More from Episodes 1812 & 1813
You manage your diabetes the way you do for a reason you've probably never said out loud.
Three people. One family. Decades of silence. This is what it cost them — and what finally changed.
Crystal has had type one diabetes since she was 14. Her brother Jason was diagnosed two years later. Their father Gary had it since he was three years old.
Three people in one family. Decades of insulin, blood sugar checks, and quiet struggle. And almost none of it — ever — talked about out loud.
This two-part episode is one of the most emotionally honest conversations the podcast has ever had. It's about what happens when a disease runs through a family for generations and nobody has the tools — or the language — to deal with it together. And it's about what finally changed that.
Dad knew. He just couldn't face it.
Gary was diagnosed at age three. By the time his daughter Crystal started showing symptoms in high school — drinking 32 ounces of water before bed, stumbling to the nurse's office with blood sugars in the fifties — he knew exactly what was happening. He tested her blood sugar before they left for the hospital. It was over 500. By the time they arrived, it was over a thousand.
He cried in the ICU. He told her mother it was his fault. He never said it to Crystal directly.
"I think dad was in denial. Because it was his fault."
— CrystalTwo years later, Jason was diagnosed too. And the family did what they'd always done: they kept moving. Kept working. Didn't talk about it. Gary managed with the tools available — four checks a day, NPH, regular insulin — and terrible A1Cs. His kids watched, absorbed it, and started managing the same way.
Fear shaped everything — in opposite directions.
Crystal had watched her father convulse and knock over a lamp during a severe low when she was four or five years old. She called her mom at work. The ambulance came. She never forgot it. For the next thirty years, that fear quietly kept her blood sugars running high.
Jason, meanwhile, had figured out that he played roller hockey better when his numbers were in range. So he ran aggressive with insulin. A1Cs in the fives and sixes — but lows that sometimes dropped him to the floor. He once woke up halfway under a coffee table in his San Diego apartment, seizing, vomiting, alone. A friend happened to try the door. It happened to be unlocked.
"You're experiencing your dad get low, then hearing about Jason — keeps you a little on the high side. And Jason, your desire to be good at roller hockey keeps yours on the lower side."
— ScottSame disease. Same family. Completely different responses — both shaped by fear, neither of them spoken out loud.
Then Wesley was diagnosed at two and a half.
Jason's son. Two and a half years old.
That's when everything shifted. The family had spent years telling themselves it would skip a generation. Instead, it arrived in a toddler who couldn't describe how he felt or treat himself. Jason started waking up two and three times a night to check his son's finger. He used himself as a guinea pig — testing every new approach on his own diabetes before trying it on Wesley. He found the podcast. He found the community. He leveled up fast and completely.
And for the first time in decades, the family started talking.
"I felt that Wesley's diagnosis was a big turning point in the family — that it was okay to talk about it. Because what had always been done wasn't working for any of us."
— CrystalGary — who had lived with type one for over fifty years without ever really discussing it — started asking questions. Started seeking advice from his own kids. Eventually agreed to try a Dexcom. Then an Omnipod. Late. But not too late to matter.
He didn't die from diabetes. But it contributed.
Gary passed away two years ago. Jason believes he would have lived longer if all of this had happened sooner — if the conversation had started earlier, if the technology had existed, if someone had found the words.
That weight sits with both of them. Crystal carries the same question: if she'd pushed harder, talked more openly, would things have gone differently for her dad?
And here's the part that stops you cold: in this episode, sitting together on a podcast, Crystal and Jason realize they've never actually talked about this with each other before. Not at this depth. Not ever.
"I'm glad it wasn't just me."
— Crystal, hearing Jason describe his grief for the first timeThis episode is for anyone who grew up with diabetes in the room but never in the conversation.
It's for the person who learned to manage from a parent who was barely managing themselves. For the sibling who didn't know what their brother or sister was going through until decades later. For the parent who sees their own diagnosis repeating in their child and doesn't know what to do with that guilt.
It's also a reminder that the tools we have right now — CGMs, closed-loop systems, communities, honest conversations — are a generational leap. Crystal went from an A1C of 11 to 6.8. Jason uses himself as a test case so his sons don't have to learn things the hard way. Gary, in the last years of his life, finally let his kids in.
It wasn't too late to matter. It just would have mattered more, sooner.
"I didn't know to that depth. But I completely sympathize with it — because I had the same feelings. If I had talked to dad earlier about my experience... would he have had better control? Could we have prevented the stroke, the heart attack, that stuff.
I'm glad it wasn't just me."
