Scott Benner 12/17/24 Scott Benner 12/17/24

#1385 Estate Sale

Katy, living with T1D since age 11, shares her journey through inadequate early care, insurance struggles, GLP medication challenges, and managing life with two kids, including one with autism.

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

Scott Benner 0:00
Welcome back, friends to another episode of The Juicebox podcast.

Katie has type one diabetes and a couple of kids got a bunch of other stuff going on. She was diagnosed when she was 11 years old. But the reason she came on the show, it changed because she lost her insurance. You'll see what I'm talking about as you listen 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. Are you an adult living with type one or the caregiver of someone who is and a US resident, if you are, I'd love it if you would go to T 1d exchange.org/juicebox and take the survey. When you complete that survey, your answers are used to move type one diabetes research of all kinds. So if you'd like to help with type one research, but don't have time to go to a doctor or an investigation and you want to do something right there from your sofa. This is the way t 1d, exchange.org/juice, box. It should not take you more than about 10 minutes 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.

This episode of The Juicebox podcast is brought to you by my favorite diabetes organization, touched by type one. Please take a moment to learn more about them at touched by type one.org on Facebook and Instagram. Touched by type one.org check out their many programs, their annual conference awareness campaign, their D box program, dancing for diabetes. They have a dance program for local kids, a golf night and so much more. Touched by type one.org. You're looking to help or you want to see people helping people with type one. You want touched by type one.org. 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 this episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by the continuous glucose monitor that my daughter wears the Dexcom g7 dexcom.com/juice box. Get started today using this link, and you'll not only be doing something great for yourself. You'll be supporting the Juicebox podcast. My

Katie 2:44
name is Katie. I live in Florida. I'm 49 years old, and I've been a type one diabetes for 38 years, almost 38 years since you were 11, since I was 11 years

Scott Benner 2:54
old. Damn. Be impressed, everyone. Okay, so hold on a second. Diagnosed at 11, type one. Do you have any other auto immune issues? No,

Katie 3:02
I don't. Nothing celiac. No, my daughter does have a gluten allergy. She has not been tested for celiac, but she definitely has an allergy.

Scott Benner 3:15
How about even eczema?

Katie 3:18
I do have eczema. I did have it pretty bad as a child. I've kind of grown out of it. It's gotten a lot better. Okay,

Scott Benner 3:25
um, do you have like, bad seasonal allergies, by any chance? Not

Katie 3:30
really bad. No. Cool, but you have them? Yeah, I would say so. All right,

Scott Benner 3:34
how about in your family line, your mom, your dad, your grandmother, your grandfather, stuff like

Katie 3:38
that. No, both my parents are treated for type two. My brother is the only other one with an autoimmune disorder. He has alopecia universalis. Yeah, so he has no hair anywhere on his body.

Scott Benner 3:56
Is that that means, like universally he has is that what that's supposed to mean?

Katie 4:00
Yep, no hair anywhere his whole life. No, he got that in his 30s. He started losing his hair in his 30s. That must have been a shock. I think it was. It started coming out in perfect circles. Think it started with his mustache and his eyebrows, and then he noticed it in his hair, and then it just started falling out all over. If

Scott Benner 4:24
that happened to me, as shocking and as upset as I would be, and how much, and I have a ton of empathy for your brother, I know for certain I would make a joke to somebody and say, I think tiny aliens are landing on me at night and creating cross circles. I would, yeah, he's

Katie 4:40
the oldest, 56 I believe there's four of us all together, and I'm the youngest. He's, yeah, he's, I believe he's fairly fine with it now,

Scott Benner 4:50
yeah, that's crazy. I mean, it's not crazy. Also, it's an autoimmune issue, right? It is, yeah. So how about his kids? Do they have any autoimmune stuff?

Katie 4:59
He doesn't have any biological kids. He has two step sons. I

Scott Benner 5:03
see okay. Now I want to start here by saying, also, you have one of those names that I feel like it's trying to trick me, and I wasn't listening very closely at the beginning when you introduced yourself. So is it you say Cathy or Katie? No, it's Katie. Katie. Okay, yeah. I mean, I thought it was, but I've had people come on with your spelling, and they're like, it's Kathy. And I'm like, I it isn't

Katie 5:26
no no Katie. I've gotten on my whole life, though, okay, when Katy Perry became popular, that was when people stopped calling me Kathy. So it was way later in my life,

Scott Benner 5:36
if only she could have pulled together sooner. You know, people started getting it right for me. Yeah, she said something shocking in an interview the other day. It's so shocking that I won't mention it here, but I was like, I can't believe you said that out loud. Nevertheless, if people have heard it, they're gonna go like, Oh, I know she had something to do with the dishes and Orlando Bloom. I won't say anything else. Now, I'll have to look it up. Yeah, don't, don't, don't look too closely. Okay, what I was going to say is, I don't know how long it's been now since I started saying, like, Hey, if you know you're using a GLP medication, you have type one, you should come on the podcast. I thought I was going to get a couple of people, you know what I mean? Like, I just didn't imagine that so many people would come forward because it's off label. It's just happening over and over again. So I want to learn a little bit about your journey, but then, you know, we'll get into what you're doing now, obviously, but I appreciate you reaching out. And, you know, I hope for people listening, they're not like, oh God, every week there's somebody on using a GLP, but, like, I don't control the flow of that. Like, you know, it's sort of the same thing as, you know, if people are like, oh my, you know, this week, everybody that he had on was like, using a T slim, or everybody he has on is using like, a Dexcom or an omnipot, whatever I have the people on who reach out to be on. So, like, yeah, like, I don't control the flow of it. But let's start at the beginning for a second. You're 11. You remember your diagnosis at all? The Dexcom g7 is sponsoring this episode of The Juicebox podcast, and it features a lightning fast 30 minute warm up time that's right from the time you put on the Dexcom g7 till the time you're getting readings. 30 minutes. That's pretty great. It also has a 12 hour grace period so you can swap your sensor when it's convenient for you, all that, on top of it being small, accurate, incredibly wearable and light, these things, in my opinion, make the Dexcom g7 a no brainer. The Dexcom g7 comes with way more than just this, up to 10 people can follow you. You can use it with type one, type two, or gestational diabetes. It's covered by all sorts of insurances. And this might be the best part. It might be the best part alerts and alarms that are customizable, so that you can be alerted at the levels that make sense to you. Dexcom.com/juice, box. Links in the show notes, links at Juicebox podcast.com, to Dexcom and all the sponsors. When you use my links, you're supporting the production of the podcast and helping to keep it free and plentiful. If you're looking for a last minute holiday gift that doesn't feel last minute, check out cozy Earth and use my offer code to save 40% off of your entire cart that's going to be the sheets, the towels and the clothing, whatever you buy from cozy Earth com, you will save 40% by using Juicebox at checkout. That's all you have to do, is put in my code Juicebox at checkout and you'll save 40% and I'm talking about everything from dryer balls to the towels that I use to you know what I mean? They've got towels. They've got clothing that is super comfortable. I'm wearing the sweat pants right now. They're awesome. I'm gonna go out later today and use my pullover from cozy Earth also awesome. This stuff is temperate, right? It keeps you warm, but not hot. It keeps you cool, but not cold. Every way you want to be is the way cozy Earth wants you to be the sheets are a joy to sleep in. The towels, like I said, get all of your bits and your grooves and oh my goodness, the clothing, cozy earth.com. Use the offer code juice box at checkout to save 40%

Katie 9:13
I do. Yeah, I do. I remember specifically what stands out in my mind, is going to the movies, ordering M, M, S and a Coke, and getting up, I don't know how many times to go to the bathroom. My stomach hurting, and my mom saying something's not right. You shouldn't be paying this much. She said that I started wetting the bed shortly after that, and her knowing that that wasn't something I should be doing at 11 years old, she had enough knowledge of type one to know that that's probably what it was. She bought the little sticks that you had to pee on, and mine turned really dark, so she made everybody in the house pee on one nobody else's did. And except for hers, was a little bit darker than everybody else's, which, of course, she found was because she was on her way the developing type two. She got me into the pediatrician pretty quickly. They did the glucose test. They had me drink the nasty, you know, drink, and tested my blood sugar one time, probably a half an hour later, and immediately told her that they needed, I needed to get to the hospital right away. We lived in Washington State at the time, and we lived across the Puget Sound and needed to take a ferry to Seattle's Children's Hospital. So they told her that we needed to be on the next ferry over. So we went home, packed a bag, and we're on the next ferry. She called my dad, told him to come home from work. I remember asking her if I was going to die, and she told me she didn't know. She's like, I don't think so, but you I don't know. Can I

Scott Benner 11:01
say something to any parent listening? If your child says, Am I gonna die? You go, No, of course not.

Katie 11:09
I don't remember feeling like, Oh, wow. This is awful for me. I just was like, wow. I'm getting a lot of attention. You know,

Scott Benner 11:17
I'm still laughing about your cop saying, No,

Katie 11:20
I don't know. So I, I was in a room with four other girls, and, you know, gave me insulin. They gave me a sponge to practice on with saline and a sliding scale and all the things, and I started learning how to give myself shots.

Unknown Speaker 11:37
Is this 1986

Katie 11:39
1986 and they told my parents from the very beginning, this is her disease. She needs to learn everything about it. And I think I probably got a shot from someone else, maybe once. But other than that, I had to

Scott Benner 11:56
do it all describe using the sliding scale to me if my

Katie 12:00
blood sugar was in a certain range, I took this much insulin, and I was on regular and NPH, I can't remember exactly how much, but it was so many units. If I was between, you know, like 80 and 150 you do a

Scott Benner 12:17
test, and if you depending on where you were you'd use a certain amount of insulin. How often every day did you do that?

Katie 12:24
I tested before each meal? No, I didn't. I don't think I tested before lunch. I think it was only in the morning and then the evening. Okay? And that was it. My

Scott Benner 12:37
point is, is that phrase, this is their disease. They have to understand everything about it is a is a phrase that comes from a time when what you need to know was you tested twice a day, then you looked at the piece of paper, and then you gave yourself a shot, yeah. And somehow we've carried that forward. Now there's all this information and faster acting insolence and different ideas. And there are still some people who will look at an 11 year old and go, this is on you. And I'm like, wow, yeah, yeah, different world, you know what? I mean, yeah, it's easier in the long run because of the technology, but in the short term, there's a lot more to learn.

Katie 13:09
Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, and there was a no sugar. I mean, I wasn't allowed any sugar. No sugar allowed.

Scott Benner 13:16
Oh, fun. How long did that last? I would

Katie 13:19
say probably into my 20s. Oh, so

Scott Benner 13:21
you were very low carb. No,

Katie 13:24
I wouldn't call it low carb. Oh, so you definitely had, oh, yeah,

Scott Benner 13:28
yeah, just not a lollipop,

Katie 13:29
right? Gotcha. No sugar,

Scott Benner 13:32
no pure sugar, not sugar in something else that we don't care about. So

Katie 13:36
cake, no cookies, no

Unknown Speaker 13:38
cake. You're saying nothing fun.

Katie 13:41
I can have chips, so I definitely like the salty stuff.

Scott Benner 13:44
Isn't that fascinating that they would tell you there's no sugar, but carbs are fine, right? Yeah, very strange. Well, not strange, but for how people understand things, not that also simple, sugars would spike you more drastically and probably, and this is me guessing a little bit, but on that insulin, you probably weren't seeing as much resistance. So, right? You know what I mean? Maybe that insulin had a had an easier time with a piece of bread than it would have with a, you know, with a push up pop or something like that. But all right, so fair. Fair is fair, but you live like that into your 20s. Do you go to college? No, did diabetes have anything to do with

Katie 14:18
that? No, I don't think so. Okay, I don't think so. No, I was pretty independent, and I think and my parents, really, they were big believers, and you can do whatever you want to. So we moved to Florida when I was 14, so I got a new endo when we moved here, through Jocelyn diabetes, and I actually kept that endo until about a year ago. I had the same endo from the time I was 14 years old until a year ago.

Scott Benner 14:47
Really? Yeah, hindsight tells you that was a good idea or a bad idea. I'm

Katie 14:51
gonna say bad idea. Okay, why? He literally let me skate by on being just good enough for a long, long time. So he let me make pretty much all my adjustments and my own decisions. And I wouldn't say until I really started listening to the podcast and really started understanding that the actual process of my own disease and becoming my own advocate, that I was like, I'm going to take over and adjust this myself and do things myself. How

Scott Benner 15:24
long ago did you find the podcast?

Katie 15:26
Probably about three years ago.

Scott Benner 15:28
Oh my gosh, yeah.

Katie 15:30
So I lived with an A, 1c in the sevens, the eights for most my life.

Scott Benner 15:38
Yeah. Do you have any anything going on now, because of that, I am programmed not to say complications. Can I tell you something? Yeah, Katie, I'm just going to share something here that I think constantly and I never say out loud. I'm going to say it to see if I can get rid of it. I tried, for some reason in the past, so hard not to say complications, that when I want the word, I can't even find it in my brain, I've strong arm myself into not saying it. And I don't want to do that. I want to just say, like, Do you have any complications?

Katie 16:06
I understand that, because I do the same thing in the line of work. I'm in I don't like to say disabilities, so I understand that too. I try not to say that. I don't like it, yeah, so I do the same type of thing, but because

Scott Benner 16:20
I don't want to, I very firmly don't, do not believe in scaring people into taking care of themselves. And I think that, like, if that's the next question I ask, it could come off as trying to scare the people listening. But I I'm just asking because you had an A one saying the seven and eights for a really long time, and I want to know what the impact of that was.

Katie 16:42
The only thing that I am dealing with now, and I absolutely hate it, is my is frozen shoulder. It definitely hurts all the time. I

Scott Benner 16:54
have heard it described in a way that doesn't make it sound like the tiniest bit of fun. Have you ever had them work on it in any way? No,

Katie 17:00
I have gone through physical therapy for both of them. The biggest benefit I've gotten is through a chiropractor. That's what I've benefited the most from. Okay, so, but, yeah, I do my stretches and everything, but I do see a chiropractor regularly.

Scott Benner 17:17
Okay, did they do that thing where you make a chicken wing on the side, and then you push your elbow back, and they pull on your shoulder. I haven't done that. How about how about the one where they you bend your fist up towards your shoulder, and then they grab your elbow and pull it back.

Katie 17:32
That sounds horrible. I gotta just tell you

Scott Benner 17:34
I have and I'm not alone, because I see the views on the YouTube channels. But Scottie loves to watch somebody get adjusted by a chiropractor on the I do too. Yeah, I do too. It's funny because never to the point where I'm like, I'm gonna go, like, I'm gonna go hunt one. It's just there's something about it that I'm just like, Oh, I wonder what that is like, the one now that I in my wildest dreams, I can't imagine is good for you. They put the victim on a table, on their back, and then pull their head up straight. Have you seen that?

Katie 18:05
Yeah, yeah. I look at almost like they're gonna pop their head off. Yeah,

Scott Benner 18:10
yeah. It's so rudimentary, they'll like, wrap a towel around their neck, grab the towel and, like, yank up on your and as I see it, I have two distinct thoughts. That does not look safe and, oh, I would like to try that. I know that's ridiculous, but anyway, yeah, but your chiropractor helps you. You go to adjustment. It helps your shoulder. Yeah. So my next question is, is, did you go to therapy before or after you found the podcast?

Katie 18:35
That's a good question.

Scott Benner 18:36
You know? Why I'm asking I'm wondering if lower, more stable blood sugars. Like, I don't know if the frozen shoulder is something that's now happened and it's there, and you can't, I think it is, and you can't really change it much, because they break away the because that whole part of that therapy is, like, they move your arm around a lot, right to just kind of break, break it free. And it's very painful, from what I understand. I

Katie 18:58
think I started going probably before my mom had a frozen shoulder, and so I knew that's what it was. And that happened probably five years ago. The first one okay, and it resolved, and then the second one started. And every time I've gone they've said, Well, what did you do to injure it? And I've said, nothing. I didn't do anything. I'm a type one diabetic. I kind of, it's par for the course. I knew this was probably going to happen to me. Yeah, it's a current issue. It is with one of them, my right side, right now. Okay, yeah, which is kind of brings up another thing is, you know, going to the doctor, if you go to a just a general practice doctor or a new doctor at my age with my gray hair. I don't know if you remember, we just met on Saturday. Of course, I don't. And they see me at my age and I say, I'm a type one diabetic, they kind of look at me like, Are you sure you know? Like they don't believe you if somebody at my age or your type one, are you sure you're. Type one, and they look at my chart again. Oh yeah, I guess you are. It's like, well, what? It's kind of they don't see us often. It's like, we grow up, you know? And I'm a type one, and I have been since I was 11. I know what I'm talking about. So this frozen shoulder, when I say it's this way because I didn't injure it. It just is something that has happened to me.

Scott Benner 20:24
I've had elevated blood sugars for 30 years, right? Yeah, I don't know.

Katie 20:29
They just a lot of times, don't quite get what I'm trying to say,

Scott Benner 20:32
yeah. And so you find yourself having to re explain it all the time, all the time, yeah, should we take a left turn here and talk about your estate sale

Katie 20:42
story. Oh, sure,

Scott Benner 20:44
I love this. Yeah, this is awesome. So I don't want to interject. Just tell it from the beginning. Well,

Katie 20:49
I was pulling up to an estate sale that's really close to my house. I happened to see a woman and her husband walking out and on her jeans looked like a pager. And I thought, nobody in 2004 or 24 not 14 has a pager. And I said, that's an insulin pump, and it looks like mine. And my son was with me, and I said, that is a tea slim. And I rolled my window down, and I said, I have the same pump as you. And she grabbed it. She said, No way. She came up to my window and she said, You have type one? And I said, Yeah, I do. And I pulled mine out. I wear mine in my bra, of course. And and so we immediately started talking, and I said, Do you listen to and she finished my sentence, and she said, The Juicebox podcast. And so then we exchanged names and phone numbers and became Facebook friends, and we met for dinner about two weeks later and took that picture. And of course, while we were in that restaurant, talking and speaking the same language about diabetes and everything. There was a man in the restaurant that just let out the biggest art ever and just shocked us, and we couldn't stop giggling. And so I had to write that on the Facebook page, because I thought it was so funny that, I mean, we talk about bodily functions on that page anyway, so why not share it and and then add that picture of us? So I thought it was really funny, and I was happy to see that everybody else thought it was really funny too.

Scott Benner 22:31
Oh yeah, no, it was just terrific. I'm wondering, How frequently do you see other type ones out in the world?

Katie 22:35
It made me kind of wonder how often we have ran into each other, because we also found out her name is Laura. We also found out that we don't live very far from each other at all, and we do have friend, a friend in common. So, I mean, in Jacksonville is a pretty big city, so we must have seen each other more than you know, more than once. So it's just

Scott Benner 22:58
fascinating, because you're similarly aged. Am

Katie 23:00
I right? We are. Yeah, we're only a couple years apart, and even

Scott Benner 23:03
though you're, you're younger, you both have like, white hair. Yes,

Katie 23:07
a lot of people said we looked we look alike. I don't think we look alike, but yes, we both have gray hair. Yeah, we're, we're probably just two years apart, but

Scott Benner 23:16
you don't have like, old lady kinky gray hair. No, you have that. You can't. You have that because my wife's hair looks like yours. It has, yeah? It's like, silvery, yeah. Like, people look at it, they're like, Oh, my God. How did you accomplish that? How can I do that? And she's like, Oh, I just stopped dying my hair one day. And this is what happens,

Katie 23:32
exactly, genetics. Yeah,

Scott Benner 23:34
it's interesting. But what's more interesting is you don't see type ones out in the wild that often you see one. You speak up, because you know she's got your pump. And the two of you listen to this podcast. But when you said, Hey, do you listen to she knew what you were saying and completed the sentence? She did? You have to everyone listening for a second. Has to put yourself in my shoes when I hear that story, because I'm like, What the hell it's one thing to know the podcast is popular and out in the world and everything, but you really do limit the percentage of chance that two of you are gonna know what it is and not just know what it is, but have it so top of mind that if somebody says, Hey, do you listen? And while diabetes is in your head, you're like, Oh my God, they're gonna say Juicebox podcast. Like, that's crazy to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really appreciated you sharing that, and then you came to touch by type one last week I

Katie 24:25
did, and I went the the previous year as well, and I did just get the notification of when it's going to be the year after. So I'm pretty excited to go again, and it's only a couple hours away from me, so it's easy for me to go, and that's fun. Yeah, I just

Scott Benner 24:41
saw them announce it on their social media, and I jumped on and said, Hey, I haven't unpacked my bag yet from this one like slow, the person who runs the whole thing, jumped on and she said, My bag's not unpacked yet either. A lovely event, and they do such a wonderful job putting it together. Yeah, yeah, it's really something. But, but. Was nice to meet you in person like that. That was awesome. If we met the year before, I apologize for not knowing that I saw you

Katie 25:05
last year, and I think I talked to you, but I don't know that we talked much. Okay, I think I was fairly new to the podcast then. So, okay,

Scott Benner 25:14
so then explain to me, then if you've been listening to the podcast for maybe a year or a couple of years, maybe yes, right? And you've had diabetes your whole flipping life. How do you turn on a podcast made by a guy who doesn't have diabetes, right? Fair enough. My daughter has it, and I've been, you know, helping her take care of it for a very long time and all. But like, how do you turn that on and think, like, Oh, I'm gonna listen to this. Why don't you think like, this guy couldn't possibly understand my life? Or, how do you even know you need more so many questions in there. I'm so sorry. I'm unclear. How did you know to look for something like what was forcing you to go out and look for something that's my first question. Let's

Katie 25:51
see. I think part of the reason is because I am a parent of a child with and here's the word that I said, I don't like to use, I'm going to say different ability that is 22 years old, that was diagnosed at a young age, and I learned everything I possibly could about his disability. And so I then went into the field of autism and learned everything that I could, and now try and help other kids, and he is very well equipped in his life, and so I kind of knew that I could listen to you, because I kind of did what you are doing. I does that make sense? You're

Scott Benner 26:47
out there helping people with autism, and you're not. You don't have some fancy degree or have and I don't have it, right,

Katie 26:54
right? So I taught him to advocate for himself, but I never advocated for my own self. You know what I mean. So I thought, why am I not doing that for myself? If I did, if I instilled it in him, I need to take it back for myself. You're

Scott Benner 27:11
aware then that your care is not all it could be exactly. And your whole adult like, you're married, right? You have other kids, or just one. I have two, two kids, two kids, yeah, two kids. You're married. You've had diabetes for three plus decades, almost, you know, almost four, right? You know that entire time I could be doing better for myself. Why don't you? Yeah,

Katie 27:30
I mean, I wasn't doing horrible. No, no,

Scott Benner 27:33
and I'm certainly not saying you are. I'm saying, if you thought there was sealing What stops you from reaching for it?

Katie 27:38
I don't know, maybe just the lack of self love, you know, just not just trying to take care of everybody else, maybe, which I think a lot of mothers do.

Scott Benner 27:49
Yeah, you like yourself, though. You're not saying you didn't like yourself. Oh, I do like myself. You're just saying you were directing that, that care and concern onto other people. Oh,

Katie 27:58
definitely. Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so you

Scott Benner 28:01
decide, listen, I'm gonna tell you the same thing. Arden went off to college, and I said to Kelly, I'm like, I'm gonna go to a doctor and say, Hey, can you help me? Like, you know? And when I said it to the doctor, I said, Look, I got both of them off the college Damn. And have a heart attack. You know what I mean? Like, I mean something's, something's wrong with my body, you know, I knew that prior, and I would only reach for help if I was in a dire situation. It was interesting up until I just decided, like, Okay, I did the thing. I got everybody off, like, they're in reasonable shape now, like, you know, can I help myself a little bit? So that's awesome. When you're searching, what do you search for? When you decide, like, I'm gonna see if I can figure out more about this.

Katie 28:37
I went to the doctor that I had, you know, that I had for 30 years? And I said, he was kind of like your a 1c is it could be better, he had told me. And I said, Who, what pump, because I was on Medtronic for 25 years. And I said, Who has the best a 1c what patients have? What pump gives them the best a 1c I said, because I can't get it with Medtronic something's not right. I'm trying, and I keep throwing insulin at these with this CGM, and it's like, it's just not I keep gaining weight, and it's just not working. The CGM is, I'm constantly calibrating it. It's not right? It's not giving me the correct readings. And so he said, the T slim and and the g6 I think, was what I had at the time. And I said, Okay, well, I want to switch over to that. And he said, Okay. And, I mean, he pretty much do whatever I asked. So he gave it to me, or wrote the prescription, and I got it, and immediately everything started coming down. And was better. I went on Facebook and I joined the group for that T slim, and someone on there said, start listening to this podcast. And that's how I found you. And so I started listening to you, and that's when everything else started clicking into place.

Scott Benner 29:59
That's. Somebody said, you should try this podcast, yes, yeah,

Katie 30:04
yeah, okay, great. And then the glps came out, and again, I learned about those. And I said to my husband, who has type two, I said, Why don't you ask your doctor if you can get on these? And he did, and he started taking them. And so then I went to my doctor. And I said, hey, could I take these? And he said, Sure, I don't see why you can't take take them. And he wrote the prescription, and I started taking them. You

Scott Benner 30:28
were able to qualify for weight, I'm assuming. So, okay, so your husband qualified as a type two, though, right, right, right. If your BMI, I think, is over 27% you'll qualify with insurance for weight reasons. Did they give you, we go V or Z bound, or did they give you? Gave

Katie 30:44
me mongero? They did. And he, as he wrote it, he said they might not cover this on insurance because you're not a type two, but give it a try. And so I did, and they approved it, and they approved it for a year, and then they stopped approving it. Okay,

Scott Benner 31:02
we'll get to that. So you start taking it. I don't need your weight, but like, just keep your starting weight in mind, because I'm interested in how much you lost, if you lost any along the way, and everything else that happened. So when you start shooting it, is it point two, five? Yes. Is that how that wait? Is that how manjarna is? Yeah. Okay. And you do that for a month. I

Katie 31:23
did it for more than a month. I was on the starting dose for probably, oh, I did keep a diary of it. I'm sorry I didn't have it right here

Scott Benner 31:32
with how come the doctor didn't move you up and up? Were you not in Congress with him?

Katie 31:36
He told me, just let me know when you want to move up. Just send me through the My Chart thing, just send me a message. I just moved up slowly. Yeah, I want to say I was probably on it for about three months, the starting dose, and then I moved up, yeah, to the next one. So

Scott Benner 31:51
tell me, what was the, what was the initial impact when you started taking it? I'll find out what the dosing schedule is for Montana while you're doing that.

Katie 31:58
I would say it was, it was pretty quick that I needed, that it impacted how much insulin I needed. I went from about anywhere from 100 to 120 units a day to probably around 60. Let me tell you, I did not go to him or have much communication with him about dropping my basal rate, or how much my carb ratio, or any of that, I did it all on my own. I started just dropping it little by little, and then as my doses went up, I started dropping it more and more and more.

Scott Benner 32:37
Okay, so just let me clarify for people, because I was thinking of wegovy or ozempic When I said point two five, it's 2.5 milligrams, 2.5 right? Is the starting dose. It goes from 2.5 to five to 7.5 to 10 to 12.5 to 15, right? I do 12.5 right now. So you start using it your insulin needs drop in half. Yes. Do you have PCOS or no? Did you have a fair amount of weight to lose?

Katie 33:06
I would say I could stand to lose about 100 pounds.

Scott Benner 33:10
Okay, so do you think you had, like, insulin resistance, or were just using a lot of insulin because your body

Katie 33:14
mass? Yes. And I would say also insulin resistance. And I would say a big part of that was also menopause. I was hitting that at the same time.

Scott Benner 33:23
Is it helping with that? Yes, I hear stories about it helping people with perimenopause. Yeah, okay, you stay on it for three months. How much to weight did you lose the first three months?

Katie 33:33
I would say I lost an average of 10 pounds a month snap.

Scott Benner 33:36
I've got the power awesome. Did you notice at touch by type one this weekend, that at the opening ceremony, which is not really open, it's the opening talk, they ran a video from the previous year, and that I was briefly in that video, and that I look significantly different now than I did in that video. Yes. Wasn't that weird? Yeah, yeah. Because last year I thought, Oh, I look good here.

Katie 34:03
My daughter said that too. She's like, he's lost a lot of weight. Yeah, no

Scott Benner 34:06
kidding. And I had already lost a lot of weight because I showed up at that thing last year, and I was like, Look out people. It was really something like I sat there when I popped up in front of myself on that screen. I thought, Oh, I did not expect to have that reaction. I looked and I went, ooh, oh, I wasn't anywhere near where I am. Now, super interesting. Yeah, that's great. Do you have the same feeling, though, like you lose the first 10 pounds, you're like, Wow, all right, then it's 20, you're like, I look great. And then every time you lose more, you look back and go, What was I thinking? Yeah,

Katie 34:35
it's pretty exciting. Yeah, no, really is. It's hard to lose weight, you know, I do think that being diabetic, it kind of it works against you a little. I mean, it's difficult. It really is. I have had success in the past with Weight Watchers. Was helpful. I I've I've used that before, and I've done like a. Low carb diet. Those are always helpful, but then they, to me, aren't sustainable, because I end up just going, oh, forget I want bread or whatever, you know, like,

Unknown Speaker 35:10
I can't forget it.

Katie 35:11
Forget it. I'm starving myself in

Scott Benner 35:14
all the other ways that you had done this, had you ever lost 30 pounds in three months? No, no. I mean, it's not that it can't be done, but, man, it's hard. And you start, for me, I start looking at the clock. I'm like, hey, you know, like, when I went to the doctor at first about this, I was probably 51 and I was like, I don't have a whole lot of time here. And I know people think that's morbid, but you know what I mean? Like, yeah, what do I got here? Like, I mean, I'm gonna be 73 in 20 years. You think I'm gonna go out and travel the world and play pickleball on Thursdays and whatnot when I'm 70. Like, I hope so, but I can't count on that. Like, now I'm the time. I want to get to it a little faster. Now. Would have been nice if I would have started when I was 20, and never been in this position, I understand. But I also look back now and I see all the other things that the Manjaro, yeah, that juice, the good juice, we'll call it, like all the other things that I'm seeing it do for me that are well beyond just my weight, right?

Katie 36:06
You know, I know, and I feel that way too. So at the beginning, it is super exciting. You're like, I look so much better. I look back at the pictures, because now I've lost 50 pounds, a little over 50 pounds, and I'm like, I look so much better, but I also am like, I am amazed at how much better I feel and how much better I know that I am inside. You know how much my health is has improved, and how much less insulin I'm taking and how much I mean, not that that is a factor of health, you know, but for me, I need it, you know. Like you say, I need what you need, what you need, but I am taking so much more. It's better care of myself and on a whole. But now I'm running into this roadblock where my insurance is not going to cover it. I can still get it. My doctors will prescribe it. It's not that, but I now have had to take another job if I want to pay for this.

Scott Benner 37:10
So your doctor will prescribe it, but your insurance won't pay for it anymore, correct? They won't cover it. Can I ask you, though, if you still have 50 pounds to lose, why don't you just ask him for zbound Instead of Manjaro, they

Katie 37:23
won't cover a weight loss.

Scott Benner 37:24
Oh, your insurance doesn't cover that. No, shitty insurance. Yeah, it really is. Who do we blame your husband? Yeah, okay, we'll

Katie 37:33
do that. We'll do that. Yeah, because he can give it I can't,

Scott Benner 37:37
Julie, he has type two, right? Fancy man, I've seen people get a dual diagnosis, type one and insulin resistance. So

Katie 37:45
I switched endos, and I asked the new and endo for that if I could have a dual diagnosis. And he said, Absolutely not. You're not a type two, yeah. And I said, I have insulin resistance. And he said, No, you don't i? And I said, Okay, maybe I need a new new, new Endo. Let's

Scott Benner 38:06
see running for post. So also, maybe that's not a good example, but you know what I'm saying,

Katie 38:12
my new estate sale diversity, she has a different Endo, and she's also on mangero. So maybe I

Scott Benner 38:21
feel like what you need is a switch to a different office. Yeah. What is he like? Isn't that funny that a physician could look and see that you've had all this success and all this benefit from something and then be swayed by the arbitrary rules of an insurance company? You don't need this because the insurance won't cover it. What does that mean? Anything? You know, awesome. Thanks a lot. When you were talking about feeling better, I found myself thinking that before, I used to think like, I was, like, a vital person in a body that was just, like, not operating well, like, you don't even, like, I'd run up the stairs and I'd be like, Yeah, I am a person who runs up the stairs you don't even, but like, I always used to think, like, I guess, I guess, just to be clear, like, I think, oh, for a fat guy, I'm really fast, or for a person who's overweight, I'm more athletic than you would think I would be. Like, you used to look at me and you wouldn't imagine I was athletic, but I was like, stuff like that. Not like, not like, on the level of my son, but like, you know, for for a guy my age, I quick and agile and stuff like that. And I used to just think of it as, like, this is my level of proficiency with athleticism, and, you know, that kind of stuff. And now that I'm the all that weight is off of me, I realized, like, that was, like, a fraction of who I was. Yeah, it's really interesting how much I was being held back by it. And I know some people are going to listen and be like, Yeah, you were fat and it held you back from being athletic. Like, I know that seems obvious now, and it seems obvious to me, but I wasn't eating my way to that scenario. Like my body just really did not intersect with food very well, and it didn't matter what food it was like, no matter how I ate, how little, how much. What kind quality of it my body would just, like, constantly, like, I would just always be holding water weight and adding weight, and I'd get heavier and heavier and and feel achy. Oh, my God, everywhere. It didn't feel good. I was tired. Like, you know, all that stuff, I take this stuff and all the things that people have heard me talk about, like, I can absorb iron now through my food. It's a big deal. I used to have to get infusions to not pass out my knee and my my feet. I used to have plantar fasciitis. Don't have that anymore. My knee hurt. My knee doesn't hurt anymore. My back used to be super stiff. My back is not stiff anymore. I feel bad because everybody bought me this chair because my back was stiff a few years ago, and now I still have the chair and I don't have the stuff back, but I appreciate it nonetheless, like all these things that changed, and I do think a lot of them have to do with just inflammation, which is probably some sort of an immune response in my body, right? You know what I mean, and I brought it up earlier, but tell me how you feel like it may have impacted your Are you in menopause fully, or was it perimenopause?

Katie 41:03
No, I'm fully. It's menopausal. Yeah, yeah.

Scott Benner 41:07
What symptoms did that help with? I'm

Katie 41:10
not exactly sure I I think I was going through menopause. I think I was pretty much done with it. Before that all it started. I am not sure that it helped with the the weight gain exactly. I had hot flashes. I didn't have a spotting or anything like that. So I don't know that it helped too much with that. Yeah,

Scott Benner 41:37
well, in ways that you could, like see and some things I've heard from other people. First of all, losing weight is going to help, right? Because that fat impacts your hormone right? So if you get rid of some of that, you might have some better luck there with hormonal fluctuations, stuff like that. But my wife specifically said, like, the hot flashes, the night sweats, like that, stuff really alleviated. Yeah, on it. And she also has long COVID, oh, which is a thing that I'm sure some people are like, that's not real, but I've seen it. It's pretty real. When she started taking a GLP, a lot of her long COVID symptoms got much easier. That's good, yeah, very cool. And then there was this moment I forget exactly what happened, but for a moment, she a doctor asked her, not her Endo, not the person who gave her the GLP, but another doctor said to her, Hey, if you're having a different symptom, stop taking that GLP for a week. And she came home and she's like, they told me to stop taking the GLP. And I was like, Look, I'm going to tell you the same thing. I tell the internet I'm not a doctor, and this isn't advice, but I wouldn't stop taking that. If I was No, I wouldn't either, right? And she's like, No, let me just do what He said for, you know, a week. And I'm like, All right, don't listen to me, which I've been married for a long time. I was expecting that. And so she definitely doesn't listen to me about anything, and she probably shouldn't, in fairness, but she stops taking it, and, like, four or five days later, she's like, Oh crap. So many of her long COVID symptoms started coming back right away. And I was like, I told you not to stop taking that magic juice. So she's like, Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take it again on Saturday. I'm like, why are you waiting till Saturday? She goes, That's my day to take it. I was like, Oh my God, just take it on Wednesday. What do you mean? What do you care? She's too type A that she waited till Saturday, but she started taking again. It ramped back up in her system, and she said, all that stuff, stop. Wow, that's amazing. Pretty awesome. Like again, I think just, I think it's inflammation that it's impacting,

Katie 43:33
right? Yeah, now I only have one more dose of mongero, and then I don't have any more so

Scott Benner 43:42
tell me again you literally had to go get a a job to pay for just this stuff,

Katie 43:46
right? I I am a respite provider. I have been working part time. I'm a respite provider for military families who have children with special needs. It's kind of a hit or miss job. They just call me when they need me, and I go into their home. So it's like a home health type of job, yeah, but I have taken a full time job as a preschool teacher, and so I am doing that now trying to figure out if I'm gonna go and now pay out of pocket for mongero prescription, you know, because it costs $550 a month if I want to make, yeah,

Scott Benner 44:26
the price came down recently, but it's still like five or $600 is what I was gonna say, right, yeah. Have you tried telling the preschool just to send the money right to Eli Lilly? Maybe they'll give you a tax break or something,

Katie 44:36
or maybe I can just go work for Eli Lilly. I mean, listen,

Scott Benner 44:41
if they give you a job before they buy an ad on this podcast about manjarna, then I'm gonna be pissed. Oh, my word. Meanwhile, I don't expect that a pharma company needs to buy an ad for any of their drugs like I'm pretty sure that, you know, they gotta handle them 1000 different ways, and I don't need it or want it, but I'm only really sharing my. Experience with it, but it's been very positive. And I do want to say because it bears saying it doesn't work for everybody. Like, there are people who know do not tolerate it at all, and there are also people with type one who take it, who don't see a big benefit in their insulin needs, that that does happen sometimes, sometimes people take it and they're like, I didn't see my insulin needs change at all for you. I mean, you, you had a pretty significant I mean, would you say 120 a day to 60 a day well, and

Katie 45:28
now it's even less than that. I take about 35 a day now.

Scott Benner 45:32
So some of that need was for your body mass. Yeah, yeah. It's some of it was for other reasons. And, I mean, what are we kind of hearing from people when they come on the podcast sometimes is that maybe they have some beta cells working, but it's just kind of so I don't even know how to put this, very un technical, but like, you know, like, your insulin need is so great you're not seeing it. And then you you kind of alleviate the need a little bit through weight loss, through hormonal control that you're getting, and then all of a sudden, maybe you're getting some help from your beta your beta cells. All of a sudden. Like, who knows? For some people, I do

Katie 46:06
have some beta cells that are so that are working, right? I just had that all checked, yeah, it's

Scott Benner 46:10
my expectation. And the people who don't see a bump from it just don't have any beta cell production at all, like, like, from it. But that's me, I want to be very clear. That is literally just me guessing right out of my ass. So like, I'm I really don't know anything. I'm just talking to people and trying to put two and two together. But yeah, so you're so your insulin needs for from 120 into the 30s a day. Yeah? God, you must be happy about that, huh?

Katie 46:35
I am. And now I'm scared after death, though, because I don't know what's gonna happen. Yeah, I say I don't know what's gonna happen. What's gonna happen is I'm gonna be paying, like,

Scott Benner 46:45
here's what's gonna happen, and I'm gonna sell whatever I have to sell to get this stuff. And that's gonna be that, can't you just go to your doctor and be like, Hey, man, what do you mean? A dick for pretty much. Like, here look what happened when I take the stuff, I go from 120 units a day, to 35 units a day. When I take the stuff, I'm down, would you say 50 pounds? Yeah?

Katie 47:07
And I it's still coming off, happening, yeah, yeah.

Scott Benner 47:12
Why don't you're gonna stop me from getting this. This 50 pounds is gonna come back. I'm gonna be back to 120 units of insulin a day. And then you're gonna say to me, Oh, guess what? You qualify for this again, like, what are you being an asshole for? Like, or just go to a better doctor, I guess. But, yeah, Jesus, 600 a month. 612, 1824, 3036, that's $7,500 a year.

Katie 47:33
I know it's very depressing, it is. And the amount of money we pay in insurance is depressing. Also because, you know, I mean, we pay almost as much as our mortgage payment for the insurance that we have. Holy hell do you really when my, yeah, when my, I was gonna say, when my, when we got married, when I got married, 26 years ago, my dad told my husband, he's like, he said, make sure you are you sure you want to marry her. She's expensive. Make sure you always have good insurance.

Scott Benner 48:05
We've got other choices in the barn if you want to grab a different one, this one only eats the best Patty, just so you know, yeah, I just, I love your dad talking about you, like your cattle, by the way, that's awesome. And your husband didn't take him seriously, and he should have,

Katie 48:19
and he's still with me. He stuck around. In fairness,

Scott Benner 48:23
I once after I was married my my wife's father said to me, like we were in a big group of guys and somebody was giving me crap about something, and my father in law stepped up, and he goes, hey, hey, easy on him. He's, uh, he does good with her. I was like, Oh, God, what does that mean? I was like, this is awfully insulting to your daughter, but she is difficult. Nevertheless, I hope she'll never hear this. No. I mean, it's just, it's really upsetting to go through decades of toil, figure something out and then have somebody tell you, like, no, no. I don't think so. I don't think you can happen anymore. Are you just gonna go try the other doctor?

Katie 49:04
I don't know what to do. I've gone back and forth about it.

Scott Benner 49:08
Why would you not do that?

Katie 49:09
I should. I should, yeah, and I know who he is. I know who the doctor is. I've heard of him. Yeah,

Scott Benner 49:16
he's doctor. Your ass is gonna be skinny. Go talk to them. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Are you telling me, is this like a doctor in a mobile home or something like that? Or no, no, okay, okay, there's not like gators out front and a sign and you're gators

Katie 49:30
everywhere out front, and that's what everybody thinks. Yeah.

Scott Benner 49:35
Are there not, isn't it just like boa constrictors and gators on the roads pretty

Katie 49:40
much. That's all you ever see on the news. Is

Scott Benner 49:43
that not true? You're like, I don't think that's true. I live here.

Katie 49:46
You know, when we moved here, my dad made us give our dog away because he said that the alligators would eat it. We moved here with a dog. We believed him.

Scott Benner 49:54
Your dad's like, I figured out how to get rid of that dog. That's

Katie 49:57
my dad. Yeah, I

Scott Benner 49:58
finally got, oh, you. Want the dog to beaten by an alligator, dude, you're like, No daddy, like, God, we're gonna have to leave it here. And where were you? Puget? Sound, where were you over there?

Katie 50:07
Yeah, we were in across the water from Seattle. Yeah, you moved

Scott Benner 50:11
as far as a human being can move, going through us, the US, yeah, man, and you've been there ever since, yeah, never left you like the Florida. No,

Katie 50:23
I don't have air. Why are you there? Well, my husband was born and raised here, so he,

Scott Benner 50:30
I don't know he's the problem. Again, you're saying, yeah, yeah, pretty much. Boys always a problem. I know I'm a huge problem. So for my wife, I know she looks at me like, if you weren't here, I feel like I'd be happier, and I and I'm like, she's probably right about that and all that. By the way, that's unspoken. She doesn't say it out loud. I just I read it in her eyes. Oh, my god, wow. When you came on, when you signed up to come on, you were signing up to tell a happy story about I found this medication. Yeah, about that,

Katie 51:00
and now it's sad. So I guess if anybody listening has any insight on making my insurance pay, or I don't know when in the world, their insurance companies are finally going to jump on board and realize or the FDA is going to approve it for us, I know that it's it's gaining popularity for type one.

Scott Benner 51:20
Yeah. I mean, I'm doing more than my fair share of trying to get the word out about it. So, yeah,

Katie 51:24
I know there's studies, but I don't know how long it takes for those studies to finally, you know, get be finished, to where it's going to be something that we all can get. I don't know how long that happens. It's disingenuous

Scott Benner 51:38
to some degree, because they've done so there's been two studies let me see if I can find them on GLP that were so successful, the FDA stopped them. I think the one was for kidneys that I'm thinking of. Hold on a second. I'm gonna, I'm gonna find this. This is me talking half out of my ass, okay, but it's something I know I've seen before. I just don't have all the details. There was, like, I think an ozempic study about that was for kidneys and Novo and semaglutide Kidney study early due to strong efficacy signals. Okay, now you can go find this story if you want, and read through it. But what I'm telling you is my takeaway was this was working so well that the FDA was like, Hey, this isn't even right to put people in a double blind study over we know this works. Start giving them the drug for it. Let's stop studying it. It doesn't need to be studied anymore, right? It's been that successful. And then there was one recently, GLP, 94% type two. These are just my Google terms. Ah, here it is. Tris appetite reduced the risk of developing type two diabetes by 94% in adults with pre diabetes and obesity or overweight. This is an article from August 2024 okay, they did a study on people with pre diabetes. It benefited 94% of the people in the study. They're not pre diabetic anymore. Wow, when a study is 94% positive, you just go, Whoa, and you don't mean you're like, my god, this is working overwhelmingly for people, if they take five seconds. This study I'm looking at, evaluated 1032 adults who had pre diabetes at randomization, and obesity or overweight for a treatment period of 176 weeks, followed by a 17 week off treatment period for 193 weeks total. The result from this surmount one phase three studies, primary analysis in 72 weeks, and all participants were published in Union medicine. It worked. Okay, yeah, right. Take 1000 people with type one diabetes, randomize it, put them on a GLP, and let's get going. Because look at this, three goddamn years to do you got to get to it here. I would imagine that the insurance companies probably aren't at the moment thrilled, because the more they can, you know, they got to keep paying for it. But I would assume too, is it? I mean, I don't know how all that works, right? But as it becomes more and more obvious it's working, the company is going to have to make more of it. It should get easier to make and cheaper to make, and hopefully that can help the pricing process a little bit. But I mean, Jesus Christ, if it's helping women with PCOS, and it's helping people with type one diabetes and type two diabetes and obesity and me and like, you know, iron. Like, why not? Like, let's go. You know what I mean,

Katie 54:34
right? And is it, it brings up all the conspiracy theories. Is it because they just want to keep us sick, you know, and all the things that people say

Scott Benner 54:43
for, I don't know who's trying to keep you sick or not, I think they just don't want to pay for stuff. That's true. Yeah, definitely true. Maybe a company that makes crappy food isn't super excited about it. I would that, I that, I have no trouble imagining that in a, in a in an office somewhere, somebody who's making, like, you know, cupcakes that are basically. Plastic, and they stay good on a shelf for 17 years. They're like saying good all these people on these GLP medications because I splurged this week. I didn't shoot my GLP on the day I was supposed to. I got bum fuzzled On the day. So last night I splurged. I had a splurge yesterday. Let me tell you what I did. I went to a local deli. I got a turkey and roast beef sandwich with provolone, and I had half of it for lunch and half of it for dinner. I was crazy. Okay, for a person taking a GLP medication that pretty much qualifies as like, oh my god, so it's got to hurt the junk food market, and some if enough people get on it, but yeah, I just want to say again, they studied over 1000 people with pre diabetes, and 94% of them benefited from it. So you're going to see fewer heart attacks, fewer strokes. You're going to see less type two diabetes. And look at all the good things it did for you so far,

Katie 55:58
right? It's impacting a lot of markets. Yeah, I

Scott Benner 56:03
don't know. I just don't, I don't want to see type ones hooking for their GLP money. You know what I mean?

Katie 56:10
I guess that's my next option. No, I

Scott Benner 56:12
wasn't saying, yeah. I'm just saying, like, people shouldn't have to go do what you're talking like, you had a job you really enjoyed, right? And you'd like to keep doing that, but now you're like, Well, maybe I'll go do this one instead, because maybe I can make more money to pay for my GLP. And I don't like knowing your like specific details, but if this thing's $600 a month, this job in this preschool, you know, I don't imagine it's a laying 6090 grand a year on your Ford. So like you're working that whole month to get the GLP and not have much left over. Is that right?

Katie 56:42
I have some, I mean, and I enjoy it. I do enjoy work

Scott Benner 56:46
at the job so, but it's a chunk of your income. Oh,

Katie 56:50
yeah, would definitely be a chunk, yeah, all right, yeah, yeah.

Scott Benner 56:54
See, that's just, I don't know. That's not right. You know, commiserate with anything else, like, as we learn more and more about it, like withholding it from people, starts to feel more and more like not giving them insulin, or not giving them their heart medication or something, right? You know, yeah, it just works too well to act like, oh, it's for the people who can afford it. Yeah, I agree, yeah, because there's plenty of people out there that couldn't just go pick up a job and shell 600 like we're we're teasing your husband for not providing but obviously, if, if you can afford to spend $600 a month on something that isn't your your base bills, you're doing okay to begin with. And so, you know, so there are plenty of people aren't doing okay to begin with. Could really use this medication? You know, I spoke yesterday. I'm actually gonna rush it out. It was so interesting. This 19 year old girl comes on the show. She's a college student. She literally, we did this from, like, her apartment at college. The interview she comes on, and she tells me about all of her problems, and it becomes obvious to me, like, as we're talking and I know you think, like, maybe you would have known this before you signed her up, but I didn't. She didn't have diabetes. She has hyper reactive or reactive hypoglycemia, or something like that, right? And I start picking through her, you know, her entire health history, and it's been bad. She's had a really terrible period since she was, like, 1314, years old, super low iron and ferritin passes out. You know, is getting B 12 injections right now because she can't stay awake. Like, all of these things are, like, wrong with her, and I'm like, what are they going to do? And there's no answer. Like, she's like, I don't know, you don't even mean, like, the doctors don't say anything. So I said to her, I'm like, you wanna do something weird? I was like, here, and I opened up a chat GPT window, and I described her to chat GPT, and then every time she told me something about herself, I entered it into it, and then asked it what it thought she should do it so remarkably, agreed with what I told her before I hit Enter, wow. I was like, here's what I think I would do if I was you. And I don't want to the episode's been out for a while, by the time somebody hears this, but I was like, she's on a proton pump, a hit burner for like, six years, I think for three, six years, it's clearly blocking like, so she's got these terrible periods. She's losing a lot of blood, and then she's taking a medication for her acid reflux that's keeping her from RE absorbing iron. I said I'd get off the PPI. You have to do it slowly. It's not as simple. You can't just, like I think, you're not supposed to just stop taking it all at once. I'd get an iron infusion. I would continue with the B 12 and infusions, digestive enzyme to your meals, to try to help your digestion, to see if we can't help clear up this probably what's pressure on your your esophageal sphincter, which is probably giving the acid, right? And I said, I'd like you to take a vacitol for your PCOS, which she also had, by the way. I said, all that. And the goddamn chat GT came back, and it was like, and it said, all the same stuff, wow. And I said to her, I'm like, I'll send this to you. Can show it to your mom. You know, I said, don't listen to me like I'm a guy on the podcast, like I'm sitting in the spare bedroom of my house right now. Just in case you're wondering, I was like, but I think you should look at all this, because your doctor's only throwing patches on your problems, right? Like he's never gonna get you to the point where you're just like, oh, I don't have reflux anymore, you know? And I even explained little things to her, like, she's like, I don't, I don't eat throughout the day. I have one big meal. I said, that's actually could be one of the reasons you have reflux. You have a big full meal, it pushes down on on that, that sphincter down there, and it kind of opens it up and allows the it allows the acid to come up through into your esophagus. I'm like, you could end up getting, like, Barrett's esophagus from that, which is pre cancerous, and, like, all this stuff. And she's on top of all that, completely exhausted. And I'm telling you right now, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say something that'll make me sound like a douche bag to somebody, but if she doesn't come on a podcast to talk to somebody about it, she's gonna live the next 30 years of her life like that, yeah, for sure. You know what. I mean, that's no good. And imagine they found all the answers for and then at the end, we're like, Ah, you don't need that, right? Just what happened to you? Oh, what are you gonna do rob a bank? I don't know. Aren't there bank Robbies in Florida all the time? Don't people ride alligators in and then rob banks, right, right, yeah, all the time, lasso them with one of those bow constrictors and you're on your

Katie 1:01:25
way right. Get away on a manatee

Scott Benner 1:01:31
like Aquaman in those old cartoons, low

Katie 1:01:33
manatee. Oh, no,

Scott Benner 1:01:35
he would have been on a big Sting Ray, right, right, yeah. Are you old? Nothing on my Aquaman reference or no, no.

Katie 1:01:42
Well, I am old, but I don't know, not that old. Is

Scott Benner 1:01:47
there anything we haven't talked about that we should have? Oh,

Katie 1:01:49
probably something pop the mind. Not really. What do you mean? Probably.

Scott Benner 1:01:54
What are you worried that we you worried we forgot something? No, I'm looking at your list. I feel like we handled it, I

Unknown Speaker 1:02:00
don't know. Struggle with my weight, type

Scott Benner 1:02:03
one for 37 years, 38 now, because it takes a lot to get on the podcast,

Katie 1:02:06
I didn't know what list you had. What list did I make? A list I have been

Scott Benner 1:02:10
living with, type one for 37 years. I've always struggled with my weight, with age and menopause came insulin resistance. I've asked my endo 35 years if I could try a GLP Med, and he very readily agreed, my blood sugars have improved, insulin needs have decreased, and weight has decreased. Okay, go. That's it. That was six months ago. Oh,

Katie 1:02:30
yeah, and now I have one shot left. Can you believe that?

Scott Benner 1:02:34
What milligram are you up to now? Well,

Katie 1:02:37
I went all the way up to 12.5 but I had, because when I moved up, I still had some left in the fridge that I saved. So if I moved up to 7.5 and I had a few left of five, then I just kept them in the fridge. And, you know, moved up, so what I have left in the fridge right now is five. So that's my very last one of the five. That sucks. It's almost like I weaned myself back down.

Scott Benner 1:03:09
Have you been gaining weight? Or has your insulin needs been going up? I have

Katie 1:03:13
not gained no, it actually, it hasn't. It's been fine, okay?

Scott Benner 1:03:17
I hope it keeps up, so we'll see. Let's be honest, it's not going to I mean, if it does, then God bless, that's wonderful. But I mean, you could run into that situation where you don't gain weight and a lot of your insulin requirements were because of your weight.

Katie 1:03:31
I hope so, and I'm not. I have no problem also going to a compounding pharmacy. I would do that too, and I think five was fine for me, okay. Is especially if I just want to maintain what I've been taking for the last month. You know,

Scott Benner 1:03:50
we're still losing weight, though, right? Very slowly,

Katie 1:03:53
just a little bit, like, maybe a pound every week, or Yeah, I found I

Scott Benner 1:03:58
stopped losing weight at this point, yeah, yeah. But, you know, I got dehydrated when I traveled this weekend. Oh, really. And I'm not, like, dehydrated, like, Oh, what was me? My kidneys hurt and I'm in trouble. But, like, I just didn't drink as much because I was traveling, yeah, yeah. And I got home, I was four pounds lighter than when I left. And I did look in the mirror and thought, oh, there is, like, more out of my midsection here. Like, my midsection is flatter, like all that stuff. But I thought the minute I start drinking regularly again, like this, these pounds are coming back, for sure. And they absolutely did. So, yeah, but I don't that's not how I'm trying to lose weight, obviously. But it was just really interesting. Like, you get on a plane Friday morning, you get down there, like, you know, by the time I get everything together, I'm supposed to go to this dinner. I go to the dinner. I don't need very much the dinner, but that's fine, like, and then next day, very busy, yeah, all day I, you know, I had to get in a car at 3am Sunday morning to leave. I was on a plane by 5am on Sunday Yeah. Got home, didn't bother weighing myself, weighed myself, like, the next day. And I was like, oh my god, I'm I was 182 it's like, the lowest I've ever been. And I was like, this is gonna this will all be the first big glass of water I have. Like, I think this is over. So what happened? Yeah, I hope it works out for you. But if it doesn't like you seem hesitant to go to that other doctor. I wasn't able to figure out why while we were talking, but I would

Katie 1:05:26
No, I think I probably will. I think the only hesitation is that I just went to the previous one. He's in a whole different practice, as in, like, we have two, well, we have more than two main hospitals here in Jacksonville, like we have the Baptist network, and then we've got, like, the University of Florida network, and we've got Memorial and so he would be in a whole new network. So I just have to be switching. That would bother you networks a little bit, because when you switch your Endo, you kind of want to switch everybody, so not only your Endo, but your general practice doctor, and your everybody else you have. Can't

Scott Benner 1:06:15
you just see the Endo, just for the GLP, I could probably and then not seeing for anything else,

I suppose. Yeah,

it feels like you're making more out of this than there is,

Unknown Speaker 1:06:28
perhaps,

Scott Benner 1:06:31
because I've been looking for a real good reason why you're saying this, and I can't find one, so, yeah, just call him and be like, Hey, you helped my friend. My doctor is a jerk. Can you help me too? And he'll be like, Yeah, sure. And that should be the end of it,

Katie 1:06:45
don't you think, probably, yeah, just go do it all right, I'll give it a try. Because

Scott Benner 1:06:50
if you don't get the ball rolling, at least, if a month from now you're like, Oh, I've gained 10 pounds, and I'm using 15 more units of insulin every day or whatever, right? Then you're going to be like, Oh, I wish I would have started this. And if a month from now, you're like, you know what? I don't even need this. GLP, then God bless you, and then keep going. But at least you had your Dexcom, you know?

Katie 1:07:08
Yeah, that's why. I'll let you know. I will put it out there on the Facebook page. Thank

Scott Benner 1:07:13
you. I appreciate that. All right, go out there and make more friends that listen to the podcast. I like that.

Katie 1:07:18
I will. All right, I'll send me your way. Thank you. Hold

Scott Benner 1:07:21
on one second for me. Okay, you can use the same continuous glucose monitor that Arden uses. All you have to do is go to dexcom.com/juicebox, and get started today. That's right. The Dexcom g7 is sponsoring this episode of The Juicebox podcast. 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. A huge thanks to touched by type one for sponsoring this episode of The Juicebox podcast. Check them out on their website, touched by type one.org or on Facebook and Instagram.

I'm still proud of what I said in that cozy Earth ad about they have dryer balls and the towels that I it was awesome. I'm really, really, really proud of myself. 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 can't thank you enough for listening. Please make sure you're subscribed or following in your audio app. I'll be back tomorrow 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.

#1383 I'm Not Calm

Tess is a mother of four, her third child has type 1 diabetes. He plays a lot of sports.

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

COMING SOON

#1382 Meditations

Brian's journey with his son's diagnosis, family reactions, & personal growth through therapy.

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Scott Benner 0:00
We are all together again friends for this next episode of The Juicebox podcast.

Brian is the father of a young child with type one diabetes who was diagnosed a few years ago, around Thanksgiving, he was anxious in the beginning of the diagnosis, and so Brian sought out therapy, which was helpful for him. We're going to talk about that and much more. 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. Don't forget, if you're a US resident who has type one or is the caregiver of someone with type one, visit T 1d exchange.org/juicebox right now and complete that survey. It will take you 10 minutes to complete the survey, and that effort alone will help to move type one diabetes research forward. It will cost you nothing to help. The holidays are coming up fast. Head to cozy earth.com. Use the offer code juice box at checkout to save 40% off of everything they sell. Cozy earth.com. Use the offer code juice box to save 40% this holiday season. 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, I'm having an on body vibe alert. This episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by ever since 365 the only one year where CGM, that's one insertion and one CGM a year, one CGM one year, not every 10 or 14 days ever since cgm.com/juicebox. Having an easy to use an accurate blood glucose meter is just one click away. Contour, next.com/juicebox That's right, today's episode is sponsored by the contour. Next Gen blood glucose meter. Your kids mean everything to you, and 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, because if even just one person in your family has type one, your child is up to 15 times more likely to get it. But just one blood test can help you spot it early. So don't wait. Talk to your doctor about screening tap now or visit screen for type one.com to get more info and screen it like you mean it. Hi,

Brian 2:40
Scott. Name is Brian. I'm glad to be here speaking with you today after listening to you for what seems like hours on end every day for a long time. So glad we finally meet. Oh, it's

Scott Benner 2:50
very nice to meet you, too, Brian. What's a long time? How long have you been listening you?

Speaker 1 2:54
Actually, you might find this a little humorous. So two thanksgiving to go is when my son was diagnosed. I got a little packet that included, actually, to your Arden's day blog. And I remember looking at that blog saying, What am I going to learn from a guy who stopped blogging 10 years ago or, you know, it was some outdated looking site that they sent me to right and by January, though, about a month and a half later, I actually found your podcast. I'm like, Oh, this is where you moved to and I basically been listening almost every day since, starting from the beginning. So it's been over a year listening almost every day. It's helped me get through a lot. So appreciate what you do.

Scott Benner 3:32
That's lovely. I'm also thinking that the Arden's day.com forward slash, blog doesn't exist. Hold on a second. What did you find

Speaker 1 3:40
it was, it was a printout. It thing was ancient looking. It had, I just remember, like, what was it? Yeah, they sent me to the blog, and I was like, I don't, this doesn't look like it's been updated in a while

Scott Benner 3:51
because, because martinsday.com forwards to Juicebox podcast.com

Speaker 1 3:56
Yeah, I don't like I said it was, it was a picture of you, and that listed the blog, and I remember typing in what it was so well it was almost I literally said to myself, What am I going to learn from this guy? He stopped talking about his, you know, anecdotes and how to work his way through things, you know, a while ago. And I was like, I guess he gave up, but you didn't. You just moved medium. So glad I found it regardless.

Scott Benner 4:17
I loved blogging, but this is what that is without all the typing and editing. But it's much better.

Speaker 1 4:23
I agree, yeah, much easier to consume. You can do two things at once while listening.

Scott Benner 4:28
You have type one of your child. I'm sorry, yeah, no, it's

Speaker 1 4:32
a great question. It's my son. He's 10. He was diagnosed when he was just after he turned eight.

Scott Benner 4:37
Was this literally on Thanksgiving or around myself.

Speaker 1 4:40
I guess diagnosis story is as good as any, right. My family came to town from a couple different states for Thanksgiving. I used to love hosting Thanksgiving. It's a bit of a traumatic process. Now, I'm sure it's still something we have to figure out how to work around. But the family come to town and my. A one of my in laws. My brother in law actually has type two and type two that's not particularly well controlled, would be something of an understatement. Hi

Scott Benner 5:08
to him, by the way, go ahead. Yeah, no. And he's, he's

Speaker 1 5:11
so well meaning. He's so great. But you know, there's definitely some denial about, you know, how he has to manage. So they were down for Thanksgiving, and my experience with with him is actually what tipped me off to my son's diagnosis. So he he drove down from where he was coming from, couple hours away. He ended up crashing the car. It sounds terrible, but it was like in trying to get into a parking lot, like, clip the curb and so you're going to disable the vehicle, okay? But he called us at like, 2am the day before Thanksgiving, like, Jimmy, like, Where'd you go? And he's like, Oh, I'm here. So I went picked him up, and I pick him up, and he's just like, chugging water and juice the whole time.

Scott Benner 5:52
Like, are you alright? You're

Speaker 1 5:53
really thirsty. He's like, Oh, it's a long drive. Like, all right, well, let's get home, get you settled, and, you know, we got a long day of cooking tomorrow. Well, the next day, it ended up being that my mother even noticed it that my son and he were kind of like queuing up to use the bathroom all day long. And I was like, what? That's a little unusual, but whatever, we didn't think too much more of it. Well, the next day, my brother in law, he was in such bad shape that he had trouble standing up, and the EMTs had to come and he did blood sugar test, and the Meter Reader was high. Like, just be like, hey, this one caps out at 500 like, oh, and I didn't almost know anything at that point, really about type one or type two. I just understood the glucose values were something out of range, for sure. So he ended up going to the hospital, and they ended up treating him. And a couple days, insulin dripped the whole thing and releasing him. So he was able to join us for Thanksgiving, but was obviously this kind of pale on the whole day. And it occurred to me that, you know, something might be off with my son, but I didn't know what it was at the time, and that night he wets the bed. And I think back, I said, Wow, this is like, the third time in two weeks, and it's like, this, this can't be, this can't be, right? This isn't someone gets sick. And, you know, wetting the vet isn't symptom of being sick in a classical like, I got an infection, right? Like a cold or something like that. I said, you just doesn't sit right with me. So especially after my brother in law's experience, and so I drove to CVS at 24 hour one at like 530 in the morning and bought a

Scott Benner 7:28
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 screen for type one.com to learn more. Again, that's screen for type one com, and screen it like you mean it contour next.com/juicebox that's the link you'll use to find out more about the contour next gen blood glucose meter. When you get there, there's a little bit at the top. You can click right on blood glucose monitoring. I'll do it with you. Go to meters, click on any of the meters. I'll click on the Next Gen, and you're going to get more information. It's easy to use and highly accurate. Smart light provides a simple understanding of your blood glucose levels. And of course, with Second Chance sampling technology, you can save money with fewer wasted test strips. As if all that wasn't enough, the contour next gen also has a compatible app for an easy way to share and see your blood glucose results. Contour next.com/juicebox and if you scroll down at that link, you're going to see things like a Buy Now button. You could register your meter after you purchase it. Or what is this? Download a coupon. Oh, receive a free contour, next gen blood glucose meter. Do tell contour, next.com/juice box. Head over there now get the same accurate and reliable meter that we use,

Speaker 1 9:46
glucose tester. And I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't know what strips went with which device, you know, completely fumbling around. And just bought two of each. I was like, well, the two of these have to go ahead, you know, go together somehow. So I came back and. And I woke up my wife. I said, Look, whatever you do, don't let anybody eat or drink anything while I figure this out. She said, why? What's wrong? I said, Well, I just, I want to rule something out, because I'd done what everyone does. Probably at some point they web and do something, and sure enough, you put in the bed, wedding and the thirst, and it's, you know, one of the top symptoms that morning, we sat around the kitchen table, and I tested myself first. It was like 79 and then went to my wife, same kind of thing in the 80s. And then went to my son. It was 250 I was like, Oh, God, what do I do? Here am I said, No, it's got to be broken. Test, test again, and test the other kids. So we tested everybody, like two or three times, and his kept coming back in the mid two hundreds, and I kind of walked around the corner broke down, because I knew right down in there what it was, just given the symptoms and the scenario, and yet, I called the pediatrician's office and she said, Oh, what could be an anomaly? You should just head to the ER and rule it out. And I say, rule it out. I'm pretty sure we just ruled it in. Are you sure about that? Just tested

Scott Benner 11:01
everybody 33 times. I spent $197

Speaker 1 11:05
in test strips. Oh, my God, they're saying Yeah. It was like, Yeah. I think I spent 202 different machines with $100 of test strips each, because they only sold the massive packs or whatever. And I was like, No, I'm pretty sure that's what it is. And so that morning, we fed them, and then a lot of people might crane just said, let's have some breakfast before we go and before we go. And he had a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice, and then, like, you know, face palm, now that I know that we just sent him to the moon on the way to the ER. So we went to the ER, and we told him, I said, we're here for type one diabetes admission. And somehow, between that moment at the window and the intake nurse, someone put him in his type two. Now my son is almost five feet tall. Well, back to, you know, four and a half feet tall, skinny, eight year old kid doesn't quite fit the description. I know we're not trying to put everyone in a type there, but didn't really fit the what it might have expected. And so they intake nurse does another finger prick, and he's like, 575 say, Oh, God, what did I just do? And I'm looking at him, I'm like, you feel all right? He's like, Yeah, why? I don't understand. But I know this isn't good.

Scott Benner 12:06
Yeah, you caught it really early.

Speaker 1 12:10
We did, it turns out, because the flip side of that was he only spent about three weeks on regular MBI injections. We kept having to titrate down over and over and over again. Because for me, the horrific part, and you were actually one of the first people to respond to me, luckily enough, when I joined the Facebook group, was I said, I said, you know, I'm sitting outside my son's school every morning because I'm freaking out that he's going to crash low. And that's what would happen. We give him his food, his insulin, and within an hour, you know, he's in the basement, and the nurse has got him downing 35 4050, grams of carbs, and we can barely get him above 80. And it turned out that the honeymoon kicked in pretty quickly after the initial insulin, and we were just overdoing it like, you know, give a kid who's insulin sensitive and, you know, unit and a half, and you know, we're fighting. So he spent three hours a day in the nurse's office for the first two weeks of school. Was like this. I literally said to myself, I don't know how anybody does This is insanity, like, what is going on? And so finally, we met with our endo two weeks later, and she's like, Well, I'm glad you've been bringing down his insulin dosing. That's been smart. And we got to the point where she couldn't give him anything. It would just tank him. And we spent almost 10 months without him needing regular injections at all. The endos were confused, initially, thinking maybe Modi or something else, but we just caught his diagnosis, probably within the first three, four

Scott Benner 13:36
weeks, yeah. And then he had a really slow onset. He

Speaker 1 13:40
did. And when we had his antibody testing done, they did it right at the at intake. We didn't get the results for almost a month. He only had one antibody against zinc. And I was like, Okay, so maybe, maybe he doesn't have a normal onset. And sure enough, now we've gone through multiple antibody testing now he's up at three and we're on much more steady, but still inconsistent. Uh, honeymoon based, yeah, treatment. So like Pokemon,

Scott Benner 14:05
he's collecting them all. I'm gonna get all the antibodies before I'm done. Oh, my gosh. Well, how many other kids? Oh,

Unknown Speaker 14:14
this is what you'll like. I have four total.

Scott Benner 14:16
So does he have Are you done or, I mean, oh, I'm done.

Speaker 1 14:19
I told my wife, have as many kids as you want. I'm here for you. Oh, who

Scott Benner 14:23
did she have them with? No, no, I was just

Speaker 1 14:26
telling her. I said, You're in charge of how many you want, like my father's one to 10. Holy Hell, really? Yeah, I grew up with 45 first cousins. I mean, Christmas and Easter and all that stuff. Was always a massive house full of people, easily 100 plus people would come to every family event. Wow. Yeah, Irish, yeah, Irish Catholic. My dad married another Irish Catholic woman. So

Scott Benner 14:51
how many Michaels Are you directly related to?

Speaker 1 14:54
That's a great question. Probably at least seven at this point. Yeah.

Scott Benner 15:00
I say this as much as I can. My wife's father's name is Michael. He had a son. He named Michael. That man had a son and named him Michael. His daughter married a guy named Michael. They had a son. They named him Michael.

Speaker 1 15:14
Well, one of my in laws, same kind of thing. They had a Michael and then a Michael. And even the middle names were simpler, so the abbreviations are almost identical. And he's like, but I don't want him to be a junior. I'm like, wow, it's pretty close to being a junior.

Scott Benner 15:27
You're all by a letter. You're all juniors. So listen, this is the most distasteful joke, but when Arden was born, they asked us if we had names for babies, and I said, in front of my wife's family to them, not just in front of them, by the way, I directed this statement to them. I said, if it's a boy, we're gonna name him Michael. We love dad more than you, and then our last name. And everybody got so pissed. But I always just think that's what I mean. Isn't that what you're doing? All right? Just like, isn't it brown nosing, you know, I don't know. Oh,

Speaker 1 16:01
well, there. I mean, so after our first was was born, we chose some family names because we were frankly struggling with what else to do, yeah, like, wow. And my father's point was like, Oh, that's a very political choice of you. I'm like, what I agree. We took one name from one side of the family, another name from the other side of the family, and just kept doing that with all of our kids, and it was just because their names were familiar to us, though it wasn't. We weren't trying to earn family brownie points or anything, but that's, that's the way certain people took it, like that was very good of you. Yeah, honor the family.

Scott Benner 16:34
Nah. People get mad at anything. Kelly and I did the exact opposite. We took a when she was pregnant. Both times, we grabbed this big fat baby name book. Now a book, as you may know, is a grouping of paper, like bound together so that you can see words. And we would sit down every night, like after work, and we would read out I would read out loud a few pages of the book, and we would just go through, like, go through the A's, go through the bill. We kept going. We would just circle any names we liked, and then we went back, and then you'd be surprised. A couple weeks later, you'd go through and you're like, who put Aiden on here? No, like, like, that kind of stuff, like, you know, and eventually we just got down to call, we're gonna name name Cole. And then we did the same thing with Arden. And when people ask, like, who are they named after, we always say, like, I don't think I'm related to anybody, like, worthy of naming another person after not that, not that I know of. But anyway, all those Michaels out there making the world a better place. How many so these other three kids? Any chance they have antibodies? Have you tested them? We

Speaker 1 17:32
haven't tested them. There's some reluctance there. I mean, literally, I think we were home from the hospital maybe a couple days when T Z yield was announced by the FDA as being cleared, my wife and I were like, well, what do we do? Because if this really does delay onset, and some of the other kids have the antibodies, is that something we're willing to put them through. And then, you know, there's Facebook groups out there that have people who've gone through it, and it seems hit or miss too, and so we've not put our heads in the sand, per se. We're definitely aware of what, what's possible and likely in some cases, but, and you'll like this just as a stat, the reason why I juggle with it is, you know, they'll tell you, Oh, if family member has type one you're at, you know, 10 times increased risk of getting it yourself and then somewhere else, higher up in the statement about type one diabetes, say, and 90% of people who are diagnosed have no family history, like, not really sure how those two stats go together, where vast majority of people don't have it, relative, and then yet you tell them, we're at this massive increased risk. So I

Scott Benner 18:36
think they're making those numbers up. I also think I've heard people say 10% and 10 times. And I think, I just think they don't know which they were told. Like, I mean, and where does that number even come from? The back to that 10% 10 times. I've heard 5% five times. I mean, if there's data on it, great, like, but I mean, at what point are we just repeating something we heard someone else say? I mean, what I can tell you is that very frequently, there are other autoimmune issues in the family. That's a fairly frequent thing. I mean, I mean, I'll ask you, are there other autoimmune issues in your family? You guys gotta have celiac right?

Speaker 1 19:19
No. So that's that's been the interesting experience. So little tangent on that is, my mother is like a self taught amateur genealogist. Okay? So she ended up being for a while there probably had, like a top 20 contributor to ancestry.com Helping people put ancestry together. She traveled around, no kidding, the country she went to all the crap Mormons get. They have the best records. My mother would go out to Salt Lake all the time for church marriage records and that sort of thing. She'd come down near where I am, the National Archives. Same kind of thing. She flew to Europe a few times. So her experience was to document family trees for a lot of people. And so when my wife and I actually were married, she actually went back across my family, through my mother and my father, my wife's mother and my wife's father, as far as she could find records in two cases, they go back fairly far, probably almost 400 years in two family cases. And I said, Well, mom, after my son's diagnosis, who in the family has auto immune, or, even more appropriately, type type one. And I knew instantly after I asked the question, who she was thinking of. So one of her second cousins, I suppose, which is really, truly like once removed kind of scenario, both her kids have type one. So we had to go almost two and a half in family generations away to find a family tree component, a branch, if you will, that had type one in it. And that was just by sheer luck that we knew that and gave with them and we talked with them. This

Scott Benner 20:53
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Speaker 1 22:18
other issues in the family. I suppose that we're not really clear as to what occurred. Perhaps, you know, we had, I had an uncle who passed very young when I was in his 30s from a rare form of juvenile brain cancer, which, at the time it happened, everyone's like, we don't understand this. This cancer develops in like, two year olds to four year olds, and here's a 35 year old man with it. How does that happen? And so we, there's family as big as my father's, you're bound to run into, yeah, people who have challenges across the board.

Scott Benner 22:49
Well, I mean, by the time you get to your temp, you're probably using some beat up sperm to make babies with, I would think

Speaker 1 22:58
they were in construction too. So, you know that? Well, my mother once said, so my father was right in the middle. My mother once said, after my grandmother stopped having children, she's, you're actually a pretty skinny woman, you know, not, not trying to be offensive, but

Scott Benner 23:10
nobody knew, because she was always pregnant, yeah, 23

Speaker 1 23:13
years, right? It was like a child every other year for for 23 years. Wow, my oldest cousins and my youngest cousin said being, I think there's almost a 40 year gap. Now, wait, that's something. It's, yeah, it now everyone's like, so who's who's an uncle, and who's a cousin and who's an Easter and nephew, it's like impossible. They have

Scott Benner 23:31
a lot of longevity, or a lot of them alive. Yeah, most of them are, wow, that's pretty

Speaker 1 23:36
much my bunch of my aunts and uncles made it into their their eldest now in their late 70s, actually, early 80s.

Scott Benner 23:43
God, now I think about it. So you could have an uncle in their early 80s that has a brother or sister in their 60s. Yeah. Wow. Jeez. All right, so when, when the diagnosis happens, what's the reaction in your family? Because you listed here in your in your notes to me that you'd like to talk about family reactions, and you said it was pretty far ranging. So what did you see and how did it impact you? Yeah,

Speaker 1 24:08
that was an interesting one for me. It kind of put me into therapy in a good way. I mean, I needed to process what was going on. I'd never done that personally. And so for me, I was, I was shook pretty hard, and I dove into it the only way I knew how, which was, as my therapist said to me, you know, you have this illusion of control, which is a very real symptom for people. And you know, he said to me, Brian, you made it 40 plus years with the idea that you were in control of anything. And this changed all of that because kids used to say, Oh, you're doctor, daddy. Why? Well, because I caught a lot of things. So for example, kid had pneumonia. We were struggling to figure out what it was. I watched the doctor diagnose it. I said, All right, I need a stethoscope. I have a stethoscope. I need a pulse ox. I got that too. And they're like, Well, why are you doing? I said, Well, I have four kids, and. And when we have problems, every time I come to pediatricians office or, you know, urgent care, you guys do the same, you know, six or seven tests every time to, you know, help establish a baseline. I said, I can do that at home and be better directed. So I used to have this idea that I could, you know, more or less figure it out. And then everything was always an acute issue, right? Type one being a chronic life, long thing. It was a total loop for me, and I accepted it by buying books. So I bought most of the books everyone in the Facebook group shares and others, maybe not so much, and threw myself into reading. So you were laughing that you know much of a reader, perhaps, but I'm a history major, so for me to pass history and get a major in it. You know, I read 1000s of pages of books a semester, if not weekly. So for me, reading was really easy to go through. So I read through a lot of the books of management, you know, the science of it, and I was accepting of it. And as much as my wife is currently, today, involved and engaged. She was a bit in denial, actually a lot, in denial that what occurred occurred, especially after he rolled off insulin. After that first month, it was kind of a it wasn't the whole idea of he's healed. It was more of a, well, his body is doing something on its own here. Let's not overthink it, and just take every day as it came. So you know, I was doing the crazy man thing, which is planning for the future. She was doing the rational thing, which was just do every step, one foot in front of the other. And if today doesn't need insulin, today doesn't need insulin. So those reactions were very wide ranging. And then same with my kids, my son's reaction, he usually at chronic ear infections. I have my whole theory as to that was part of the problem is that he was always in blamed from various foods that he would eat, that he doesn't eat now, but none of us eat now, stuff like fried foods, seed oil, for example. I don't mind if it's butter and that sort of thing, but like, we took him off all that, and he no longer gets ear infections. But he was good for two or three a year, easy. His response at diagnosis was, you know, laying on the ER table getting his first two injections. Was, well, so how long do I have to do this? Like, 10 days. Because he was thinking, you know, amoxicillin, that kind of thing, yeah. And the nurse kind of looked at me like, I don't know how to respond to that. Like he's asking how long he has to do these injections. And I kind of looked at him, I said, Well, only I could think of at the moment was for as long as you need to, until they're secure, and we'll just do it every day. As it happens, that was one of these. He looked at me, goes, well, what does that mean? Well, for a while, and it could be years, I don't know, but for right now, it's going to be every day. And he cried for maybe 30 seconds, and then moved on. I mean, the kid is resilient. That's again, reaction there being pod changes don't bother him. Sensor changes don't bother him. He did his own injections. I don't I don't know how he did it. It used to scare the crap out of me. My doing it right or wrong and that sort of thing. Yeah. And then my eldest daughter, she Dad, you're so so upset all the time. Why you're so sad? That's like, well, because your brother's facing this. And she goes, Yeah, but he's not doing anything any different. So here's another child observing that really grateful for that. She doesn't want to treat him any differently. She doesn't treat him like he's a glass object ready to break at any moment. She still beats up on him. Not that I enjoy that, but you know, again, another reaction. And my youngest, he's also got another sibling that's really close. So back to your thing about parenting. My two middle kids are 13 months apart, so one was born in summer, and then for Christmas, my wife dropped a pregnancy test in the stocking. Said, surprise. You know, well, we got one in diapers, followed by another one on diapers nine months later, and

Scott Benner 28:50
your dad's like, you're not going fast enough.

Speaker 1 28:54
Pick up the pace. So yeah, there's only six years between our four kids, so it's a pretty tight go out. But okay, my youngest was just like, she was kind of quiet about the whole thing, in awe, and she wanted to know how she could help. You know, little five year old girl at the time looking at her big brother. So it was just really interesting to see how no one really wanted to treat him differently. But I was like, trying to throw a protective bubble wrap around him, and it ended up being not the wrong thing at the moment was for me, it wasn't so much for him, right? I guess that's the best way to put

Scott Benner 29:28
it. You're still trying to figure out a way to stop all this and be in control of it,

Speaker 1 29:33
right? And so I realized, you know, I just can't. And so one of your favorite sayings has helped me a lot, which it's interesting to see a lot of the static thinking and in the healthcare setting, because we go to large Children's National Hospital, and one of the original big wigs in pediatric endocrinology runs to practice, and we've not ever met with that Endo. But I came up with all our basal settings. I came up with all of our Bolus settings, our insulin to car BA. Sensitivity, all that stuff, because listening to you mainly, and the podcast, and all your contributors, like Jenny, that sort of thing, the books as well. And I was like, Well, meet the need, right? And so, I mean, right now, while he's honeymooning, some people may be pulling their hair out. I've just had to roll with it. He needed four and a half units yesterday, and I think he's already up to four and a half units today. Like, I can't tell you why. It's not like, it's a major change in his food intake. It's just some days it's like, whoa, dial back to basal and dial back the amount we give him at meal time. And other times it's like, whoa, we didn't even put a dent in this. Like, what on earth is going on? So I've learned to just let go and let it happen and respond to it, because you'll drive yourself absolutely crazy into therapy like I did, trying to figure it out.

Scott Benner 30:48
I hope when I say that, I hope people like take it the way I mean it. Because I always worry that when I say meet the need, that it feels like an increase statement, but it could be a decrease statement. It could be whatever the need is, just meet it. Don't. Don't overthink it. Don't, you know, don't go, I don't understand. Why is it less today? Why is it like, who cares? Just just match the need with the resistance of insulin that that's required and move on. It's so weird. Like when you said a second ago, you're like, there's this saying you have the bot that that helps me, and then you kind of went into your story. It's so interesting to see what strikes certain people and how it ends up helping them.

Speaker 1 31:30
Oh, it does. So I'm in my analogy that that matches up with that is so I'm in sales and high tech software selling to enterprise and government, and

Scott Benner 31:41
that history degree really came in handy. When people ask me, what do you do with a

Speaker 1 31:45
history degree? I'm like, I don't know, whatever you want. I sold shoes at Nordstrom when I was, you know, in college to help pay for it. Afterwards, I was like, Well, what do I do with this? Went to go work on Capitol Hill, and they don't pay anything, by the way. People who are dedicated on the hill, that's a they're not doing it for the money, at least the members might be, but people work for them, definitely not. So I moved here to do that, and then decided to be in in software sales, because I understood technology Well, I'd love to tinker. I got in trouble with the FBI one time. Wait,

Scott Benner 32:16
hold on, you got in trouble with the FBI one time.

Speaker 1 32:21
So the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was just passed when I was in college, and I was doing, you remember Napster? I mean, wow, we're going back. Of course. There was alternatives to that for video and media and other things, software, etc. And this was, gosh, we're gonna go off on a tangent here. So my best friend's father was an intellectual property lawyer, and I'll never forget after I graduated, and this whole thing with the FBI stopped and whatever, and he said, your generation was right to be angry at the music industry. And I was like, that's not why I did it. It was free. I like, I was confused. I'm like, I wasn't thinking about it. But he's making the point. I spent $22 on that album listen to one song kind of felt like a rip off. And that's where the iTunes thing took off. The FBI thing was because I was, I was sharing huge volumes of pirated movies that had been ripped off of Hollywood Studios by insiders in Hollywood. Have you set up a server? Yeah, I was, I was one of the biggest sharing groups in the US at the time. It wasn't me personally, it was a group of us in a fraternity that I then went and hacked the school network, took all the firewall rules off and all the other fun stuff that stopped us from sharing. And, you know, I kind of had personal control of the network. This was the early days of a lot of cyber security. It wasn't very good. So, yeah, I had fun with it. And, you know, we'd literally that night, I'd be like, what do you guys want to work watch, right? And we'd go download something before dinner and come back, and by nine o'clock, whatever movie anyone wanted to watch, we downloaded it. And so that's that ended up being a problem for me, because the FBI traced my P Jess back to the school, and then from the school, they figured out where it's coming from, they sent this massive letter. It actually went home to and that's where my father was, like, you he wanted to kill me. You know, you're gonna risk everything. I said, Well, I laughed. I said, they didn't catch me for like, 99.9% of the stuff they found, like an Adobe installer file or something, you know, completely innocent, like, literally none of the stolen stuff. It was just the when I say stolen stuff, I mean, like, the pirate ape stuff that people were sharing. It was a legitimate file that I'd actually saved in the wrong file. Like, upgrading it and, like, okay, yeah, sure, I'll delete that file. And from there forward, I never did it, ever again. It was one of these, wow. That was a closed brush with with reality. Just,

Scott Benner 34:35
was it like a seasoned assist, and you just cease to desist, exactly, right? Yeah. You know, it's funny people like nowadays, I don't even think movie going to the movies doesn't have the same vibe as it used to, obviously, like you're talking about sharing films that weren't even released yet or or were literally in a theater, and young people listening don't understand, like a movie would come out in June, it would stay. In the theater for six months, like, like, you know what I mean? Like, it's not like right now, a movie comes out in a movie theater and, like, three weeks later you can watch it on like, Max or something like that. That's not, it wasn't like that. So you were, in their mind, stealing millions of dollars from them, if, if you were making it free, but you're lucky you didn't go down for that.

Speaker 1 35:19
Oh, here's, here's the the, I don't know. The funny part of the whole thing is, most of these movies were actually taken from the studios themselves by employees, because you'd get their screener discs. So if people have never seen Oscars from a while ago, the Oscar discs that they'd send out anytime they wanted a vote for given actor, actress, at least. This is what I was told back then. This could have evolved since then, but the disc itself for the scene they wanted someone to be nominated for. And these were always in the movie screeners that we downloaded at the bottom, it would scroll for your consideration in big block, white lettering. And they were like, what's that for? I'm like, the guys at Paramount, or the guys at whatever, thought this was the scene the actor should win Best Picture for, right? And people like, Wait, isn't this in the theaters now I'm like, yeah, they're already pushing, like, who should be nominated for something, and the Oscars aren't for six months, right? So the part for me that I was like, Look, this is just one big circle, like the studios are not paying their people well enough. They're not protecting your own property well enough. It's all being shared freely. I don't know what you're supposed to do. And, you know, I was a kid, and it was like, Hey, I just type in a word, and I find the movie and I download it like there was no, there's no limit, right? Same thing with the music, and

Scott Benner 36:34
you're not making money off it. It's all swagger, right? It's all just because I can, yeah, and it

Speaker 1 36:38
was all, it was all one of these things where it was all built on idea of the more shares you have, peer to peer, networking took off, right? And that's where the whole process just was, the more you share, the more you had access to and the more people downloaded from you, the higher your rating. It was just like Facebook before Facebook, how many shares you have, some likes, that's, that's, he's a good source of material. And,

Scott Benner 37:00
you know, just that was that crazy. No kidding.

Unknown Speaker 37:03
So I turned that somehow into a sales career.

Scott Benner 37:06
Well, I see the Connect. I see the through points, but and they let you graduate the school didn't make you bigger. Oh no kidding. Well, the school, the school, understood

Speaker 1 37:15
what we were doing, and we weren't, by any means, any violator anywhere. It was happening all around the country, and at the end of the day, everyone figured out how to shut it down. They went after the people who created the platforms, which is what they always do. They don't go after the users. They go after the dealers, right? The dealers are the guys that made the tech, like the guys that founded Napster and these other products that said, You got to stop doing it. It's making it too easy for piracy. I mean, I knew deep down at the end of the day, I said, this really isn't wrong, but it's so easy. So what are you going to do? But it taught me a lot about how how to talk to people around the technology, because people wouldn't understand. How did you do this? And I realized it was just a series of stepping stones, right? You just had to start questioning and start doing and start dabbling, and then you'd build on that experience. So it put me in a mindset of technology has to be conquered one step at a time. You don't become an instant expert, just like with what you do. I mean, I look at you and the way you talk about management, and I said, My God, what he's so confident. Clear. He knows what he's doing, why he's doing it, and if doesn't go as planned, doesn't bother him. I was like, that's the 10,000 hour rule, which, in a technology world, a lot of people know it, which is, you're an expert. After 10,000 hours, you can't really learn a whole lot more.

Scott Benner 38:26
Yeah, my secret to how I how I think about diabetes, is that I don't think about it any differently than I think about anything else, like I run my life the way I run diabetes. So I learn things I once. I know they're right. I do them. I never look back. I never question things once they work. And you know, if something goes wrong, you just wipe the slate clean and start over again. Like there's no reason to beat yourself up. There's no reason to overthink something has been thought through a million different times, like, this is how insulin works. You know, just use it like that. And if something goes wrong, there's a variable at play, you know, you can look back later and try to find it if you want. But in the moment, the moment passes, and so now you're in a new moment. Just go back to doing things the right way again, and it just works. Like everything works like what I say, something incredibly inflammatory. Life is really easy if you let it be most of the time. Like, where it gets difficult is when you bring other people into it, because they have their perspectives and ideas and what's important to them. And when that doesn't mesh with you, that's where things become. That's where they say. You know, relationships are are difficult, right? Because you have a way of thinking and somebody else has a way of thinking, and now you're trying to co exist without pissing the other one off too much. But if you just kind of put yourself in a white room with diabetes, you get your settings right, your pre bulls, your meals, you. Pay attention to implications like fat, protein, exercise, you stay flexible, you meet the need. You don't argue too much about why what's happening is happening. If you get stuck on that, you get stuck forever. It's like stepping it up, but a tar pit, you know, now you're now you're here having this argument. There's no answer to forever and ever and ever. So just don't step in it. Just go past it. And it sounds like that. It's funny, because the way you talked about going through the technology and figuring out the peer to peer and the whole bigger idea, that's really very similar. The only place you got stuck so far it sounds like is in the unreasonable idea that you could somehow impact this for your son in a way that's beyond you know what the natural world will allow? Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 40:51
Yeah, I, I mean, I, I feel myself happier today than I did when I used to tell people, I don't have a care in the world. Like I used to look back the summer before the diagnosis were really three weeks, three months prior to that, one of the businesses I was in, it's part of the reason why you do high risk startups is private equity came in and and bought the business and hey, like, that's nice little lump of change. Let's have a little vacation. So we took two weeks to go to the beach, something we wanted to do as a family for a while, and we so we did it. And I remember thinking, literally, I'm like, oh, life can't get any better than this, and blah, blah, blah, but I was still always on edge with kids still learning to swim. Two youngest were still running around the pool. I could not relax. Lots of other components, like, we'd go skiing. I grew up skiing in New England, teaching them to ski. It's like, oh my god, they're gonna careen off the trail and hit a tree. Like, literally, my mom would always race to the worst possible outcome of whatever the enjoyable event I was supposed to have, you know, like, the waves gonna take him out at the beach and sweep him out. I'd have to go save him. Like, save him. So I was never really capable of just letting go. And then once the diagnosis happened, I was like, I just I can't live like this. I have to let go and just let to your point, life happen. Just go with it. So

Scott Benner 42:15
there's nothing wrong, in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with being prepared for those ideas. It's being stuck in them. That's the problem. Yes, I

Unknown Speaker 42:22
was certainly stuck in them. Yeah, that was my problem. I

Scott Benner 42:24
once, I was having this conversation once with my brother in law, and I said, Wait a minute. I said, you have a two story house. And he goes, Yeah. I said, you don't know which window you jump out of if there was a fire and you couldn't get down the stairs. And he goes, what? And I said, one of your Windows is a lesser of evils. You don't know which one it is. And he goes, No. And I said, I do. I plan for stuff like that. He goes, you plan for what you'll do if your house catches fire and you can't get down the stairs? And I was like, I mean, plan is a strong word. I gave it 20 seconds of thought. I know which window I'd go to,

Speaker 1 43:00
yeah. I mean, I had the little ladder roll away, ladder tucked under your arm as you walked into the second

Scott Benner 43:05
story. Well, that's my in my mind, having the ladder is a bridge too far, but knowing which one goes to a little rooftop that would let me, like, kind of tumble down on the ground and probably not break anything, or put me in a position where I could make it longer till somebody got there. Like it's not a thing I've ever thought about since then, but I did think about it for four seconds. I'm freaked out when none of you think about anything. I'm also freaked out when you can't stop thinking about it. Like, I understand the kids don't swim, we're going to the beach, so we're going to pay attention. But after I've had the thought, then I execute it, I don't worry about it. Like, that's where, like worries, a waste of imagination, comes into my mind. You are genuinely making up a story about a thing that very likely won't happen, and then you're guarding against it. So do you have anxiety? I don't anymore, but you did, most certainly did. You gave it away for your son.

Speaker 1 43:56
I did. Yeah, I had to be able to enjoy life. I had to let him feel that it wasn't a barrier to him. And if he's watching his father constantly worry over every little thing, he's going to wonder, is there something I need to be worried about? And the reality is, you know, he's he was starting to transition some of his care to him, and he's gotten better with it. But, like, I didn't want him to see the anxiety that was very obviously on my face, like I was not eating. Well, I lost a ton of weight. When I say a ton, it sounds like a huge amount to lose, but I probably lost 30 pounds in two and a half months because I had to force myself to eat like I was just so anxious. And my wife one day was like, get a hold of yourself. And I was like, Yeah, I need to well

Scott Benner 44:41
she No, I'm not laughing. I'm just trying to imagine, if I told my wife to get a hold of herself, what would happen?

Unknown Speaker 44:49
Well, it was, it was warranted because, oh

Scott Benner 44:51
no, it would be warranted if I said it to my wife too. I'm just wondering what would happen if I said you got a hold of yourself, my wife would beat. Me with a stick and then leave me and take everything, get a hold. It was, that's

Speaker 1 45:06
where. That's why I said the reactions were so helpful. Like, I overdid it and she kind of underdid it right. And we both had to get to our, our balance and our where we were both at peace with like, hey, like, I'm accepting of

Scott Benner 45:18
it. Did you both find level is she, did she rise up and you came down?

Speaker 1 45:22
Yes, okay, yes, yeah. And she's still probably calmer about the whole thing than I am. Well,

Scott Benner 45:29
in fairness, Brian, you're worrying about it. Why did two of you have to worry about it? Well,

Speaker 1 45:33
no, that, hey, you know what that's that's probably a fair way to look at it. Um, we settled into that role a little bit like we still have. We still have, we still haven't been able to use any of the automation stuff, because he's just like, every day would be different. It's just not. You're not up to automation yet. Yeah, we're thinking at some point we'll be able to, but his needs are just too highly variable still. Yeah, so, so I'm the automation. That's me, but I enjoy it because I look at it from your perspective, which is, if I can better begin to see the patterns that are there, maybe some of them are imagined, and I just lucked out. But for the most part, I take it the way you look at it, which is, you know, it, it's very real in most cases. And I'm not tinkering with settings. It's more about responding in the moment to what's going on. But that process, she's slowly coming around to like I told her, Hey, listen to Scott. And I gave her the old beginnings and Pro Tip series said, listen through all of these and we'll be able to have a better conversation about what we're doing. She do that. Did it help? Oh, absolutely, I'm glad completely understands now, like yesterday, my son, we went to watch her voting day, I guess was yesterday, right Tuesday. So a bunch of schools were closed, so I took my son to have her he went to go watch her play a tennis match, and at the end of it, he's like, Dad, I want a cheeseburger. And I was like, I kind of was rolling my eyes a little bit, like these fat bombs, and just like whatever, you know, it's good. Let's go ahead. So we went ahead of cheeseburger. And, you know, this giant thing? I was like, God, I don't even know what the car count is on that. So I said, we have to wing it. We have to eyeball it, and we have to be ready to respond. And I let him make the judgment call. What do you think that is? And thankfully, I He did it on his own. I didn't do this at all. He's, I guess, to your point, like Arden, he overestimates it, not by a lot, not where I'd go, oh no, no, no. But he does more than I do. And I'm like, All right, let's go for it. I think he was only above like 180 for maybe 30 minutes. But of course, it came back three hours later, there was that rise again, and my wife said, Oh, the fat rise and the proteins going on, like, we need to knock it down. I didn't even see it. She saw it before I did. And I was like, we would not have been able to have that conversation. Earlier on. She'd have been like, I don't understand what's happening. What do we do? And there'd be freezing paralysis, like, and we'd watch it probably keep going up. Also,

Scott Benner 47:57
then there's an assumption you did something wrong, because if she doesn't know enough about it to understand that other impact, then the idea is, well, you guys just didn't Bolus well for this. And that's the thing that people get, forget you and your wife. But people get frozen that if they don't know the other implications, then they just go to, I did something wrong. And sometimes people shut down. You know what I mean? Instead of like, not everybody lurches forward. Some people just go, oh, I suck at this. And they kind of collapse. And then they sit with their 300 blood sugar forever. Yeah, I

Speaker 1 48:26
had that conversation with our, I guess, our our nurse practitioner that we see more than we see the end of and at one, back and forth over our they use a lot of electronic communication for the easy stuff. I say, Hey, I'm trying to dial in his ratio. And I made this change. She's kind of like, well, why did you do that? I said, Well, if I give him this much, he drops too far. This is how we ended up getting on a pump. Was he needs? We have to do things in temp of the unit on a regular basis, because trying to keep a tighter range. You just for his insulin sensitivity, like even a half unit will move them 80 move them like, 80 points. Yeah. So if he's at like, 130 I'm like, so we did this for a while. I'm like, All right, Rory, go grab your favorite whatever, ice cream, sugary thing. It was, like the idea you gave you'd Bolus for a juice box before sports like that way, if it doesn't work, just down the juice like, so we were always trying to match how much we could kind of catch it before it would drop, knowing that it would help bring him down. But not all the way down. We were doing this, like, feed the insulin thing. I'm like, This is insanity. Like, he doesn't need to eat an extra 500 600 calories a day in mainly carbohydrates and glucose related stuff, just so that I can bring them down to a number I'd like to see in that Yeah? And she's like, Well, okay, I see your point. I said, so can we get the Omnipod please? She's like, alright, you, you clearly have comfort level with this that most people don't. So yeah. And we had, we had it, like, three days later, but that was after a lot of trial and error, yeah. And that was my. First experience of trying to figure these things out on my own. I said, Ah, first confidence boost, right?

Scott Benner 50:04
I think for sure, when you are trying to make small adjustments like that, MDI is is harder, you know, like it's just there's all you can't get as fine with the amounts, and there's more poking. And did you think your wife just didn't want him to have a pump, or she just didn't feel like she knew enough about it right away? Like, so she saw your comfort with it, and thought, okay, that's fine. There

Speaker 1 50:29
was some level of resistance to the idea. But then, when I explained to her that, you know, when he has, like, his favorite breakfast, he has eggs and these two Kodiak waffles that he loves, like a unit ends up being a little too much, and half units not nearly enough. So we were, we were doing, like, split balls and constantly just trying to figure this out. I said, Hey, imagine we do this now with an extended Bolus, and we split the ratios. And then, you know, now he's not 225, going into school at, you know, 830 because the Bolus still hadn't hit from the second one. And, you know, and so it took this whole process, and she wrapped her head around the idea of, if you don't like his number going above a certain number, not that we need to make a number good or bad, but just what are we shooting for? Target wise, it's easier given his dosage. Needs to do it with a pump. And then when my son figured out that he only needs to put it on every three days, he's like, Oh, I'm in. I'm in. Okay? Because, you know, yeah, he'd do six or seven injections, maybe eight a day, just, you know, with everything he ate, and it didn't bother him. But he was kind of like, it's such a production. Like, lift up the shirt, Bob the area, so grab the pen, prep the pen, like he was doing all of that, because he would actually tell us, Mom, I can insert it without any paint. You believe me be and I was like, oh, okay, so he's, he's ready for this.

Scott Benner 51:58
Let's see about a pump. Yeah, well, it's, that's pretty great. Actually. Hey, I've decided on what I'm gonna call your episode, and it's, I'm gonna name it after the book I'm reading right now. That sounds fun. And as a history major, I feel like you're gonna know what I'm reading.

Unknown Speaker 52:13
It's called meditations.

Scott Benner 52:17
I don't know that book. Oh, it's a collection of Marcus Aurelius is writings.

Speaker 1 52:21
Oh, that sounds fun. Yeah, I actually have a book called hubris sitting on my desk, which is all about kind of the the pomp and circumstances that leave up to war and why wars typically don't go the way that people who start them think. And there's some, there's some uh, Roman battles of that book as well. I believe you

Scott Benner 52:45
haven't read it yet. Apparently, he used to sit down at the end of the day and just write down random thoughts, and they're all collected in this, uh, in this book called meditations. So and I feel like this is what we're doing with you right now. Like I feel like we're just hearing about the things that at the end of the day you were like, This is my takeaway from today. I'm gonna build on tomorrow with this. And I don't know anyway, that's my inclination.

Speaker 1 53:13
I like it. I I've my father used to quote the Beatles to me about that, which is life is what happens to you while you're making other plans. I think that's roughly the quote. He was a Beatles fan, not me, but I was always making lots of other plans. This obviously was not in, and I don't think type one's in anybody's plans. But that never really resonated with me until after this, actually speaking, going all the way back to one of your earlier questions about how people responded my parents, when I called them from the hospital room. I said, you know, Rory has type one. My father's response was, oh, everything will be all fine. And it took me about two weeks, but I called him back after I said, That's the absolute wrong response. I needed from you at that time, I needed someone to empathize with me, sympathize with me, just be present in that raw emotion of it sucks. It probably feels really shitty right now, and that's what's going to happen for a while. And I didn't get that, and that's where I was really grasping. So my heart goes out to all the newly diagnosed on a regular basis, and those are really, generally, the people I almost always respond to on the Facebook group, which is, you know, I've been in your shoes. It does suck, but just the longer on this component, my favorite podcast episode of yours is when you It's titled, I think the time I decided to share that put me at ease when I first heard it, because it puts the Scott today and the Scott of when you were not really newly diagnosed, but about as far back as you you would share those two pictures of you. It's kind of like newly diagnosed Scott struggled too, right? Like it's, it's no secret, but it's, you know, we're so far along in your podcast, I think some of that gets lost on people. But I was like, yeah, there's some really big gems in the background that you can say, hey, if Scott can. Be who he is today, and Arden can be the one she is today with this for 20 years. So can I, you know, why can't I, like, I'm listening to this person basically talk like an expert, but it didn't start there. No one starts there. And

Scott Benner 55:13
maybe, maybe I can let go of some of the angst that exist during the process too. I would hope, I would hope people can do that a little bit like just, I mean, not that the feelings aren't real, but that you don't have to live in them for so long that you can go, You know what? This is probably gonna pass. I have to tell you my favorite Beatles song. That's a message from a title is, let it be. I find that like a chant, almost when I listen to it. Just, there's so many things that happen, and they all seem so important, and you feel like there's something to do all the time, but the truth is that most of the time, the best thing to do is nothing, just let it be. I know I take a lot of comfort out of that. Usually, yeah,

Speaker 1 55:55
it's a good point. It's something. Occasionally I get a little jumpy on corrections, and my wife will look at me and she'll kind of say, Hey, can you can you give it one or two more Dexcom readings see if this is really a trend? And I would say probably 80% of the time, she's right. She's she's a good governor on the process for me, because otherwise I'm like, Cool. Overdid that. And then I got a text, Hey, cut the basal back and, like, we gotta make up for a little aggressive over correction. So she's a good governor on the Let It Be part two, which is sometimes you gotta let the decision you made play out and not second guess yourself, because then you'll just drive yourself crazy. Yeah,

Scott Benner 56:32
sometimes you need to see the process happen. It's not so much about controlling the number as it is seeing what your impacts did so that you can make better decisions. And I mean, listen, I've had, you know, back when I would, you know, texting Arden, when she was younger, I'd be like, temp basal increase 30% for an hour, and then five minutes later, I'd be like, shut that off. And then

Speaker 1 56:54
all the time, well, not to him directly, but when he's home, I'm always like, Oh God, I'll walk, you know, back into the bedroom, 10 minutes later, back. Well, don't need that temp, basal,

Scott Benner 57:03
temp, basal, the other way. Now, what we went too far. Do, uh, do 10% but for 45 minutes now, and like, it's fun to joke about, because it felt like such like these wild over corrections. But I'm telling you, the experiences were important. Like, I'm telling you like to see it happen now. Now it allows me, in present day, to say, I don't like this 170 blood sugar, but I see what's happened in the past here with this. You know, the algorithms pushed insulin, or we Bolus or something, and I'm reasonably sure that this 170 is going to be 90 in an hour. So I want to put more insulin in because of the number, but I got to trust the process, and I can trust it, because in the past, I've not trusted it, and then I've learned from it. So I think it's all important. But in the end, when you get to your zen place, and this is not just about diabetes. You sincerely apply this to your personal relationships, your jobs, how you feel about people driving in traffic. Often the best thing to do is nothing. I mean, if you can leave with more than that today, you've done really well, but most of the time you're just you, what's the the cooking saying? Right? Like, you just you touched it too many times and now it sucks, or something like that. Like, I forget what that idea is like. Just stop fiddling with it so much. Let it be what it is. I don't know. I find that getting up people get upset. I think if you just walked away from this, never thought about it again, it would go away. But instead, we're gonna spend the next six months being mad about this, you know. So anyway, I run my life on some very basic ideas. I run diabetes on my basic life ideas. Most of the time, things go on. Am I perfect? I'm not. Do people all agree with it. They don't. You know what I mean, but it works. It's working pretty well. Arden's alive. She's thriving. I just talked to her last night on FaceTime. She's at the end of her quarter. She's about to finish her sophomore year in college. She's sitting in a lab with a friend she made who somehow has diabetes like the first in person my daughter made her first in person friend with diabetes in her life when she was 20 years old at college, and she's never once known a person with type one personally in person, she has one online friend and one in person friend who has diabetes, and they're working together, and they FaceTimed last night, because they're, they got an extension on something, and they were, they seemed like very happy for a minute, so that, I think they face time to be like, we got an extension, And they're so relaxed and laughing. But yet, in the past week, they've both done all nighters, three nights in a row, nobody's had like, a crazy low blood sugar. They're managing themselves. It's nice, you know what? I mean, like, so I don't, I don't begrudge you your drill downs and you're over involved. Yes, and I'm really impressed at how you let them go. I'm sure plenty of people are like, how did he just let go of that anxiety? I'm going to assume you went to therapy. Is that how you did it?

Speaker 1 1:00:10
Yeah, I did. I did it with therapy. They were things that I had to accept, because the therapist would say to me that a lot of the anxiety was really a reflection of probably things that I had to acknowledge when I were younger, and so, I mean, I had to have a conversation with my parents. I said, Is there a trauma in my background that I don't know about? I mean, I had to be very serious about that. No, no, no, I know what you're talking about. At the end of the day, there was maybe not so little things, but they definitely had an impact me as a young, young kid, that it kind of had me put up walls around certain things that hadn't really face down. And through therapy, it was one of these, look, there's there's ways that you can respond to certain pressures in life, and just have to make that choice, and I'd been making the wrong one, essentially, very guarding, and I had to face them head on. So for me, a lot of it was, I had to be more upfront with what I was actually feeling. So I think, to your credit, in some ways, like not that you don't have a filter, but you don't like you you're speaking your mind, and you're very clear about that. I think there's a lot of people who don't like to speak their mind because they're afraid they're afraid they're going to upset somebody, when, in reality, there's something you're trying to work through, and there's maybe a communication gap between you and the other person, and someone might take offense, but there are ways that you can learn to talk about them and say, Look, this isn't me being offensive. This is me having an honest conversation about what I'm experiencing, what I'm feeling, and I hadn't really done that, you know, Were

Scott Benner 1:01:42
you mad at your parents or something because your debt, your reaction to your father was angry?

Speaker 1 1:01:47
It was, yeah, the reaction with that is, he's an on again, off again alcoholic. Oh, and so when I say that it's, it's he, he realizes that he's a much better person when he doesn't drink, and he's atrocious when he does and I don't, not physically at all. It's verbal it's terribly verbal abuse in more of the attempt to be funny, that's the painful part of the whole thing. It was not mean to be mean. It wasn't saying anything vicious, but it was just barbs and jabs like you wouldn't say that if you hadn't been drinking. And I noticed this, and I said at the end of the day, I said, I just the people who should, in your mind, love you most, and not say those things or saying them like I had to square up with that. And it was experiences as Kid where that was like something you'd see at the dinner table when the family would get together, is who can be wittier than the other person. And it almost invariably devolved into a rose peeking at each other. Oh yeah, the full roast thing. Could you imagine what Tom Brady just went through in this Netflix thing? Like, oh, it's

Scott Benner 1:02:46
fantastic. I loved it.

Speaker 1 1:02:48
I mean, I was like, Wow, you really have to be open minded about doing that. But imagine that, instead of those being comedians hired to pick at you, it's your closest friends and family. And suddenly that may not feel so good. So yeah, roasting constantly. They would cross the line a lot. I never acknowledged that, that that bothered me immensely, because I married into a family that doesn't do that at all. Oh, those people, they treat family, yeah, those people very differently. And you can be light hearted, but like, there's things you just like, Listen, I

Scott Benner 1:03:17
love humor. You can't be light hearted and humorous. It has to hurt or it's not funny. And your point is, you don't need your dad doing that to you.

Speaker 1 1:03:26
Right? Your your jerseys through I'm from Northern Jersey originally, so, like, I'm definitely familiar with the jersey approach to stuff New York City feel. But, yeah, it was, but for me, it was one of these things where he didn't drink for 20 years. I didn't know he had this problem until after I was growing

Scott Benner 1:03:40
Oh, no kidding. Your dad hid drinking from you through your first 20 years of your life.

Speaker 1 1:03:45
He didn't hide it. He'd quit cold turkey. Oh, he'd stopped for that

Unknown Speaker 1:03:49
long. Stopped for

Speaker 1 1:03:50
that long. I had no idea my father was the he's he'd go to a party, and it was, I just knew my dad is, he'd have a coke on ice. That was all you'd ever drink.

Scott Benner 1:03:57
Your dad was white knuckle on it through his whole life with this, yeah, for sure. No kidding, how about that?

Speaker 1 1:04:03
And then after my brother and I moved out of the house, I think he realized, for whatever reason, that he thought he could, you know, ease his way into it. And nope, so he's done the rehab thing twice, and it hurts now because he's got grandkids. I might do you want to spend a lot of time with him, like, I don't know what to tell you, like, what motivations you need not to pick up a drink you can't stop. So for me, it was facing that down. And people may say, Oh, I have problems in my life too, and I face it down all the time. But like for me, it was an unaddressed issue that, you know, if you idolize somebody and they're they're your rock because you saw them operate a certain way for 20 years, and then suddenly they're vulnerable, they're a mess. They're all these other things. It's like, well, my anchor point just flew off, like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do now, the person who I would have expected to drive down and, you know, stay at the house with us for a little while. You would never trust them to operate a vehicle. We

Scott Benner 1:04:53
have family members. Our kids have never been in a car with and we told them you can't drive our kids. So. Don't ever like if it ever falls that way, just know that you're not allowed to drive my kid somewhere no matter what. And we had to say that when we were pretty young to somebody, it was hard, yeah. But again, I don't really have trouble saying stuff like that to people, so no,

Speaker 1 1:05:15
yeah. And as it should be, though, like, that's, that's the thing that I had to do, is I had to learn to take the governor's off on the hard feelings, yeah, again, not to insult somebody or hurt them, but to make sure that I wasn't left in this anxiety ridden ball of, you know, what if? And that freaked me up, because the other option was medicate myself. And I talked to a few friends who'd done that, and they're like, it feels like you're driving somebody else's body. It's, it's really weird. It works. Like the anxiety goes away, but it's, it's they didn't, in their experience, think that going the SSRI route and others was was worth it to them. I got a prescription, looked at it on my desk, and said, If I go down this route and it works, I'm going to think that that's what I need my whole life. I want to try addressing the other underlying issues first and see if that works. Because if nothing works, then, hey, maybe I do need it. Like, I'm not judging at all. If you need it, you need it, yeah, but I decided that I would go the other way with it. And for me, it was, what summarizes it up is I used to come home every day from work, and then I'd say, all right, made it through another day. The kids are a little bit older, and I used to say to myself, well, at some point they'll all be old enough for like, it's not stressful. So I used to kind of do that to myself. I was like, because we had so many young kids, you know, under the age of six or seven. So for a long time, everything was, I mean, I've been to the ER on the same day with two different kids for two different injuries, with the same ER doctor looking at me, like, would you forget something? I'm like, nope. Here for a different reason, different kid like, that's that was kind of the chaos in the house.

Scott Benner 1:06:44
Were you finding problems that didn't exist? I thought they asked you this earlier, and I never did.

Speaker 1 1:06:49
No, I never, I never found problem that didn't exist. Okay, you know, it was, if it was an ear infection, it was an ear infection. If it was, you know, pneumonia, it was pneumonia, the flu, the flu, that kind of thing. So I never invented issues. But like that day of the ER trip, a friend of ours had given us one of these little sticker books for little kids. And my one daughter left it open, and my youngest, who was two at the time, put the stickers in her mouth, and they were these kind of hard plastic foil back things that, oh God, like, whoa. Like, so my wife is she hears her gag, and she's like, What the hell. So she's like, swooping out, and she thinks she's choking on it. And we're like, how many stickers were there? And we're like, we have no ideas. We've at this point, we're operating with the idea that maybe she swallowed one. And I'm like, Well, if it's sticker made of paper or plastic, no big deal. But these were, these were hard, like, we were thinking this might be a bit large or something, yeah, or get stuck. So we drove the ER, and the ER doc was was listening. There was no whistling, and he's no but we'll do a chest X ray, because he's like, these things will light up on a x ray machine, no problem, because they're made with some foil lining. It all came back clear. So in order to celebrate the ah, you know, we dodged whatever we went to the local park, and we're working on my older two daughters bike riding skills. And my second daughter wanted to try riding around the park with one of the training wheels off, following her big sister and I rode with them. They hit the brake. Oh, slow it down. Like we did this five or six times. And then the second time out. I was like, sit down, relax. They got it. I sat down and I watched her, and she's my speed demon, like risk taker one, no breaking. She keeps picking up speed. I'm like, Oh my God. She tries to make a turn, goes right over the handlebars, nearly hits the big post, goes down hard, and I hear crying, so I run to the other side of the field, and her arm is bent at a 35 degree angle. There's no bone sticking out, but you very clearly tell it's broken. So the day that was supposed to be relaxing for me, after the chaos, go back and the ER doc, like, oh, you forget something. You were just here three hours ago. I'm like, No, and I show him the arm. He's like, What the hell so,

Scott Benner 1:08:59
buddy, I told you, there's no sticker in the kid. What is wrong with you? No, no. Different kid. Different problem. Hold on, exactly. Oh,

Speaker 1 1:09:06
my look on his face was shock, like, oh, oh, you're serious. And then they had to do the standard thing with Child Protective Services, not because they were worried about us, but it was one of these two, yeah, kids on a bike, and were you wearing a helmet? And so these are all that stuff, and that kid's tough too. I mean, all my I said, all my kids are tough, but she, she never really was in too much pain throughout. And then, if you've never seen a kid on ketamine, it had a bone break set. It makes their eyes kind of go screwy. And I looked at my wife and said, I can't stay here for this while. They set the break. You have to do it. And now my wife worked in the medical field for 10 years as a rep, and she'd seen brain surgery, spine surgery, hips, like all sorts of stuff at a military hospital being worked on. So I was like, you have the fortitude for this? I do not. And so she stayed and watched him set the break. But she's like, Yeah, I don't ever want to watch that again either, because when it's your own kid, it's you don't disassociate you. Of that. So that's

Scott Benner 1:10:00
painful. Hey, listen, I, in case I forget, if you don't watch the entire Tom Brady roast, I'm not talking to the people who are listening. At least listen to Nikki Glaser, Tony Hinchcliffe and Sam Jay. They were particularly funny. Yes,

Speaker 1 1:10:15
Nikki was, yeah, wow. It just, she

Scott Benner 1:10:19
was just, she's her cadence is almost perfect for that stuff. Really fantastic anyway. And and to Tom Brady, who's now saying this didn't go the way he expected it to, or whatever bullshit he's talking about right now. Like, stop it, man. What'd you think was gonna happen?

Speaker 1 1:10:34
He didn't go to the after party. I'm like, Are you surprised? No,

Scott Benner 1:10:37
that I don't that I wouldn't go to the after party. He looked dazed at points, and with that plastic surgery, what I'm assuming is plastic surgery, he looked a little extra crazy at some points. But no, I thought those three comedians were hilarious. So if you're looking for an insight into what I think is funny in a roast situation, those three got me maybe, maybe Andrew Schultz, but I thought his cadence wasn't great, but I liked a lot of his content anyway, not the point, Brian, we've done a thing today that I think of as masterful. I asked you one question, and we talked for an hour and 15 minutes. That's perfect. There's other questions on here. You on your list here? Said family reactions, which I think took us through a great story. You did talk about your therapy, letting go illusion of control. You got through that. You talked about community a little bit, and how to support people and what they need in those situations. Maybe I yeah, maybe we did. Okay, actually. Well,

Speaker 1 1:11:36
there's, there's one thing I would add about the community part. Go ahead and I think it's, interesting, prior to my son's diagnosis, I'd only known one person prior to that, a good friend of mine, his wife, was diagnosed late in life, and that's kind of all I knew, and she lived a perfectly normal life and didn't think anything of it. One of the things that really helped me was finding people to talk to quickly. But one gentleman in particular did something great for me, and this is what I think everybody might need, which is he kind of represented what I envisioned my my son to be. And it's not unlike the story you had recently with another one of your guests that when she was diagnosed at 12 and she found herself later on with with someone else in the ER with her said, Oh, and you're perfectly normal, like, I kind of needed that experience. So a good friend of mine introduced me one of his best friends growing up. And he's like, oh, oh, your son is type one. Don't worry about it. I'm like, What are you talking about? Job? And he said, Well, you got to meet this guy, Tommy. I said, why he goes well, he was my best friend growing up. We did the JDR fund walks together. We went to college together. We played sports together. He's got a family. He's kids. He lives down the street. So I went and met him, and we had an hour and a half long conversation, and he did everything absolutely normal and nothing unusual about any of it. And he showed me off his Omnipod, and he said, Brian, I've been dealing with this for, you know, 28 years, and, you know, just got the Omnipod five. For me, this is about as close to a cure as I think I'll ever really need, because, hey, it helps minimize the risk for me, but I've gotten really good at this. And I was like, Oh, that's really interesting, great technology. And at the end of the night, as we were walking out of the restaurant, he turns and looked at me, because I know what you need. What's that? He goes, you want a hub, don't you? And I said, Yeah, dude. And I looked at him, and I said, you know you I have to look at you and say, That's what my son is capable of being and doing. Is his own grown man with his own family. And this won't prevent any of that, like I needed to see that in the flesh for whatever reason. Yeah, and it still gets me, and you say it on your podcast too, right? You will meet somebody, and I got a chance to see that as an embodiment in the flesh. And so for me, that community sense of and I still talk with Tommy on occasion. He's always asking how things are going. So it doesn't need to be this constant everyday thing, but there will be somebody you may meet that just if you can make them your spirit animal. That's what I call them anyway, and I joke about it, because they can be for me anyway, the reflection of my future son, right in that respect, or future daughter, if someone doesn't have the son that's diagnosed, right? And it doesn't have to be massive or impactful in that way. But for me, it was, it was almost freeing, like I don't have to think of my son as challenged or limited in any way, and and here's a person that I can relate to like that. So that's what it meant

Scott Benner 1:14:18
to me. So much of this path is having something that you can look to as aspirational, really important to have hope and a goal that is tangible, that has been embodied by somebody else already. That makes sense, absolutely, yeah, that's very, very important, because in the moment it all does feel terrible and insurmountable, and I'm different or broken, or my kid isn't what I thought they were going to be. And then people sometimes can be inclined to give up. You know, when they when they feel like, when they feel like, the aspiration is gone now, like. Know, then what's they're left to do, and why would I be trying? But that's just, it's just so patently not correct. I mean, I've talked to people with significant health issues on top of type one diabetes, who are maybe some of the happier people I've ever met in my life. Yeah? Well,

Speaker 1 1:15:16
you talk to the gentleman who's blind by his kind of mismanagement, by his own admission, just, you know, but got married, has kid, he's on the forums. And I said, Hey, I don't know how to contact you, but loved your episode, because, my God, the outlook you have on life, that was very freeing for me. You had another woman, I think it was Gloria, same kind of thing, you know, she's in her 70s, and it's like, I love horses, and she just decided to kind of move off into be with horses. And it was like, so for me, it was, hey, these people aren't at all saying it's a limitation, and for a long time, the medical community always wants to treat it that way. And that hurt most was that's kind of again, to your and I'll say you have a dislike of it, but the approach matters, right? They don't really know how to say it genuinely, because, unless they, as an endo, live with type one, how you're really supposed to take it seriously about when you're not living with that limitation, you know, that's like the guy walking around talking to someone you know, with inability to walk say, hey, everything could be fine. It's kind of like, kind of a weird, disjointed way to try to convince me, because you don't live with this, like, what am I supposed to

Scott Benner 1:16:20
do? What made you mad about your dad's statement isn't, I think that it was unfeeling, it's that it was unfounded. Like, and the thing he could have offered you, you know, I know you needed empathy in the moment, but like, at least that would have been honest from him. You know what I mean, like, it's going to be okay, from a person who doesn't really know if it's going to be okay is infuriating to me. It falls on the same level as God only gives these things to people who can handle it. Anytime anyone's ever said to me, God gave Arden diabetes because they knew you'd be good at taking care of it. I want to punch them in all of their faces with all of my hands, because the inference is that there's a God, first of all, and he looked at me and said, Hey, you're a thoughtful person. I'll give your kid diabetes. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. I understand the overall feeling I get what they mean, but the way you say it is really important. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's, oh, I do. There's another way to say something, like you can, you could pass that sentiment to me in a way that would be comforting, instead of a way that's infuriating, that goes for a lot of of different things. Hey, listen, I'm gonna, I don't usually do this at the end here, but here's a PSA, from me to you, if you grew up with alcoholic parents, go to therapy.

Speaker 1 1:17:39
Yes, yeah, even if you don't know until later in life

Scott Benner 1:17:42
for sure. Yeah, there's so much impact that comes from alcoholic parenting onto children, and there are probably a dozen things you do with your personality that you would be much happier without, and they all stem from your parents being drinkers. And I know that most people don't believe that, but wait, man, I see it over and over again. Go to a therapist and say, hey, my parents were drunks, and I need help, and a year later, you're gonna feel a lot better. So that's from me to anybody who cares. Yeah,

Speaker 1 1:18:16
well, the coup de gras for me on this whole thing of like, kind of letting go was, you know, I've done the big corporate America thing for a long time. I've done startups as well, all Silicon Valley kind of things, and it's been enjoyable, and I've learned a ton along the way, but I never really felt like any of it was mine. It was always working for someone else's benefit. And so you whether you call yourself an entrepreneur or not, you are, and you're doing it your way and the way you want to do it, and at some point, you may or may not retire on it, you know, God bless. Hope you do. But you know that's that's up to you or not. I can't tell it's up to you how far you take it, but I went so far as to say I have money in retirement that's sitting out there. I don't know what life's going to look like in 25 years when I can finally touch it. So I liquidated it and I went on a opportunity to go buy my way into a small business or start one, because I wanted to be in the here and now. I wanted to be more present in my kid's life. But more importantly, I wanted to be able to say, hey, but that's mine. Like I work on that with passion and enjoyment, like you do. I mean, I think people, if you listen enough, I mean, you clearly love what you do. It motivates people, hardest working people I know are also the longest lived people, not saying too much, but they love what they do, and I've stopped loving what I do, generally speaking, just being a salesperson for someone else. I said, Well, let me see if I can turn this inward and do something with it. Now I'm not telling people to liquidate your savings. There are ways to do it. I happen to have a cousin in the business that does these business startup where your retirement money is tax free. And it sounds like a scam, but it's not. It's called rollover for business startup. It's part of the IRS tax code, but essentially, you can tap your retirement savings early, so long as you don't benefit your current self for your future self. Big. Unquote there with the IRS. I said, You know what? Old me would have never taken this risk. But at this point, I'm like, got it all this stuff that's happened in the last few years. Screw it. How long are you going to

Scott Benner 1:20:12
I'm 42 okay. Oh, it's an early, early in life to come to that idea. Well, listen, I'll answer a couple things. You said I My goal is to do the podcast for 10 more years. I think I can. I mean, forget. I think I can. I could easily do that. It's all about if people still care to hear from me, if they care to hear from me, they'll listen. If the numbers are right, advertisers will buy ads, and then I can make a podcast. That's my goal. I hope it I hope it works that way. I'm putting my fingers in other things, a little bit with AI, with diabetes and some other stuff like that, that I think will help people now and after I'm gone and I stopped making the podcast, but my wife asked me the other day, in a really, like serious moment, she said, I say I'm gonna go record now. And she goes, you ever get tired of it? And I was like, what? She goes talking to people, is it exhausting? And I was like, oh, it's like, the best part of my day. And she's like, really, because my wife's pretty introverted. You wouldn't know it about her if you met her, but she's a fairly introverted person, and I think the conversating, it exhausts her a little bit. But this is the best part of my day, like getting to know you, but moreover, letting you tell your story, giving you a platform to tell your story on, and then to recognize that with some a little more work that I can share it with a bunch of other people, and then this experience that you've had listening to the podcast, somebody else gets to have it from you. Like, this is the building like you're a building block, Brian, you know what I mean? Like you're a building block of the podcast. Like, I started off going, Hey, this is my story, from my perspective, that the time I decided to share, I think is episode like two,

Unknown Speaker 1:21:48
right? It's early on, yeah, I think it's single digits, for sure.

Scott Benner 1:21:50
That's me just sharing, right? And then I meet a person. A person comes on, they share their thing. We build, we build, we build. Today. I think I put up episode 1200 and something today, 10 years from now, my expectation is that this is already a compendium of diabetes information, and now we have the ability for these large, large language models to absorb the text from the podcast and actually be able to like thoughtfully, go through it and and regurgitate it back to you in ways that are astonishing. Actually, before we go, I'll do this. Hold on a second.

Speaker 1 1:22:29
By the way, I'm in the AI space, so it's it. I'm following along what you're doing. I know who you're working with.

Scott Benner 1:22:35
Oh, do you really? Oh, that's crazy.

Speaker 1 1:22:37
Well, I mean, I saw, I saw when you request early on. I was like, Oh, I know him, but connected with him on LinkedIn for a separate reason, but so

Scott Benner 1:22:45
well here, let me show you. This is fascinating. Sure. Who

Speaker 2 1:22:50
is Scott Benner? Scott Benner is an author and diabetes advocate known for his book, Life is short, laundry is eternal, Confessions of a stay at home dad and his podcast, Juicebox podcast, he shares his experiences as a father of a child with type one diabetes and offers insights and support to the diabetes community. Watch

Scott Benner 1:23:11
this. What does he say about pre Bolus insulin?

Speaker 2 1:23:16
Scott Benner often emphasizes the importance of pre bolusing insulin on his podcast, he explains that pre Bolus helps manage blood sugar levels more effectively by giving the insulin time to start working before eating, this approach can help prevent post meal blood sugar spikes, making overall diabetes management smoother. Have you tried this method, or is it something you're considering for your podcast discussions?

Scott Benner 1:23:41
Anyway, there's nothing you can't ask this thing that it doesn't know about. What I've already said, it's fascinating.

Speaker 1 1:23:47
Yeah, it's amazing to do that. I'm so glad to see you do it.

Scott Benner 1:23:51
So that's open, AI, right? The thing that I'm involved in. Now, I just heard from the Creator last night. Here I'll read you a text from him, very quickly, the Pro Tip series has been integrated into vision. It is really awesome. I've been testing it right now. The responses combine visions, default reasoning with Juicebox knowledge. It can cite specifics if you ask for it, like say to it, which episode is this from? And even, hey, what timestamp could I find that at it goes on and on. But basically, not only can you ask it to provide you with key takeaways, like from an episode, but if your diabetes information is connected to the service, you can say, provide me with key takeaways from episode 1000 tailor the takeaways to my specific situation. Arden's account, which is the one I mess around with, is attached to her night Scout, so it knows all of her bolusing and all of her settings and everything else. Like, this is insane. Like, so, like, I was very concerned that I'd make this podcast for however long I made it, and it would have the impact on people that it had on you and your. Son and your family and other people like that. Then one day, I just would stop making the podcast, and it would just, it would just dissipate into the air, and it would really like, I know, but that's hard for people to think about. But if you don't make content, you don't know this flame on a stone, stone stays warm while the flames on the stone. You take the flame away, the stone gets cold. It's over. It dies. That's it. If I stop making this podcast, all the information dies with it, and so I had to try to find a way to keep it alive after I can't feed it every day. That makes sense, so I

Speaker 1 1:25:29
get it. Yeah, internet is not forever. A lot of people think it is. But having worked at a large internet firm, like at some point, stuff does fade away, and based on the way the algorithms and other things work, I mean, it's a perpetual motion machine. So if you're not moving, I get that entirely. This

Scott Benner 1:25:44
is 1000s and 10s of 1000s of hours of of real conversations that now we have a computer model that can pick through and then regurgitate it back to you like a human being. It's a repository at this point. So I'm trying to treat it like it's a, you know, like it's a library, as you should, yeah. So anyway, that's what I'm trying to get

Speaker 1 1:26:06
to. Well, the technology under that, the retrieval, augmented generation, I think, is what he's using in that process to limit the AI generation, to just the content you created. Is stuff I work with in government all the time where, like, hey, like, we have 80 years of building code. We need to update it, modernize it, help people be able to query it. Like builders, like, hey, what's the amount of square footage I need in order to, you know, not have to use a bathroom or add a bathroom in a giant office setting, etc, like that. Conversant process with AI is getting better and better every day. Yeah, well, we tell them, you don't even have to do anything crazy, like you can plug into existing models like llms from Google and chat GPT open AI, but if you generate internal like, but here's the data I want you to use from and only pull from and limit the model response to what's in it. It really doesn't hallucinate very much. I think that phrase gets used a lot, but it's not trying to make stuff up at that point. It's being directed to use the content, right? That it's it's working off of so it'll get better and better. I mean, I've seen some really, really wild stuff working in the space that I'm in now, where it's like, oh, that's an incredible use case, but like teaching people how to be more empathetic. Caseworkers was one I was just recently involved in where using intonation and voice modulation analysis, like, Hey, do they sound as well as saying the words that actually show empathy? Like, or do we have someone just going through the motions, right? And it's like, yeah, AI can now do that kind of stuff. Now it needs to be centered on that content. But I have really high hopes for you, and I think you're doing an amazing thing doing that because, gosh,

Scott Benner 1:27:46
I mean, wait till I, wait till I ask it to create a quiz that from the content that will help people broaden their understanding. And then once it creates the quiz, tell it to use the quiz to set up a course to teach the answers to the quiz. And that all happens in like a split second. Like, that's the kind of like, even the building code stuff. Wait till it gets calmed down and somebody thinks to say, Hey, can you identify redundancy in this code and things that we can eliminate? Yep, yeah, boom. And then the building code gets easier to understand. Of these codes, what really doesn't have an impact on safety, and it's stuff that people don't have the time or the I'm gonna say bandwidth, but I don't mean bandwidth like time. I mean bandwidth like actual intelligence to absorb the larger problem and to understand it and then spit back something like people don't have the bandwidth to go through things that are that big. You're gonna fix healthcare with this. You're gonna fix everything by being smarter and having a bigger memory base to work with while you're juggling all the different variables of a problem. And I'm not saying just like tell the machine to fix it, but you know, once it gives once it gives you suggestions, then you can have human beings sit down and go, Oh, wow, here's the here's the 20 years of thinking it would have taken me to get from A to B. Now we're at B. Now let's go back and be people again and reassess this. I see endless possibilities for this. So anyway, I'm, I'm super excited for it. Um, let me say goodbye to you, because at this point I I'm gonna have to ask you for 100 bucks so I can help. I can afford to edit this around. Yeah, poor Rob. Like Rob. I'm just, I'm just messing around. Man, don't feel bad. You're, you do a great job, and you're, you're paid very fairly. I'm not upset by how much I sent you.

Speaker 1 1:29:40
He does great. Your remastered series worked out so well. Like, it's not that it was bad, but, like, you can tell a difference. If you go back to the very beginning podcast, where it is now, you're like, Oh, right. Audio quality, everything.

Scott Benner 1:29:51
I'll tell you a secret. If you listen back to the last year of the podcast that Rob has edited, and then go the year back before that, you'll see there's finite. Little decisions and gaps and ums and things like that. I probably sound smarter today than I am because of Rob.

Speaker 1 1:30:07
Well, I've noticed that there is no dead air. So kind of back to my comment about, you know, who was a radio personality would have succeeded in their build major radio for sure, because you can go on, I don't wanna say forever. It's not, not a knock, but you seem to be willing to engage with the audience constantly, which is a necessary trait all of this. But yeah, I've noticed even when people respond, I was like, Wow, this starts to feel, not negative way it was good before, but like, there's another level of polish and professionalism that like, ah. And I get this now because I hear it with your Medtronic series. I hear it with others where the Q, A, it doesn't feel disjointed at at the same time, I almost know there was an um or a pause there. I'm sure of it, but it flowed so well. So he's done a really terrific job. He's

Scott Benner 1:30:52
wonderful. Let's not be too nice to him. He'll put the price up, but um, no, he lost the price. Yeah, I can't afford that. Like Rob, whatever insecurities you have. You have to hold on to at least 50% of them, or I can't afford this. But no, he's really wonderful, like and I'll have to have him on someday to talk about his theories about how he edits the show, because it's really interesting. When he tells me about it, he's made it better. He's a part of the process, and nobody would even know it. So anyway, all right, hold on, Brian,

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