Guest Post-Living With Type 1 Diabetes Pt. 1 with Tierra M.

Introduction

I asked a special person in my life to do a guest post for National Diabetes Awareness, which is celebrated in November. She is one of my best friends who is also my sister cousin. She is a strong woman continuing to fight and live with Type 1 Diabetes. She is an amazing mother and woman who constantly gives to others. She is sharing her journey with pancreatitis and first being diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes in her first post. I hope that you will read her story and spread awareness of pancreatitis and diabetes. *Notice-One photo used will show surgery scars.

My Type 1 Diabetes journey started in 2013. I was having complications with my gallbladder being full of stones. I was working at a job that was very stressful-working 12-hour days. On top of that my weight was increasing due to the stress of working overnights, not sleeping well, helping family and everything just did not add up. The end of November in 2013 I finally got in to see a specialist about removing my gallstones or gallbladder. The surgery was set up but nothing was done. I went about my days at work struggling to make it through the shifts in pain, nauseated, cramping not wanting to eat.

Then one day I go to work as normal. I make it to the last half of the shift, which is six hours left, do my rounds and I can’t make it down the stairs.  I start feeling a sharp pain in my stomach to where I can’t even breathe. I made it out of the first pod with the inmates by my side helping me get out. I make it to my last round of checks and I don’t make it off the top area I think, and I can’t see. I’m in such immense pain that the inmates are all screaming out for people to come help me, and no one is coming to help me because they get locked in and I’m on the outside. Finally, people rush into the cells to get me out, but it was really the inmates that helped. I’m rushed out into the medical wing at the jail were they really can’t do anything for me. Two of my friends decide to take me in their truck since nothing is about to be done. They take me to the local hospital rushing within 5 minutes and get me there just in time.  People tell me if I would have been there ten minutes later I possibly could have died. I’m throwing up, using the bathroom on myself, and very irate. They keep shooting me up with morphine and my body is fighting it to where I’m throwing up bile and it’s not working. They begin to tell me to try to calm down when I’m in so much pain that I’m screaming loudly and vomiting everywhere, and continue to lose my bowels on myself.  

Later that day after finally giving me Dilaudid in my arms from the veins that had not crashed.  They figured out that I have become a Type 1 diabetic due to my gallstone being trapped inside of my pancreas trying to force its way out when my gallbladder was completely full. They then tell me that I won’t be able to eat anything and stick a tube down my throat after claiming that I was numb and telling me to hush it’s not hurting me. I felt every cut that they did on the side of my throat and I felt that tube going in my throat because I was not numb. I cried all day and night and my nurses would abuse me and bruise my arms because they had to come give me insulin and did not want to hear me cry due to the pain that I was in. I was at St. Anthony’s Hospital in downtown Oklahoma City, and I felt like I was very alone. After almost a month of being in the hospital they told me that I had cysts on top of my pancreas where the enzymes had eaten up half of my pancreas and turned me into a Type 1 diabetic.

My life had changed for the worst. I did not want to live. I felt nothing. All I could do is call on God for help when it seemed like nothing took the pain away. I was sent home after a month. Seven days later I could not even handle being at home due to all the pain the medicine did not work, and $2,000 went down the drain for all the medicine that I was given. I had severe pancreatitis and no one wanted to touch me so back to the hospital I went. I spent the next month back in Saint Anthony’s Hospital. I begin losing weight because I still couldn’t eat due to the tube that was in my neck all I could do was drink shakes they were extremely nasty. I’d lost a total of 80 lbs., my skin was hanging and did not look like who I used to be I did not feel like me. Only a couple of my real friends came and visited me besides my family which was my mother, sister, and nieces and nephews, and that is why I claim that they are my family as well because they have been there from the beginning and still have not left my fight.

I was released again from the hospital and told if I ever wanted to get anything done to go to the teaching school and they would help me. It was only 3 days after being released that I ended up transferring to a different hospital and they began to work on me and do something about the pain that I was in. I wanted to live.  I was OU Hospital for 21 days. I had my first pair of stents placed in my pancreas and drained the cysts that were on top of it as well and the cysts were completely painful. I had stents placed in my bile duct as well to take the pain of using the bathroom or what. After being released from that I felt a little bit of myself coming back. Three months later I found myself having my gallbladder finally removed and the pain from that was unbearable. But after that was gone I felt a little bit of me trying to sneak back in. I still had a fighting chance at living. A month later, I went back to work, not knowing really how to be a Type 1 diabetic because I was not shown anything except for to stick yourself in the arm, check your carb count and that’s it. I did not get to go to class until two years later to figure out what it was to be a Type 1 diabetic. It’s okay I had a support system that did not give up on me, and going to work it seems like I could get by with just doing the same things that I used to do.  I neglected myself trying to deny the fact that I was a diabetic.

My body completely shut down on me for an entire year no periods or anything affecting my body it was in total shock. After finally learning how to deal with it, the next year I tried to continue on with life as I knew it and found out that I was pregnant because I had gotten sick. All I can tell you is that my baby kept me alive during the entire pregnancy because she woke me up when I was low and kept me sane and going. I fought for her and she fought for me. She is 3 years old now and I’m still not done fighting. Since the beginning I can now tell you that I’ve had over 8 surgeries with stents in my belly, 3 hemorrhoidectomies, and then the biggest surgery of all which I’m still struggling with was to sew my pancreas to my intestines because they could not cure me from having all these foreign cases of pancreatitis.

I am not the typical Type 1 diabetic, which is very weird because nobody has been through what I’ve been through nor do they know the case that’s why I’m always a mystery. Do not let anyone tell you that they know anything about it unless they walked in your shoes, which they haven’t. No diabetic is the same. I cannot lose mine due to diet and exercise. I fight for my life daily, and I’m in the doctor’s office beyond what I should be. I try to work and people just think ‘oh she’s a hypochondriac’ but I’m not. My body tells me when things are wrong and I’ll go get it checked out and then everybody looks stupid because I’m back in the hospital from what I said was wrong. Like I said I’m not that typical Type 1 diabetic. I fight because I have a reason to fight and I will stand strong try to live on for my daughter Carolyne De Nea. 

Post from Tierra M. More on her journey to come…