the offer code juicebox at checkout to save 40% off of your entire order. I'm not saying 40% off of one item. I'm saying 40% off of everything you put in the cart. Cozy earth.com, use the offer code. Juice box at checkout.

Laura 8:35
Yeah. I mean, I kind of fell off the wagon when the pandemic happened, but I hadn't gained any, you know, I was, I was like, okay, I'm good, I'm good. And then it was like, falling off. And I was like, wow, this is fantastic. But then I think it was probably in mid to late June when I was just like, getting winded, walking across the parking lot. And I was like, there is definitely something going on. So I made an appointment with my PCP, but she was on vacation. It was like, The appointment was, like, a month out, like, all right, well, okay, end of July, going to see the doctor. And then when she got back from vacation and saw my list of symptoms, she sent me for lab work, and I went and did that on a Friday afternoon, and on Saturday morning she called me and said, Get thee to the ER right now. I was like, why I'm fine. She was like, You're not fine. Like, I'm fine. She said, you're dehydrated. And I pulled up the skin on my hand and went, No, I'm fine. I

Scott Benner 9:41
see plenty of plumpness right here. It's really okay, but dehydrated. What she sent you to the hospital for? Well,

Laura 9:46
she knew.

Scott Benner 9:48
Oh okay.

Laura 9:49
My a 1c was 13 and a half. Oh

Scott Benner 9:52
yeah, okay. My

Laura 9:53
blood sugar was 400 and something.

Scott Benner 9:55
Did she indicate type one or type two to you, or did she let the hospital tell

Laura 9:59
you she. She all she said was, you need to go right now. You're dehydrated, you're very sick. Go like, Okay, we were packing to go camping, Scott packing to go camping. Like, the next day we were going camping. That day, it was Saturday. We were leaving that afternoon I would be dead. Now, yeah, out in the woods, yeah, yeah. So I get to the, er, of course, I'm in DKA, so couple of days in the ICU and a day in the regular and then I'm home.

Scott Benner 10:38
They give you, obviously, insulin. They brought your blood sugar down slowly, all that stuff. And then what's the management like leaving the hospital? Is it pens

Laura 10:47
or, of course, diagnosed with type two, and I left with Lantus and Humalog and syringes and lip aside, they put me on glipizide. Oh, and my, my TSH was like 1800 everyone just likes this disgustingly high amount. So also Hashimotos, same time, yeah, I

Scott Benner 11:12
was gonna say we said about the hair loss. That made me think about that. Yeah. Okay, so you started with Synthroid, yep. And they thought you had type two, yep. How long does it take you to realize you don't have type two?

Laura 11:26
Not very long. I'm very, very lucky, because I'm in the hospital. I have the hospitalist is my, you know, guy comes to see me, and I'm like, I do not understand how this happened. I There's no type two in my family. I've always been heavy my whole entire life. I'm very conscious of what I eat. I exercise all the time. I do not eat I don't drink soda, I don't eat poorly. I don't have a lot of carbohydrates. They're telling me to eat 45 to 65 grams of carbs per meal, and I'm like, that's more than I eat now. Yeah, I can't do that. I don't understand. And so he ran the test, he did the GAD test, and told me it would take some weeks for the results to come back. Okay, so

Scott Benner 12:17
let me say so basically, you think your body structure pointed to type two. Oh,

Laura 12:24
yeah, my age and my overweightness. Okay, yeah, Laura, you

Scott Benner 12:28
don't have to. But can you give me context how tall and how much I

Laura 12:32
am, five, four and I was I rolled in at like, 210,

Scott Benner 12:38
Laura, did you say rolled in on purpose? You're trying to be funny?

Laura 12:42
I did not, but we'll say I did okay. I'm hilarious. I

Scott Benner 12:45
was like, is she just be like, going for it here and and your whole life, that's your issue. But, yeah, but you do exercise and you don't eat egregiously correct,

Laura 12:56
interesting. And that actually runs in my family.

Scott Benner 13:02
See, now we're getting to something here. Have they talked about putting you on a GLP medication?

Laura 13:06
I am currently, well, let me go you. Oh

Scott Benner 13:10
yeah, you don't want me to jump ahead. I like it. Tease it out. Laura, keep everybody listening. Let's get them to the ads. All right. No, okay, okay, so they give you the get antibody test, but it takes a while to get the results back.

Laura 13:24
That's right. So I leave on a sliding scale with a poker, you know, and a blood sugar meter the hospital, because I went in on a Saturday, they were going to send me home on like Sunday afternoon, when I when they let me out of the ICU, they were going to discharge me from the ICU, and the nurses were like, What? No, you cannot just send her home like this. She needs to talk to a nutritionist. She needs to talk to somebody you know, you can't just send her home. And the doctor was like, she's out. But then there was an issue with the pharmacy and what they were gonna my insurance was gonna cover, so the nurses advocated for me to get a room a regular on the telemetry floor, or whatever nice another night, so that I could be there on Monday to see people

Scott Benner 14:17
that's excellent. Good, good for them, for sticking up for you. Did you have anything to do with it, or were you really at their mercy?

Laura 14:23
I was a little I mean, I didn't get to talk to the doctor about that they were. They just told me that they were trying to get it so that I didn't have to go home straight out of the ICU. And I was like, that's good, because I don't know what's happening. This is

Scott Benner 14:37
going to seem morbid for a second, but I was with my mom in the days approaching her passing, and I was fascinated about how little contact you had with a doctor. Even in that dire situation, they roll in, they say a couple things and they leave again. You're like you have questions, and sometimes you can't even think of all your questions, right? Away. You know what I mean? You're right. You're writing them down, and you're like, trying to get people's attention, and then they say, Oh, don't worry, we'll send a hospitalist to you, because that that person will be your, you know, you know who you'll speak through to all the doctors. But then you don't see those people like, hey, when's the hospital is coming back tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning, it's 10 o'clock in the morning now, you know, like, it's really fascinating how it all works. And, yeah, yeah, the situation you get put in, but the nurse saves you, right? They get you to a bed. What happens next?

Laura 15:27
You know, I talked to the nutritionist, who, you know, was basically useless. She told me the same thing, 45 to 65 grams of carbs per meal. And I was like, I'm not going to eat that much. She said, Well, that's what you need to do. And then she was like, Well, what's your favorite thing to eat? Your all time you would, you know, knock over a bank to have this thing. I was like, Well, you know, I never eat this thing, but my all time favorite thing is a load of baked potato with barbecue. And she was like, well, you can have that. And I was like, No, I can't.

Scott Benner 16:00
I'm pretty sure that's not right, yeah, oh my god. Okay, so you get shaky advice in the hospital. How do you figure out what to do for yourself? Actually, how much weight did you lose in the run up to the diagnosis? I meant to ask

Laura 16:19
like, 2025 pounds. Just 2025, pounds

Scott Benner 16:23
off the off the 210 No, no, I

Laura 16:26
was at the hospital at 210 Oh,

Scott Benner 16:29
okay, and that 25 took you to 210 Yeah, I got you. So we started at around 235 we got to the hospital at 210 Yeah, yeah. You know the phrase tickled her ass with the feather. What do you weigh now? My daughter is 20 years old. I can't even believe it. She was diagnosed with type one diabetes when she was two, and she put her first insulin pump on when she was four. That insulin pump was an OmniPod, and it's been an OmniPod every day since then. That's 16 straight years of wearing OmniPod. It's been a friend to us, and I believe it could be a friend to you. Omnipod.com/juicebox, whether you get the OmniPod dash or the automation that's available with the OmniPod five, you are going to enjoy tubeless insulin pumping. You're going to be able to jump into a shower or a pool or a bathtub without taking off your pump. That's right, you will not have to disconnect to bathe with an OmniPod. You also won't have to disconnect to play a sport or to do anything where a regular tube pump has to come off. Arden has been wearing an OmniPod for 16 years. She knows other people that wear different pumps, and she has never once asked the question, should I be trying a different pump? Never once omnipod.com/juicebox, get a pump that you'll be happy with forever for a person using insulin. The benefits of a Dexcom CGM cannot be overstated. The Dexcom allows you to see the speed, direction and number of your blood sugar. For example, My daughter, who is 700 miles away in college, her blood sugar is currently 163 after a meal and steady. I'm going to tell you all about that in a second, but please remember that you can get a Dexcom right now@dexcom.com forward slash juicebox. I have that information because I am one of the people who follows her Dexcom CGM. The Dexcom CGM allows for up to 10 followers of your choosing. That means that I can see everything that Arden's blood sugar is doing, no matter where she is. You might be thinking, Oh, you have to look at your phone constantly, but you don't, because you can set up alarms to let you know when thresholds are met. I on my phone have Arden's low alarm set at 70, and her high alarm set at 120 on Arden's phone, her low alarm is 80 and her high alarm is 130 so we get alarms that make us go, Hmm. I wonder what this is about. Do we always do something about it? We don't. Right now, for instance, I can see what Arden has been doing. I spoke to her recently. I know what she had for lunch. She made a great bolus. This is going to come back down, but if it doesn't, we'll see that on the CGM. If it starts to head back up, we'll see that on the Dexcom. And then she can make adjustments to her insulin using this great information. Find out more right now and get started today@dexcom.com forward slash juicebox. That special link is for you the juicebox podcast listeners. And guess what? You may be eligible for a free 10 day trial of the Dexcom g6 you'll find out at my link head over there. Now maybe there are some questions you have about Dexcom that I didn't answer in this ad, but all the information you need is right at the link see customizable alerts and alarms zero finger sticks and glucose readings right on your smart device. Nice. Dexcom.com. Forward slash juicebox links in your show notes. Links at juicebox podcast.com. 162 Wow. Very nice. Good for you. Okay, we'll figure out how you got to it as we talk. Okay,

you're married, is that right? Yes,

Laura 20:18
I'm not married, but I'm in a long term thing,

Scott Benner 20:22
somebody may as well be somebody stuck helping you. I got you, that's all. I meant, yeah, by married. I meant, is there someone with you? Going, Uh, okay,

Laura 20:29
yes, yes, there is. And that was pretty much his reaction, of

Scott Benner 20:35
course. Like, what are we doing? I thought we were gonna retire soon.

Laura 20:39
What the hell? Right. So

Scott Benner 20:40
you guys make sense of all this. You don't like you're getting the advice about eating, but this isn't obviously what you ended up doing. So how do you figure it all out? I'm

Laura 20:50
the kind of person who needs to know all the things. I always know all the things. So of course, you know, what do I do? I'm instantly trying to figure out what to do and what's going on, and how to advocate for myself, and how to make sure that I use my insulin properly and do all the things I had a follow up. Well, my original appointment with my doctor was, like the next week, so I kept that appointment, and, you know, they kind of gave me some advice about what to do, but it was pretty much stay the course. I was lucky enough to get in with an endo, probably within a month, I think, okay, yeah, it was in August when I saw the Endo. I'm so lucky. She's so great. I've heard so many horror stories, yeah, mostly on your show. Thank you. And she's really fantastic. And by that time, I had the results of the GAD test, and it was astronomically high. Type one for sure, be off the flip aside. And, you know, switch me to pens, and got you going with, yeah, with all that, got me a Dexcom. But by that time, I already knew what I wanted I had. You know? She was like, Well, if you heard there's this thing called that, and I'm like, Yeah, I want the Dexcom. Oh, okay, yeah. Where

Scott Benner 22:17
did you hear about all that? Like, going through the internet and looking around, that's how you found out about like, CGM things,

Laura 22:22
yep, yep. Facebook Facebook groups, they were far more health helpful than anything else. I don't think I had found your podcast before I went to the end of for the first time, but it was shortly after that, and I have to say, Scott, I would not be where I am today if it were not for the podcast and the Facebook group and the other groups, because, you know, we all know they don't tell you anything. Yeah, they don't tell you. They're trying to keep you alive, and that's about it

Scott Benner 22:53
here. This is a quote from an NIH article. Social media has become a primary source of health information for Americans. A large number of users, 76% reported that they do not merely encounter such content on the internet, but also rely on platforms such as Facebook for health information. That's like from an NIH study, yeah, wow. It doesn't stop any doctor and make them go, huh? You know what I mean, from like, a self preservation standpoint, Laura, like you're a small business owner, yeah, if you heard that 76% of the people who came to you figured out what they needed somewhere besides you, you'd think, Oh, we're going to be out of business soon. Yes,

Laura 23:34
right? Yeah, I would, and I would do everything in my power to make myself relevant, yeah,

Scott Benner 23:40
right, become the person who who delivers that good information, right? Fascinating to me. I seriously, I'd be in a panic if I was a doctor. I read something like that and think, how close are we to? You know, no lie, an AI bot diagnosing you, and you coming in and saying, Here's what I think is wrong, and the bot agrees with you or not agreeing with you, and you ended up with a, you know, a prescription, or, you know, a direction or something like that. Like, I don't know, I think I'd want to be protecting my job if I was a doctor, but Right, no kidding. Now, I mean, some of them are terrific, and I don't even mean that pejoratively, like a lot of doctors are fantastic, but I speak to enough people to know that it's not a big enough percentage of patients having good experiences for me to say, you know, wow. Mostly people are doing great. I think mostly the information shaky. Somebody's reading from you from a book, like, I mean, how fascinating is it when like, three people bump into you and they go, just eat up to 45 carbs a day, and you're at a meal, and you're like, wait, the last person said that. You know, I told the last person, I don't eat that much already. What am I supposed to do? You want me to eat more? And that was the nutritionist right in the hospital, in a hospital, standing in front of you, weighing 210, pounds, at five, four. He's like, you know, you should, you should eat more food than you're eating now. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. Fascinating. Sorry. All right, so now you got pens, you know, you're a type one. You're picking around online, figuring things out. How long does it take you to get comfortable that you're making reasonable decisions?

Laura 25:11
You know? I It's, it's a continuum, I don't know. Once I had the CGM, it was, of course, much more clear what was happening. And you know, my insulin needs drastically went down once I got my blood sugar under control. And again, I have a great doctor, because right off the bat, she was like, you adjust the Lantis as you see fit. Oh, good. And she wrote in my chart that I had agency to make changes up to 30% like, on day one, yeah, giving

Scott Benner 25:47
you freedom to, like, see what's happening and and react to it, right?

Laura 25:51
Yeah, that's excellent, which is great, because it never occurred to me to not do that. And before I had the CGM, I didn't know I was having lows at night.

Scott Benner 26:02
Yeah, no,

Laura 26:02
I never woke up in a cold sweat. And she she did say, like, if you wake up in the middle of the night, go and test your blood sugar just to see. She didn't say you should get up every night and test your blood sugar to see if it's low if you wake up, take a look. Yeah, yeah, which I never did. I mean, I would wake up, but I just roll over and not do it. You

Scott Benner 26:21
should have seen me begging Arden last night to test before she left her class because her CGM was like, dead. And I was like, please don't drive without testing. She's like, don't you worry. And I was like, that sounds like she's gonna do it. She made it home. Fine. Yeah. I mean, like this just happened to you. Now someone's saying to you, hey, you know how poking your finger sucks. You should do it if you wake up in the middle. The middle of the night, yeah, but not if you But isn't it interesting? Like, not if you don't wake up in the middle of the night, right? Then why is it important, right? Like, if it doesn't have to be every night, then why is it important, right? I had a very similar experience with Arden when she was little, about that overnight stuff, where they were like, hey, you know, you can leave the blood sugar much higher overnight for safety. And I said, Well, why does it have to be lower during the day? Then, well, because high blood sugars are bad for health. I said, Well, why are they not bad for health at night? She's like, well, you need to sleep. I was like, that doesn't answer the question. Like that just pushes it down the road. You know what I mean? Like, it's, it's kicked the can at that point. Yeah, you know, answers the questions that don't really answer the question and don't make sense or upsetting, and then you don't know what to do, so you did nothing. Correct.

Laura 27:30
Yeah, correct. But then once I had the CGM, I was like, Oh, that's too much. So dialed it way back, and then back up and then back down. I mess with my carb ratios a lot, figuring out things like, I'm more insulin resistant in the morning, and that my breakfast ratio was much higher, lower, higher. Needed to be stronger. Yeah, yeah, in the morning, things like that. I've figured all that stuff out. What about is it something

Scott Benner 27:59
about your personality that lets you just be like, I'm going to like, I'm gonna do you think it's your age? Like,

Laura 28:04
you know what I mean? No, it's who I am. I before I owned my game store, I was a software test engineer. When I left to do my business, I was a director of test engineering for a Fortune 100 company. It's kind of in my DNA to know all the things, okay,

Scott Benner 28:23
yeah, so you're not so it's your personality. Then I wasn't sure if maybe your age just leaves you to be more, you know, less afraid. I guess I think that's

Laura 28:34
probably some of it. You know us, us elders are wise

Scott Benner 28:39
elders. Gotta try to claim that. At your age,

Laura 28:44
I'm taking it, man. Well,

Scott Benner 28:45
if you can claim it, then I'm gonna start claiming it. I'm getting close enough, you know, when you speak to so many people who will tell you that they were frozen because no one told them to make an adjustment. And if they do make an adjustment, somebody gave them, you know, crap about it, then that stops them, not just for a day or a week or a month, but sometimes for years and decades of making like, reasonable adjustments to help things.

Laura 29:07
And that's why, again, I keep saying how lucky I am that I have the doctors that I have, because I think she she knew right away that I would be able to do that, and she never said, No, don't do that, or don't make those changes. Or she never told me how to manage my self. She let me take the lead on how I'm going to do that.

Scott Benner 29:31
Has she been helpful making adjustments to Settings going forward since then?

Laura 29:35
No. I mean, I make all she has never adjusted anything.

Scott Benner 29:40
Well, now I'm worried, Laura, that she just gave you autonomy because she didn't know what to do.

Laura 29:45
Oh, she did. I mean, you know, she set me up with an insulin to carb ratio and a correction factor and no good you know, those initial settings, how much Lantus to take and that kind of thing.

Scott Benner 29:57
How much have they changed as you've lost weight? Uh, quite, quite a bit, quite a bit, yeah, I would imagine that 4050, pounds, 50 pounds is, I mean, a reduction in your basal, a reduction in your insulin sensitivity and your carb ratio. No,

Laura 30:17
yeah, yeah, yeah, I use way less insulin than I did. And there are a lot of factors that go into that. I think one is the weight loss. I'm down from where I started, like 94 pounds or something like that. You're

Scott Benner 30:35
down 94 total pounds

Laura 30:39
since before the pandemic.

Scott Benner 30:42
Oh, okay, so you were 235 and then went to 210 but you had been up to 256

Laura 30:50
Yeah, prior to that, I

Scott Benner 30:51
say, Wow, good for you. That's such a, such a change. Well, are you doing anything differently now that you're continuing on your weight loss? I mean, now obviously that you're out of decay and you know for years,

Laura 31:02
well, one of the things that I figured out was eating is a problem. It was an aha moment for me. Tell me more. I just don't eat.

Scott Benner 31:15
Laura, you've decided that your body just revolts against food one way or the other, so you don't eat very much anymore, correct?

Laura 31:23
What do you eat? Meat and veggies and the occasional starches? What'd you cut out? You know, I just changed the amount. So I figured out that I really only need, like, 12 to 1300 calories a day at all. I mean, just to maintain

Scott Benner 31:46
so even though you were eating things that you thought of as healthy, meats, vegetables, etc, you were eating in mass, so much of it that you

Laura 31:55
were holding weight. I was eating probably less than the RDA for somebody of my age and still struggling.

Scott Benner 32:05
So do you think your body doesn't work well, like it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing? Okay? Because this is what I think about me, by the way, growing

Laura 32:13
up, and because I've had this issue my whole life, you know, one of those you hear somebody say, Well, I have a slow metabolism. Well, that's just an excuse, right? Well, it's not, not for you, not for me. It's actually true, and now that I know that, and I've internalized it, I just eat half of what I used to eat, not half, but markedly less.

Scott Benner 32:38
Was it difficult to eat less? Oh, I

Laura 32:41
made myself crazy. I was on the verge of an eating disorder. What were you doing? I was just really strict about what I ate and how many carbs I had, and I wasn't like keto, low carb, but I was trying to stay around 70 per day and keep my calories between 1012 100. Yeah. Do

Scott Benner 33:05
you think you're at your ideal weight now, or is there more to lose?

Laura 33:08
I would like to weigh less, but my PCP sent me to a weight loss doctor because I got stuck. I've been the same for like, a year and a half or two years now, the same weight I can't lose anymore. And she basically told me that, um, my body is not going to let me lose anymore, and I should be happy where I am. I

Scott Benner 33:33
have questions, how is your digestion and your elimination? Fine, good. The poopy comes out like the way you want, good, good form, not squishy or anything like that. No, you don't run to the bathroom after you eat. Your digestion works pretty

Laura 33:49
well. My digestion works, well, great. I don't have any gluten issues or lactose issues. Nothing to that I've done. I did an elimination thing, uh, 10 years ago and had zero change in anything.

Scott Benner 34:04
What's your hourly basal?

Laura 34:06
It varies. My total basal for 24 hours is probably around eight units

Scott Benner 34:13
really well. That's because you're not really eating much right either. And

Laura 34:17
my basal is actually like 65% of my insulin. Hold

Scott Benner 34:23
on, hold on, stop. You're not making sense. Let me your total daily basal is eight units. Yeah, wow. Point three, five an hour.

Laura 34:34
So at sometimes it's point two and sometimes it's point six. It varies. I have 12345, segments, which is probably too much, but that's what it is. What's your A, 1c, the last one was 4.8 which I don't think is right, because my CGM says 5.7 which it always says 5.7 it's never I mean 5.6 sometimes five. Point eight. But it's always been 5.1 5.2 when I get it tested. And so the CGM still says 5.7 and my average is 103, or something for 90 days, but it came back at 4.8 which is weird. Take me through today. What

Scott Benner 35:16
you eat for breakfast? I have not eaten today. Oh, a little intermittent fasting. When will you eat first?

Laura 35:23
I usually eat before I go to the shop, because we open at noon, so between 11 and 1130 okay,

Scott Benner 35:32
you're on the West Coast, so it's 10am there. Yeah, okay, okay, so you haven't eaten yet at 10am because I'm looking at my clock, and it's one o'clock, and I was like, You haven't eaten yet. Doing the intermittent fasting,

Laura 35:42
I could easily not eat. Easily not eat. No GLP medications at all. Well, I am taking Victoza here we which was a daily injection. I did not start that until it's been about a year. And the reason is and my endo prescribed it to preserve the beta cells that I still have Okay.

Scott Benner 36:07
And how will it do that? How does she explain that

Laura 36:11
it would do that? She said, Yeah, I have many questions. She said, there have been studies that show that people who retain beta cell function that a GLP one helps, helps that because I'd just been waiting for the other shoe to drop right. When is it going to get bad? When am I? When am I going to be in the full blown horror stories that I see from everyone and my C peptide was like point five, I think after two years. So if

Scott Benner 36:46
your total daily basal is just under eight, what's your total daily insulin? It

Laura 36:50
varies between, where can I see it? It's probably like 11

Scott Benner 36:55
to 15, between 1214,

Laura 36:57
something like that. Okay, wow. Okay, it depends on how many carbs I eat, Yeah, but

Scott Benner 37:04
you're having up to 75 carbs a day. Sometimes I

Laura 37:07
have more interest. But since starting the vitoza, my insulin to carb ratios are much less aggressive, less strong. Yes, have

Scott Benner 37:17
you considered asking her for something like manjarno to see if you could, because I'm looking at the chart here. Five four female. At 160 you're at the high end of of overweight, and 174 would put you at obese. 140 is the high end of a healthy weight for your height, as far as this chart goes down to 110 so I think you you would qualify for a Z bound for example, which is just the weight loss version of of manjarno with what you've been saying previously, it matches up so much to my life. I wonder if you wouldn't lose another 20 pounds on this because I have always thought that my body doesn't work well, either, like I've never eaten a ton of food. It doesn't matter if I do or if I don't. I'm always gaining weight. You know, if I went and had a regular meal, like most people would like, nothing crazy, if I just if we all went out to dinner together, I didn't need anything differently than the skinny person sitting next to me, I'd wake up like, two pounds heavier the next day. Yeah, yeah. And so I would restrict my food all the time because it was the only way I could keep myself from ballooning up to 300 pounds probably, you know. So I ate very little most of the time to accomplish that. And then every once in a while, I would do stuff like, fast to drop 20 pounds, if that my number was getting too far, and I was starting to count, like, 230 pounds. It's like the top of my, of my, you know, my goal weight even, because I just couldn't really control it. Exercise wouldn't help. You know, drink a bunch of water didn't help. Like, all the things you think of, nothing helped. I started taking, we go V in March last year, and then basically lost like, 40 pounds, and then I plateaued. I went from 233, to 196, I think, and then I plateaued. I couldn't I started gaining and losing the same two and a half pounds every week. It was like, I'd shoot the week over, I'd lose a couple pounds, four or five days later, I'd start to put them back on again. By the time it was time it was time to shoot the week over again, I was back to where I started. I talked to my doctor. She said, Let's try zepbound, which is manjarno. Boom, I'm on that. I've lost like 188 now. I've lost eight pounds on manjarno in like three, like three and a half weeks. Wow, that's fantastic, yeah, but my eating hasn't changed. See, that's the thing

Laura 39:41
that concerns me, because I do not need to eat less. I need I often have to. I mean, I'm looking at the I use my fitness pal, yeah, to keep track of my carbs and also my calories, because I can't eat too much, and I'm at the end of the day and I'm like, Oh, I'm only at like, eight. 900 I need to eat something,

Scott Benner 40:02
not only that, but when I eat more, I lose more weight. Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah. As crazy as that might sound today, I got up this morning and I had two eggs, scrambled, honestly, not scrambled more like, what do you call it when you lay flat and you fold them? There's a real simple word for that. There you go. Two eggs with two pieces of shrimp, like previously cooked shrimp warmed up in it. That's what I ate for breakfast. This afternoon, I'm thinking about a cold sandwich, roast beef, turkey, provolone on a roll with some yellow mustard. Don't make fun of me. That's what I'm gonna have for lunch, and tonight, I'm thinking about having some leftover pasta that has shrimp and sausage in it. I will eat all of that today. I'll wake up tomorrow, I'll be a pound lighter. Wow. It's insane. And the emergency feeling I used to get after I ate is completely gone. Like, I used to be one of those people, like, if you went out to lunch, like, I'd be like, All right, we got to go home now. We can't walk around the mall. I got to get out of here because, you know, I'm going to need a bathroom that is completely gone out of my life that's great, completely gone. All my acid reflux gone. So my not educated perspective, and I want to say by not educated. I barely got out of high school, I didn't go to college. I'm not a doctor. I've never read a study about a GLP or a GIP or anything like that. The closest thing I can come up with is that whatever is in that juice that they're that I'm injecting once a week, is something my body either did not have enough of or didn't have any of. I

Laura 41:39
think that is 100% true. Yeah, it's the GLP one Gi, P, yeah, yeah, that, that hormone enzyme, whatever the hell it is, I think it's the thing that I did not have enough of, right? And now you're getting taken one of those drugs. It would have helped me immensely. Oh, my God, because I white knuckled it to where I am. Oh,

Scott Benner 42:00
see you. And I did the same exact thing, which is, we just restricted our food so much. Like, I mean, that's what I've done my whole adult life, yeah, like, I'm like, I just can't, like, ever since I've been out of my I mean, Jesus I was when I was a kid. Like, if my family went out for a slice of pizza, I was, I knew I was dead. Like, I knew I was going to be just like, like, everyone would be home, like, living life, and I'd be in the bathroom afterwards. You know, all that's gone now, and this is the only thing that's changed. And I just interviewed a woman the other day about her daughter, her like, teen, young, teen daughter hasn't come out yet, but type one for like, three years using a fairly significant amount of insulin, and now she's on we go V for weight loss, because she was gaining weight that she couldn't stop gaining. And the weight come off of her and her insulin needs. She's off her pump. She's down to injecting basal. Wow. She sends me her graph. Sometimes you should see how insane they are. She's not even injecting for meals, but she's definitely got type one. So I don't know if that GLP is like, like your doctor said, like retaining some beta cell function, if it's what it's doing, but I'll tell you what. Scotty ran, he did not walk, and got his daughter on ozempic, because Arden's only shooting the introductory amount, the point two, five a month, which is by all measurements, not even a therapeutic dose she's going to use. I forget what the number is, 11,016 like over 10,000 fewer units of insulin next year because of the reduction it made, point two, five a month, and any excess weight on her body is gone. She looks so healthy, and anywhere she was carrying excess weight in eight weeks is gone.

Laura 43:53
I I'll, I'll check into that because, because I have been reluctant. I mean, I'm not taking the vitosa for weight loss, it doesn't really do that. I mean, for some people, it does, but not for me, but it has reduced my insulin usage, and like I have fewer spikes. So Laura, if I had $100,000

Scott Benner 44:15
to put on a bet in Vegas, I'd bet it on 10 years from now, type one diabetics are going to get GLP medications with their insulin when they're diagnosed. Wouldn't that be great? It's going to be my bet. I don't know if I'm right again, like I said, barely got out of high school, you probably shouldn't listen to me. There's the disclaimer at the beginning of the podcast, on purpose. It says you shouldn't listen to me, so but these are my experiences and what I'm hearing from other people, and I think they're worth sharing, because this person I spoke to is not nearly the only one. My schedule is littered with people to record with this year who are using wegov bound, manjarno, those things, and they're seeing insane reductions in their insulin needs. So. Now, maybe not for everybody, but for people like you and me, who, like, you know, I gain weight thinking about eating like, maybe my body just didn't work right. Because at the moment, sometimes I look in the mirror I can't believe it's me. My ophthalmologist. I walked in to get a new pair of reading glasses the other day, and I've known him my whole adult life, and he almost cursed in his business in front of other people. He went, Scott, what the You look like a different person? And he was not being, you know, polite or, you know, but he was like, my god, you don't even look like the same person. And I don't. I've seen photos of myself a year ago, and now I can't believe I wasn't in the hospital a year ago the way I looked, and I didn't know. I thought that was who I was. You know, I've yo

Laura 45:44
yo dieted my whole entire life and so but it's ingrained in who I am is, you know, this pudgy to fat to obese person, and the personal failing that was my inability to control my weight is part of who I am, and I still struggle with that, actually, which my eating just because of all that. And then I got type one right, and I had lost that weight the little bit at the beginning, when I first went to the Endo, the only thing. I did not cry at all about any of it until she told me that my body was going to want to gain that weight back. Yeah, and I burst into tears, and she was like, It's okay, it's okay. And I'm like, It's not okay.

Scott Benner 46:37
I can't tell you how much happier I am now than a year ago for so many reasons that, I mean, I could sit here and list them all day but, but they just they weren't things that any of my efforts were were impacting. And I listen, I don't think there aren't people who are eating their way to their weight. I'm sure there are. I'm saying that. I think that some people's bodies just are mis tuned, like, no differently than you need that Synthroid now because your thyroid is not picking up the the TSH correctly, right? Like, so, yeah, you know? So you, you take that t4 not because your body's not making it, but because your body's not using it correctly, so you kind of flood your body with extra T for so that you get enough of it, almost like, you know, you really only need, like that little squirt bottle in a football game that they squirt in the players faces, but for some reason, it doesn't make it into your mouth, so they have to shoot a fire hose at you, and then you get as much as you want. And that's what's happening with that. I don't think that's not what's happening to me, because I'm going to tell you right now, arms, butt, legs, hips, my back, my chest. There's no extra weight on me anymore, and it's coming out of my stomach. It's been the entire time. I've never I could lose weight like crazy. It would never come out of my stomach, like, if I could lose 15 or 20 pounds, like, I could starve myself and lose weight 10 years ago, it wouldn't come out of my stomach. My stomach's almost gone. I'm down to measuring my stomach by handfuls of fat. That's how I do it. Like, I'm down to four of handfuls, and I can feel when they're like, I didn't measure myself first. Sometimes I'm like, disappointed that I didn't but I didn't measure my body, but I'm telling you right now, my arms, my hands, my face, my legs, there's not an ounce of fat on me anywhere, like I and I'm not too thin, like I'm not like skin stretched over muscle over bone, I look healthy, and the extra fats coming out of my midsection, it came out of my I'm so embarrassed to say I probably had side boobs at one point. They're gone. You know what I mean? And that's not attractive for a guy.

Laura 48:43
That's not attractive for anyone, really. No,

Scott Benner 48:45
listen, Laura, that depends on what you like. But I'm saying that for me, it didn't look good on me, my back, which I never would, lose weight off my back, my face looks so different. It's insane.

Laura 48:56
Do you have loose skin? No, I do. I probably have 10 to 15 pounds of loose skin. I

Scott Benner 49:02
am vitamining and supplementing, and, AG, wanting and like, trying to give my body everything possible that I can so that hopefully it can bounce back from that. I have a little bit under my arms, but it's getting better. I had it on the inside of my thighs, but that actually tightened up, and my stomach is like astonishingly tightening as it's shrinking. It's great. I'm gonna have some around my belly button when it's over. I know for sure, but not nearly the way I expected to.

Laura 49:30
I don't have as much as I thought I was gonna have, either considering how much weight I've lost, I

Scott Benner 49:36
swear to you. And and by the way, I used to think, Oh, what are that? What's that person gonna do without loose skin? And now that I'm a person who is in that situation, I'm going to tell you, it's so much better than being bloated. I don't even care. Oh,

Laura 49:48
God, right, yeah,

Scott Benner 49:50
don't even care. Wow,

Laura 49:52
I have a an appointment with my What do you call it the weight loss doctor, which I don't really need because I'm not losing. Wait, but I like the accountability that year, because I'm seeing her yearly. Now, I

Scott Benner 50:06
would lead with, what if I have a GLP deficiency? Can we try one of these other medications for a little while? Now, look, I I'm gonna say too, there are some people who have, like, terrible side effects from it. I'm not one of them, right? And I don't think it's a lot of people, but it's enough that it's a known side effect. I've seen, you know, a handful of stories of people having, like, bowel obstructions even, but I don't know those people's details. Like, you know what I mean? Like, if they were, as an example, if you have had type two diabetes your whole life, and you have some gastroparesis, and then we put in a drug that slows down your digestion, maybe you get a bowel destruction from that, right? You know what I mean, like, but I'm gonna tell you that like I'm on it. I let my daughter take it. My what? My wife's lost 65 pounds on it, my wife, who had her thyroid explode after she had my daughter and gained a ton of weight that was inexplicable. Nothing about her life had changed, and she fought with it for a decade, and, you know, got on top of it as much as she could, but was not winning that fight. She looks like a different person now, and by the way, too, my knees don't hurt anymore. My back's not sore. My joints feel better, like I can run up and down the stairs. The other night we threw away, you know, when you like, go down in the basement, you're like, Oh, how did all this stuff get down here? We should be throwing out. Yeah, and, and, right. So that happened the other weekend. We were like, Let's get rid of this stuff. I ran up and down my stairs 100 times with a jacket on, up out of my house, down to the driveway, put it down, came back in over and over again. I did it for two hours. I didn't break a sweat, I didn't run out of breath. Like it was amazing. Like, if you would have found me a year ago, I would have told you I don't think I'm gonna live into my mid 60s, and now I'm like, I think I could live forever like this. I'm not kidding, you know. So I

Laura 51:55
feel so much better, I bet from even before. I mean, I was getting, like, you had stand up from sitting and be stiff. I don't have that anymore. Yeah, and this was before the diabetes, you know, I was like, Oh, I'm getting old, and that sucks. Getting up and down off the floor was hard. But now I'm like, spring chicken baby.

Scott Benner 52:17
I found myself a year and a half ago, I got up off the sofa, and I was, like, bent over. I couldn't even stand up straight, like, I was like, what is happening? And to your point, you think, like, Oh, I'm getting old. I guess this is what they mean, bullshit. I was fat, that was the problem, and I didn't have whatever. This is, like, whatever GLP brings to you. And I have to admit, I know I sound ridiculous, saying that something is helping me, and I don't even know exactly how, but I don't really care. Yeah, so you know, it just is working for me. That's what I know right now. I somebody said, do you have to take it the rest of your life? I said, I don't care if I have to. I have to. I don't know what that means. Like, I mean, I'm sure we'll dial it back at some point, because there's going to be a point when I don't want to lose weight, and we're gonna probably have to find a balance to stop that from happening. But my doctors already said we could, you know, we'll try lower doses. We'll try longer intervals in between the injections. She's like, who know? She's like, we'll figure it out. Just very cool, having a good doctor like that, you know, yeah. Anyway, why did you come on the podcast? I'm sorry. It's only been, well, I

Laura 53:21
wanted to talk about the late onset a little bit, and the whole weight thing, you know, I the, I did really screw myself up with the eating, and I saw myself going down a bad path of, you know, really, I mean, I'm still overweight, so I clearly don't have the eating disorder that would make me excruciatingly thin. But I I was screwed up, and so I found somebody on my own who was a t1 who did counseling, and she helped me a lot, making me like, I mean, was it CRT? Is that what they call it? Wait,

Scott Benner 54:06
the rapid eye movement thing? Oh, no, no,

Laura 54:09
no. But where they you have to do things. So she was like, go out to eat and eat something that scares you.

Scott Benner 54:20
Nice. I don't know that one, but okay,

Laura 54:23
it's behavioral therapy. Okay, I don't remember the name anyway. It doesn't matter. But she helped me a lot. Helped me get out of my head about it. One of the things that Victoza, which is also a GLP one, it's just lower. It's liraglutide instead of semiglutide Anyway, that has stopped a lot of the food noise, which is great. Oh, you had that. My

Scott Benner 54:45
wife talks about that. Oh,

Laura 54:47
my God. I mean, because it's my whole entire life. Well, what am I going to eat? What am I going to eat? It. Can I have that? How much is in that? Should I eat this first? Should I not have that? We're going out to eat. What am I going to get? I'm going to be with those people. Know, just this constant, never shut up, yeah. And now I don't, I don't think about it hardly at all. My

Scott Benner 55:07
I've said it before. My wife said that she'd open her eyes in the morning and think about what she was gonna eat for breakfast immediately. And then she said while she was making breakfast, she'd find herself thinking about what she was gonna eat for lunch. Yep, that's, yeah. She's like, it's, it's insane, like, and now she said it's completely gone.

Laura 55:24
So now I did get, I got a referral to the psychologist who's on the on the diabetes in the clinic that I go to, and she's been very helpful as well. I feel now like I'm no longer screwed up with my food. Yeah, and I'm in a zone that I can maintain without having to think about it all the time, and that has been very helpful. That's excellent. Good for you. So I want people to seek the help that they need and to recognize when you think you're going down a path because it's very hard. The whole thing is hard, man, it sucks every time I go to the end though, she was like, so how are you like? I'm all right, diabetes still sucks. And she puts that in my chart, diabetes still sucks, like, it's always gonna suck. Yes, never gonna not suck. Thanks

Scott Benner 56:16
a lot. To learn that in medical school. Fantastic, right? Yeah. You

Laura 56:21
don't really need to write that down. It's always going to be that way, and it's just the late onset is hard because, you know, I lived my entire life a different way, yeah, but in a way, in a weird kind of way, it was a blessing. I'm not going to say that, but I've heard people say that. Tell me why? Me to figure it out. And I am way healthier than I was before. Yeah, and I wasn't unhealthy. All my labs were good. My a 1c, was like five and a half. My cholesterol was good. Everything was good. I was fine. I was just fat.

Scott Benner 57:00
You really think you had an eating disorder.

Laura 57:03
I think I was very close, okay. I mean, I still can just not eat anything, yeah,

Scott Benner 57:09
just not, just not. So you're talking about an eating disorder, not in the way of, like, Oh, I'm uncontrollably eating, or I'm eating and purging, or something like that. You're, you're saying, like, I was just not eating.

Laura 57:18
I was not eating, yeah, and nutritional,

Scott Benner 57:21
like, downgrade. That's why I think I look so bad last year, because of nutrition. Like, I was trying to get all my nutrition through, like, a green drink, you know what I mean? Because, yeah, I wasn't really eating very much. And still, I'm taking those, like, I still drink ag one, and I take my like, you know, I take my vitamins and everything really religiously. By the way, I take vitamins, like, very, very religiously every day, vitamin D, magnesium, a probiotic, zinc. I take a multivitamin. That's really good. And and I take iron, like, three times a week with some vitamin C. And so I'm very, like, very careful to do all that, because I really think my body is going through a metamorphosis, and I want to give it as many building blocks as I possibly can. Yeah,

Laura 58:09
yeah. My little my pill case has two actual pills, and all the rest of it is supplements. Yeah, do you take all that stuff? And I'm like, Well, yeah, there's the calcium and the magnesium and the this one and that one, and the Omega three and the I got it all in there.

Scott Benner 58:27
I like, when somebody said to me, I'm like, Well, I, you know, you shouldn't have to take all those supplements. And I was like, Well, I do. Because if I don't, like, look at this photo of me when it looked like my eyes were falling back in my head, and, you know, I look terrible all the time. If I was going to go to a speaking engagement, I'd have to start six weeks before the engagement and go completely like low carb, just to get enough of the bloat out of my body that I felt comfortable getting on stage. Wow, yeah. And so that's not a thing you tell people about, but I absolutely that's not my situation right now. Like, if you came to me right now and said, Hey, stand up in front of 500 people and talk, I wouldn't even think twice about it. Like, okay, great. What are we going to talk about? And I jump right up, but be back. Then I would set my I would set up my things, and then I would do these, like, very restrictive, like, very high protein, almost no carb diets to kind of, like, diaphragm myself a little bit, like, try to get like, as much liquid out of my body as I could. But I wasn't really, like, losing much weight. I was just getting, like, the blow down, yeah, yeah. It's, uh, it's hard, like, it's hard to stand up in front of people thinking, I know what I look like. You know what I mean?

Laura 59:41
So, yeah, yes, I totally understand that. Yeah,

Scott Benner 59:45
that's I feel so much better now it's Synchron I actually thought today my clothing sizes are dropping so much that I've been trying very hard not to replace clothes. Because I'm like, if I just buy another shirt, this shirt is not going to fit me in six weeks. So I've been very careful about it, because I don't want to spend extra money where I don't have to. I just had that thought today, like, I have to go buy different pants. Like, I'm gonna go to a I think I'm gonna go to a 34 waist, which, trust me, as a person who at one point had a 40 waist, like, it's insane. It's such a significant difference. I wear a large T shirt. Now. I used to wear a two XL, and there were days where I was like, oh, things grabbing me. And then one day, I was like, I can't wear this two XL anymore. I look homeless in it. So I threw it away, and I got, like, some xls. And then before I knew it, I was said to my wife, I'm like, I think I have to get large T shirts. I don't think I'm ever going to be a medium. But I don't think my that's just my size of my body. I said to somebody the other day, I'm sitting here at a 90 degree angle recording the podcast, and I can see the hinge in my hip like I can see where my leg touches my torso. And I was like, that's such a crazy thing to me. I was recording one time on camera with somebody, and I could see myself like I could see the image of myself that they were seeing. And I started touching my forearm, and someone said, What are you doing? And I said, Oh, I thought there was something on my arm. And then I looked closer, and it was the line between the two muscles in your arm. And I thought, Oh, I've never seen that before. Like, seriously, you know. So I don't know if the if these things can help people to not have all the problems that you've described and all the problems I've described, and to generally be healthier, to live more comfortably. I'm not even talking about esthetically, you know, that's a bonus. Honestly. Yeah, I think run, don't walk. You know what? I

Laura 1:01:34
mean? Yeah, I've had to replace my wardrobe twice. The first time it was like Target clothes, because I knew it was transitional, but now I am in a single digit size. Yeah, I have not been in since, like, junior high. I wear a medium shirt. It's just amazing.

Scott Benner 1:01:57
I learned that skinny Scott likes fashion. I didn't know that. I upgraded just slightly, like, not, not this great expense. I spend a little more money just on the T shirts I buy now so that they they're just out of a slightly better material, and I look better because I didn't know that. And I never would have done that before, because that material is a little, um, stretchy, and so I would have been super afraid of how it would have clung to me. So I would never have bought it before. I would always stick with, nobody wants anything clingy, right? I would stick with more cotton because it would billow. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah, such a good deal. But also, my brother did it. He's type two, lost like 35 pounds, a 1c went way down. There's just a lot about this that's valuable. So anyway, good luck to everybody. Whatever. What else? Anything else, Laura, we done? You did a great job. I was terrific.

Laura 1:02:53
I do. I did have a couple more things. Number one is I use an OmniPod dash and my endo has been pushing me to switch to the five and use the algorithm, okay, but I'm not going to do that because, because the target is too high.

Scott Benner 1:03:12
Oh yeah, you are. What is your target on your you're probably targeting eight. I'm

Laura 1:03:16
at it'll correct at 110, I have all my settings in my pump, so I use those. I let it do the math for me, you know. So it won't add a correction unless I'm over 110 I understand, yeah, and I like it at 100 okay, I've got it down now. Like, I know what's going to happen in the afternoon. After lunch, I don't need anything again, like I eat at 11, and I won't eat again until dinner, which is usually at like seven, and by that time I'm riding around 85 and then I'll eat dinner. That's fantastic. Look at you. Well, you know, I credit a lot of that to you, Scott. I learned so much. I understand how insulin works, and I now i i do it without thinking about it's like, oh, I'm 85 and this is what I'm going to have for dinner. So I'm not going to pre bolus, right? Or I'm going to pre bolus 10 minutes, or I'm 120 I'm going to pre bolus for 20 minutes. You know, it just depends on what I'm going to eat and where I am and how what I'm going to do after you have to think about all those things. I made a list once for my my people around me about all the things you have to do to eat, like, I

Scott Benner 1:04:33
want this goddamn response, yeah.

Laura 1:04:38
And that doesn't include, like, preparing the food. It's just the 25 steps to eating,

Scott Benner 1:04:44
yeah, and, and, what a big difference they make for you. Yeah,

Laura 1:04:48
oh, it's, it's huge. I feel a little bit like I know that because my pancreas still works a little bit that it's not as volatile as it could be. Hmm. But I really think that the management wise, I've figured it out enough that when and if that ever happens, that it'll it'll be pretty much the same.

Scott Benner 1:05:12
Yeah. I wonder how much that the victims is helping you too.

Laura 1:05:15
It has helped it reduce my insulin needs, and it because it makes your pancreas produce more insulin, which I was like, isn't that going to burn it out faster? Because this is why I take insulin, right? So that my pancreas doesn't have to work so hard and burn itself out. And she was like, you would think, but no, so I don't know. It does help a little bit. You inject that daily. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, interesting, yeah, the daily injection is not the greatest, but, you know, it's just part of my routine. I get up, I poke my finger, I calibrate my Dexcom, I take my shot. I go, Oh, I take my Synthroid. I go on with my day. Yeah, yeah. Just get it out of the way. So that's another thing I so I like the g6 because I don't use the code when I started up. If you don't use the code, then you have to calibrate it every day. And I do that, and it is always right, good. It's always right. Go ahead, always. You're doing

Scott Benner 1:06:20
terrific. Larry, you really are. I'm proud of my disciple and what has happened to so I'm actually just, it's hard. It doesn't get any less awkward sometimes to know that the podcast is so helpful to people. Like, when somebody says it to my face, I'm always like, Oh, thank you. You know, I don't really know what to say so much, but hearing you mimic back the things that I know you got from this, it makes me feel terrific. I know you're a healthier person because of it, and that's really exciting for me. I

Laura 1:06:52
am, I am. I feel really lucky. And, you know, just again, I'm that kind of I've read all the things. I've read, all the books, all of them and

Scott Benner 1:07:01
are for free too. By the way, I give it away.

Laura 1:07:05
That's right, throw it out in the air, take it

Scott Benner 1:07:08
Yeah. Also, I saw ads. I just want to be clear, it's not. It is altruistic. OmniPod, yeah, yeah. Hey, omnipot.com/juice, box. Thank you. Dexcom.com/juice,

Laura 1:07:20
box. Oh, I also use the contour next, next, oh, contour next. And I pay, I pay for it myself.

Scott Benner 1:07:26
Thank you. See that, because I hope they're listening, yeah, yeah. Actually, they're a great sponsor. That's a sense of diabetes. They're actually coming on with another product soon. Actually, by the time this comes out, it's very possible the ad could be on this, but we're going to be doing ads for their CGM as well.

Laura 1:07:45
Excellent, the implantable one. Do you know it? Oh, haha. I have done three research studies, and one of them was for the six month ever since, really, how was it? Oh, it was so hard. Oh, my God. Why you didn't like it? Tell me. Oh, well, the device itself was fine. Oh, although it was kind of a it's not as accurate as because I couldn't, I wasn't. I had two of them, one in each arm. One was blind, and the other one was not. And I had to, I mean, I had to poke my finger four times a day. Oh,

Scott Benner 1:08:23
the I see what you're saying that doing the study was hard. Doing the study was hard,

Laura 1:08:27
yeah, it was not as accurate as my Dexcom. But

Scott Benner 1:08:30
this was prior to it being released.

Laura 1:08:33
It was out for three months, and I was in the study to or the trial, I think was a trial, actually, I don't know what it was for for to move it to six. Oh, I see, I see, so all you six month, errs, you're welcome.

Scott Benner 1:08:46
I got you there. Good job. And

Laura 1:08:49
now they're down to the year, and they asked me if I wanted to continue on for the year. And I was like, Absolutely not.

Scott Benner 1:08:56
You were good. Like, I'm all right. With this other one, you

Laura 1:08:59
would have to go in every like three weeks,

Unknown Speaker 1:09:03
oh, oh, I

Laura 1:09:04
see again day, like 12 hours of an IV, and every 15 minute pokes and blood draws. And just for

Scott Benner 1:09:13
the for the study, yeah, for the study participant is difficult in some things, that's for sure. Yes, I appreciate you doing that very much. I've

Laura 1:09:21
done a couple other ones that were far east. Were far easier, yeah, which like what I did one through the dermatology department, and they found me through my Endo. It was about pump sites and you know, how they were scarring and that kind of stuff. So they did these biopsies of different spots on my body where I had had a pump over like, three ago, two ago, the last one, and then they had me do it right then, yeah, so they had big chunks out of me for that. Jeez, how

Scott Benner 1:09:57
much money did you make for that? Was it enough?

Laura 1:09:59
I. That one, not really. It was like $125 gift card. What did you buy with it? Probably test strip. Oh, but the sentionic study is the one they gave me, the contour next meter. And I was like, Oh, this is fantastic. I wish I could get it, but my insurance doesn't cover it, so I just buy it myself. Pay for

Scott Benner 1:10:23
yourself. I do hear that it's possible that you can pay less for the test strips and cash than other people pay through their insurance for other test strips. That's

Laura 1:10:32
exactly right. You can pay less by just buying them yourself. Contour,

Scott Benner 1:10:36
next, com, forward, slash, contour,

Laura 1:10:38
next, that's

Scott Benner 1:10:41
hilarious. Well, I appreciate you being such a good supporter of the podcast as well. I really do appreciate it. Like this information only gets out because people listen, they support the advertisers, and they tell other people about the podcast. That's how it keeps happening. So, yeah, yeah, if that that stops, I'm just going to be a really popular Walmart cashier. I

Laura 1:11:00
recommend it. I'm in a couple of support groups, which I also recommend everybody out there, find people around you. And I mean, we don't really talk about anything, yeah, but it's helpful to have other people around you, because I don't have anybody around me. Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:11:17
no, it's more valuable than I ever imagined it would be. Watching the my Facebook group help people is

Laura 1:11:25
extraordinary, actually, yeah, yeah, yes. All

Scott Benner 1:11:29
right. Well, Laura, I appreciate you doing this with me. I am gonna go out and buy a pair of pants. You've motivated me. What do you think about do it? All right, I'm tired of like pulling my belt so tight and I'm gathering up around my waist,

Laura 1:11:42
you'll feel much better when you have pants that fit. I

Scott Benner 1:11:44
think so too. Thank you. I appreciate that. Hold on for me for one second. Okay,

today's episode of The juicebox podcast is sponsored by the Dexcom g7 which now integrates with the tandem T slim x2 system. Learn more and get started today at dexcom.com/juice. Box. If you'd like to wear the same insulin pump that Arden does, all you have to do is go to omnipod.com/juice. Box. That's it. Head over now and get started today, and you'll be wearing the same tubeless insulin pump that Arden has been wearing since she was four years old. Huge thanks to cozy Earth for sponsoring this episode of The juicebox podcast. Cozy earth.com use the offer code juicebox at checkout to save 40% off of your entire order if you're newly diagnosed, check out the bold beginnings series. Find it at juicebox podcast.com, up in the menu, in the feature tab of the private Facebook group, or go into the audio app you're listening in right now and search for juicebox podcast, bold beginnings, juicebox is one word. Juicebox podcast, bold beginnings. This series is perfect for newly diagnosed people. I want to thank you so much for listening and remind you please subscribe and follow to the podcast wherever you're listening right now, if it's YouTube, Apple podcast, Spotify, or any other audio app, go hit follow or subscribe, whichever your app allows for and set up those downloads so you never miss an episode, especially an apple podcast. Go into your settings and choose, download all new episodes. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back very soon with another episode of The juicebox podcast. Hey, what's up? Everybody? If you've noticed that the podcast sounds better and you're thinking like, how does that happen? What you're hearing is Rob at wrong way, recording, doing his magic to these files. So if you want him to do his magic to you, wrong way. Recording.com, you got a podcast. You want somebody to edit it. You want rob you.