#1600 Into The Woods

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Ten-year-old Emma shares life with type 1 diabetes, from gymnastics to MMA, carb counting at school, and spotting her cousin’s diagnosis before anyone else.

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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
Hello friends, and welcome back to another episode of The Juicebox Podcast.

Emma 0:14
I'm Emma. I'm 10 years old, and I have type one diabetes. I was diagnosed October 23 2018 I was three, almost four. If

Scott Benner 0:26
this is your first time listening to the Juicebox podcast and you'd like to hear more, download Apple podcasts or Spotify, really, any audio app at all, look for the Juicebox podcast and follow or subscribe. We put out new content every day that you'll enjoy. Want to learn more about your diabetes management. Go to Juicebox podcast.com up in the menu and look for bold Beginnings The Diabetes Pro Tip series and much more. This podcast is full of collections and series of information that will help you to live better with insulin. Nothing you hear on the Juicebox podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your healthcare plan or becoming bold with insulin. The show you're about to listen to is sponsored by the ever since 365 the ever since 365 has exceptional accuracy over one year, and is the most accurate CGM in the low range that you can get ever since cgm.com/juicebox this episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by the Omnipod five, and at My link, omnipod.com/juicebox you can get yourself a free, what I just say, a free Omnipod five starter kit, free. Get out of here. Go click on that link, omnipod.com/juicebox check it out, terms and conditions. Apply. Eligibility may vary. Full terms and conditions can be found at omnipod.com/juicebox links in the show notes. Links@juiceboxpodcast.com the episode you're about to listen to was sponsored by touched by type one. Go check them out right now on Facebook, Instagram, and, of course, at touched by type one.org check out that Programs tab when you get to the website to see all the great things that they're doing for people living with type one diabetes, touched by type one.org

Emma 2:26
I'm Emma. I'm 10 years old, and I have type one diabetes. I was diagnosed October 23 2018 I was

Scott Benner 2:35
three, almost four, almost four, and you're how old now I'm 1010, wow. You've had it for six years. Yeah, wow. Okay, that's longer. So you've had diabetes for longer than you haven't had diabetes? Yes, yes. Do you remember anything about being diagnosed? I don't, really, literally, nothing. Yes, nothing. So do you have? I don't know. I don't know how that I don't I'm old, so I don't know how this works for younger people. But What's your earliest memory of diabetes? Do you have like, one that sticks in your

Emma 3:04
head? Not really, but the only memory I remember was we were at a campsite. This is what, like triggered my diabetes. I was playing tag with another friend. I was the three, and we were running. I had tripped and I'd fallen into a bee's nest, and then a few days later, I got diagnosed. That was the only one. Wait, did the bee sting you? Yeah, the bees, I fell into the hive because it was on the grounds. Oh, my God, how bad was that? It was pretty bad. I got stung by like 20 ish, it was pretty bad. Did you have to go to the hospital? Thankfully, no, the other people at the camp had, like, Benadryl and stuff that they gave me.

Scott Benner 3:46
Oh, wow, did you yell the bees, the bees when it was happening, or anything like that. Do you remember, I

Emma 3:50
think I screamed and, like, because I was little, I cried and we had to go in the camper for a

Scott Benner 3:56
while. Are you telling me that if you fell into a bee's nest today, you wouldn't cry because you're not little anymore. I don't know, oh, because I would cry. I'm trying to figure out why you're so tough. You're like, I only cried because I was young. Okay, so you fell at the campground, got stung by 20 B's. And then how does that lead to the diabetes?

Emma 4:17
I think that either, like, triggered it, because a few days later, my dad was at a huge work meeting. My mom was calling him, like, shaking like, I don't know what to do. She has diabetes. My dad had to, like, cancel his work meeting at the place and drive back, and on the way back, he actually listened to your podcast.

Scott Benner 4:38
No kidding, he found my podcast while he was driving to meet you for the first time with diabetes. Yes, that's crazy. Oh, Emma, yeah, I'm wearing white socks today, yeah, and I have my feet up while we're talking, and my chameleon is freaking out because my socks are white. Oh, my God. This is so upsetting, because I really want to put my feet up. I. Hold on a second. Oh, I'm sorry, buddy. You should see him. Do you know what a chameleon is? Yes. Okay, so he is right now, bent in half, leaning away from me. His colors have completely changed to like defensive colors, and he is staring me in the face, like, Why did you bring those in here? But he just doesn't like certain colors. Oh, my God, I'm gonna take the socks off. He's eyeballing the socks. Hold on a second and take the socks off and I'm gonna throw them where he can't see them. This would be nice. A, B testing. All right, socks are gone, buddy. Okay, now, can I put my feet back up, although I am white, so I don't know like but I'm not as white as a sock. So yeah, all right, let's see what happens here. I'll look away from him for a second and we'll get back to it. Sorry. I just looked up and he was like, Oh, this is going to be okay. He's okay, okay, good. That's crazy, isn't it? You imagine being afraid of socks,

Emma 5:55
but only if they were white, only if they were white. That

Scott Benner 5:59
phobia you would have, I know. So you're in the hospital, you're young, you're only four. You don't really, you don't have any hospital memories, yeah, not really. I don't remember. Okay, that's fine. And then, do you recall, Mom? Let's, let's ask it this way, how much of your diabetes is in your control day to day?

Emma 6:18
A lot, sometimes, if the nurse, like, isn't there in time for snack, I just text my parents and what I'm having and, yeah, mostly

Scott Benner 6:27
that. So the school wants you to do it with the nurse, but if the nurse is there, you text your mom. You're like, Hey, I don't see a nurse. You know, it's snack time or whatever. Like, what do I do? Yes, could you do it without them? Yes, I'm pretty sure I could, yeah. And so are you good at counting carbs? I think so, yeah. Well, yeah. What's the highest your blood sugar gets in the in the course of a general day, a general day,

Emma 6:54
the highest it gets is like 130 but if it's like a bad day, like 200

Scott Benner 6:58
okay, how do you manage? Are you MDI? Do you have a pump? Do you have a CGM?

Emma 7:04
I started with MDI and finger poke, and I got the Omnipod and Dexcom three months later.

Scott Benner 7:10
Okay, so you're using just regular Omnipod dash.

Emma 7:12
Oh, yes, okay, because I have loop. Oh, you're looping. Okay, yeah. How

Scott Benner 7:16
long have you been doing that? A few years. Okay, you like that, yeah, it's the best thing for me. Awesome, awesome. Oh, look at you. You're like, you're like, out of a commercial. You're like, it's the, oh, who's calling me a spam risk. Hold on. It's

Emma 7:30
like, go away.

Scott Benner 7:32
Oh, sorry, don't they know, I make a podcast. So you've been looping for how long do you think? A few years. You said, Yeah, a few years. Okay, you've been looping for a few years. You go to counting carbs. You think of a high blood sugar as 130

Emma 7:46
kind of, yeah. When I'm 200 I do get pretty nervous.

Scott Benner 7:50
It changes how you feel internally, yeah, yeah. Explain that to me a little bit like how it feels.

Emma 7:56
I don't know why I get, like, so scared, but whenever I'm high, I get just really nervous, shaky, sweaty. I, like, get afraid it won't come down for some reason. Okay,

Scott Benner 8:06
so do you think you are having a physical reaction to the high blood sugar, or do you think you're having like, an anxiety reaction about seeing the high number?

Emma 8:14
I think anxiety because, um, whenever I look at it, I get even, like, really scared. Or what

Scott Benner 8:19
do you think is going to happen if it stays at 200

Emma 8:21
for a while? I don't know, I think, like I feel really sick, and that's mostly the reason,

Scott Benner 8:27
has that happened in the past that you felt sick with high blood sugar? Uh, yes, yeah, okay. I am not a professional therapist, okay, but I think that's the thing that you you could talk to your parents about working on like I do, yeah? I talk to them. What do they do for you? Like, try to make it better.

Emma 8:45
Tell me, like, it's gonna be okay. Blood sugar always comes down. We have insulin. We're all good.

Scott Benner 8:50
So they just give you reinforcing calming ideas, yeah, does that help you? Yeah, it does a lot awesome. What kind of activities are you involved in

Emma 9:00
I do a lot of sports. My biggest one is gymnastics. I started softball a few months ago. I do soccer, basketball and yeah,

Scott Benner 9:09
so you're trying a little bit of everything. What do you like? You have something that you prefer?

Emma 9:13
Gymnastics is my favorite so far. How come? What do you love about it? I just like being able to like work out and have fun with all my friends that are there

Scott Benner 9:22
and there's a dirt stuck in your socks when it's over. Yeah, that you're gonna get with softball. Oh yeah. Let's rank your activities as how good you are at them. Like gymnastics is first, or do you just love it?

Emma 9:34
I love it, and I think I'm way better than my dad at it. You're way better than what my dad, but

Scott Benner 9:40
your dad, he's so good, but your dad's in gymnastics too. Nobody

Emma 9:44
tries to copy me and watches me and he thinks he's so much better than me. Now,

Scott Benner 9:49
when that happens, what do you think in your head that you don't say out loud?

Emma 9:52
I think that he's so bad that he will never get it. Well, I really think that he could get it, but

Scott Benner 9:59
not. Gonna happen? He's busy, yeah, working and doing the things your mom tells him to do, right? Yeah, yeah, it takes a lot of time. Yeah, right. Okay. Then what else do you basketball? What's next on your list that you prefer? Like, if you couldn't play, if you couldn't do gymnastics anymore, what would

Emma 10:14
you do? And love soccer, softball, okay, all right,

Scott Benner 10:17
awesome. Like, I don't understand soccer at all. So, like, you just all running around crazy, right? And there's a

Emma 10:21
ball. Oh yeah, you kick the ball in the goal, and yeah, it gets pretty intense when you get older, though.

Scott Benner 10:26
Oh yeah. Is it intense now? Or you think it's going to get intense later?

Emma 10:30
I think it's going to get more intense. But people have been getting more hurt in soccer once we've been getting older.

Scott Benner 10:37
Have you identified the angry girls that run people over? Yes. Are you one of them?

Emma 10:44
No, I don't think so. Don't think so. No, I don't I don't try and kick people over. Awesome. Good for you. That's very nice. Do you have any brothers or sisters? Uh, yes, I have two brothers. Are they older or younger? They're older than me. I'm the youngest. Oh, do you not prefer that? I mean, I like being the youngest, but I also don't, because I don't get to drive and that type of stuff. Oh, they're already driving. My oldest is graduating soon, the middle, middle my brother, he is doing Driver's Ed right now.

Scott Benner 11:16
Hold on, Emma, have you ever thought this through like you're a lot younger than them? Yeah, I'm really I'm a lot younger. Either of your parents are you like a second marriage, baby. Today's episode is brought to you by Omnipod. Did you know that the majority of Omnipod five users pay less than $30 per month at the pharmacy? That's less than $1 a day for tube free automated insulin delivery, and a third of Omnipod five users pay $0 per month. You heard that right? Zero? That's less than your daily coffee for all of the benefits of tubeless, waterproof, automated insulin delivery. My daughter has been wearing an Omnipod every day since she was four years old, and she's about to be 21 my family relies on Omnipod, and I think you'll love it, and you can try it for free right now by requesting your free Starter Kit today at my link, omnipod.com/juicebox Omnipod has been an advertiser for a decade. But even if they weren't, I would tell you proudly, my daughter wears an Omnipod. Omnipod.com/juicebox Terms and Conditions apply. Eligibility may vary. Why don't you get yourself that free starter kit, full terms and conditions can be found at omnipod.com/juicebox this episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by the ever since 365 get 365 days of comfortable wear without having to change a sensor. When you think of a continuous glucose monitor, you think of a CGM that lasts 10 or 14 days, but the Eversense 365 it lives up to its name, lasting 365 days. That's one year without having to change your CGM with the Eversense 365 you can count on comfort and consistency. 365 days a year, because the ever sense, silicon based adhesive is designed for your skin to be gentle and to allow you to take the transmitter on and off, to enjoy your shower, a trip to the pool or an activity where you don't want your CGM on your body, if you're looking for comfort, accuracy and a one year wear you are looking for ever since 365 go to ever since cgm.com/juicebox To learn more, I

Emma 13:34
think so. I was technically an accident.

Scott Benner 13:39
Oh, you're, you're an oops baby, yeah, I gotcha. How much of life do you understand? Do you know what that means? Yeah, I think so. Would you please tell me your best explanation of what that means? Like,

Emma 13:53
they weren't planning on having any more babies. But then I came like,

Scott Benner 13:58
yeah, I gotcha. Okay, all right, that's what I could tell. Because usually, what happens when the youngest is that far off of the older ones, either, like, the parents have been divorced and remarried and you're like, the baby of a second marriage, or, you know, something happened that they weren't expecting. Yeah,

Emma 14:16
did they tell you that? Yeah, they told me that. How did that Do you remember how that made you feel? Yeah, I didn't really care, honestly, as long as you're here, right? Yeah, Jackson was technically an oops baby, too. Oh, your

Scott Benner 14:29
parents were trying to say, your parents are not very good at not having babies.

Emma 14:33
Yeah, my middle was the only one that was planned. What do you enjoy doing in school? I like math gym and art, those are my top math

Scott Benner 14:43
gym and art. And your dad has kind of a math based job too, right?

Emma 14:47
Yeah, but he's horrible at math. He didn't graduate college, didn't

Scott Benner 14:51
graduate from college. He tried to go to college and couldn't do it,

Emma 14:55
yeah? Like he couldn't, so he just dropped out. Your

Scott Benner 14:58
dad's a college dropout, yeah? Yeah, if you want to say it out loud, just so you can get it on the

Emma 15:02
recording, yeah, my dad's a big college drop out. There you go, awesome.

Scott Benner 15:06
How about your mom? What does she do? She

Emma 15:09
doesn't usually work, but she sometimes substitutes for kids in school.

Scott Benner 15:15
Yeah, hey, your pod's about to expire, yeah? What do you got four hours?

Emma 15:19
Oh, no, I have low reserve of insulin. I have four hours left. Oh, I do have four

Scott Benner 15:24
hours. Oh, look at me. How much insulin Do you have? A 25 more units. Oh, how much do you know? How much you use in a day,

Emma 15:30
in a day, I honestly don't know.

Scott Benner 15:33
Okay, what do you know? What your a 1c is right now about

Emma 15:36
it's about either like six or five point like nine or eight.

Scott Benner 15:43
Okay, so let me ask you a couple of diabetes questions, right? Are you good at answering diabetes questions? Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm pretty good. We'll find out together. So you're 10 years old, you've had diabetes for six years. You're looping, but you, you know you, you have your parents help, right? But you can do it by yourself. You feel pretty confident. So that's kind of the setup of who you are around diabetes. Yes. Now, how do you eat? Are you like a trash baby? When you eat, you eat pretty well. Like, what's a go through your day? For me, what did I have? What do you have for breakfast, lunch, dinner?

Emma 16:13
Okay, so I always have the same thing for breakfast. It's this protein bar I have. It's like 12 grams, 12 minute timer every morning, and I know how to bolster that really well now.

Scott Benner 16:24
Okay, and then is that, do you eat that way because you have diabetes, or that's how you prefer to eat? Both? Okay, all right, so you wouldn't eat like a bowl of Apple Jacks?

Emma 16:33
I don't think so. I would. Have you ever had an Apple Jack? Never had an Apple

Scott Benner 16:38
Jack? Let me tell you something. They're not good. Okay, yeah, but if I could put you in a time machine and take you to 1977 they were awesome. Do you understand they were awesome back then? But now I don't know what they are, garbage, Styrofoam, okay, now, okay, so you have a nice protein bar. In the morning, you get up. They tell me how you set take me through it. You wake up in the morning. Where's your blood sugar? Usually when

Emma 17:01
you wake up, usually when I wake up, it's like 100 to 80s, like 80.

Scott Benner 17:07
Okay? And then you get in the shower, you give yourself insulin. How's your day go?

Emma 17:11
So then after that, I either ask dad to Bolus because I'm too tired, or I Bolus myself. Is it

Scott Benner 17:19
difficult for you getting up in the morning? Yeah, I don't, I don't

Emma 17:23
like mornings. Has it always been that way? Pretty sure.

Scott Benner 17:26
Do you have hypothyroidism or any other autoimmune issues? Uh, no, I don't think so. Okay, you don't think so. Do you take a pill for anything? No, I don't take a pill. Okay, all right, so your dad comes in and wakes you up, or you wake yourself up.

Emma 17:38
Sometimes He wakes me up. Sometimes I just wake up.

Scott Benner 17:42
There's no way that Arden would let me share this online, but I have a video of me trying to wake Arden up when she was, like, young and in high school or middle school or something, and I'm literally, like, picking her limbs up off the bed and dropping them and just like, and she's not like, I'm like, I'm yelling, Arden, Arden. I'm banging on things, like I'm making my phone make noises, holding it up to her ear, dropping her limbs, like she looks like a dead body. Okay, so now we've had our protein bar. Yeah, you are you finally awake? Are you a problem in the morning? Do you know what I mean? Do you give your parents trouble? Not really, not usually. Okay. Now, do you spike from the protein bar? Or you're good,

Emma 18:20
because we've had it for a long time, I'm pretty good with it.

Scott Benner 18:24
It took you a while, though to figure it out. Yeah, okay. And then you get your energy. You feel good. You're off to school. Yeah, all right, now, when's the first time you eat at school? School

Emma 18:33
starts at like you get on the playground at 810 you have to be inside by 830

Scott Benner 18:40
Okay, so you get a playground, you mess around a little bit. You say hi to people. It's like a, like a, like a meet and greet in the morning, right? You find your friends, blah, blah, blah. Head inside and you eat lunch. Then do you have a snack in the morning? Do they let you snack? Still? Are you too old for that?

Emma 18:55
If we're, like, really hungry, we didn't eat breakfast, you could go down to the cafeteria where we're having recess. To go grab a breakfast.

Scott Benner 19:02
Okay, you don't do that? No. Okay, so lunch comes. You go visit the nurse.

Emma 19:06
No. So I usually just, if I get hot lunch, I go grab it and sit down. If I'm out of the cold lunch, I just go straight to the table and sit down. When do you? When do you? Bolus, usually when I start eating, or it's either eyeball us or the nurse comes. The nurse comes either a little after or a little before I'm

Scott Benner 19:26
there. She comes to you in

Emma 19:28
the lunch room. Yes, and one of my other friends that has diabetes,

Scott Benner 19:32
they call that concierge service. That's lovely. You don't have to go to the nurse room, the nurse room, sorry, the nurse's office, and she comes to you. Yes. Do you ever tip her? Give her a couple bucks? You know what I mean? Not really. No. How funny would that be one time if you turned to her with a couple dollars folded in between your forefinger and your pointer finger, or your middle finger and your pointer finger, and you just reached out with you said, Hey, I appreciate it. Please do that one day and tell me how that goes. Yes, I will. That would be hilarious. You just you turned her to go, Hey, and you get her in real close. Just reach out with the dollar, and you go, you're doing a good job. All right, sorry. Okay, so she boluses for you. Do you spike at lunch?

Emma 20:13
If it's like hot lunch and we're having, like, french toast sticks, usually I spike a little bit. But if it's like my normal lunch, no, you

Scott Benner 20:21
know, it's funny, when you said that you have a protein bar for breakfast, I thought, oh, like, you're a little Jenny in training. Do you know who Jenny is from the podcast? Like, she's in, like, the pro tip stuff and stuff. Oh, yeah, okay. I thought, like, Oh, that's it. But no, you're, you get the school and you're, you're like, I'll have some french toast sticks with everybody else, right? Okay, all right. So it's so that's carb heavier, harder to deal with. But what is it your parents have figured out how to Bolus for that usually, yes, okay, because I mean a 596, a, 1c, is really awesome. You know that, right?

Emma 20:51
Yeah, a few times ago when we had went to, oh, my nurses are like, Corey and Tori at, like, not school. What

Scott Benner 21:01
are you in a Disney Channel show

Emma 21:06
we go to there for, like, when I need to get my diabetes check up. And a few times ago, one of the nurses came in with her, like, jaw dropped, and they gave me a squishy my a 1c, was 5.6 or 5.50

Scott Benner 21:18
wait, your nurse in the school, or your nurse at the like, the endos office, the endos office. Oh, you got a doll for having a good a one say,

Emma 21:25
well, it's like this little, like, squishy panda. I got awesome. You should

Scott Benner 21:29
hand it back to him and say, I prefer cash poor Bitcoin. Tell them that next time go, oh, yeah, give me some bitcoin. Yeah, I prefer cash or Bitcoin. And then just hand it back to them. And then don't and look away, like, as if it doesn't bother you at all. What kind of squishy did you get? Squishy

Emma 21:43
did you get? Um, it was just, like, rubber, squishy type of thing. What's it like? Though, it's a kind of, like a panda, um, it's, it's in like a plastic bag, but you open it, you get, like, the squishies from like, Dollar Tree or something. Yeah,

Scott Benner 21:56
you should, you should have said, thanks. This is gonna end up in the ocean. Give them like, a real black bummer feeling. Well, that's nice. So they, they incentivized you. They with, with plastic tchotchkes. Do you know tchotchke means, uh, no. What does it mean? It's a Yiddish word. It just means a thing that sits and you look at it. Did they say stuff to you like, Oh, my God, you're the best person we have here. Or, like, what is like, what are their names, Millie and Jilly. What are their

Emma 22:23
names? Again, Corey and Tory. Corey and Tory. Gotcha so. Corey is like, he's a boy. He's like, the one of the head people there that I do for he said I was one of the best because he right before this, he saw someone with like, like a point 11 or 1111,

Scott Benner 22:40
yeah, yeah. Corey, pitting you all against each other. Do you eat again in the afternoon at school or not? Till you get

Emma 22:47
home, we have a snack like right before we leave, kind of like we have snack special, and then pack up and go home. When do you learn anything? Oh, so when we get there, we usually have morning meeting, math, social studies, lunch, recess, social studies, reading, writing, and then snack, and then special.

Scott Benner 23:08
Did you have to do school and covid? You know you were like six during covid, right? Six? Yeah. Did you have to do, like, school online, a little bit? Yeah. Do you prefer going there or doing it online? Oh, I prefer going there, okay, because is it the people or just, do you like it now the house? What is it you like about

Emma 23:26
it? Getting to see my friends, yeah, yeah,

Scott Benner 23:29
seeing people, right? Okay, well, that makes sense. And

Emma 23:31
something crazy happened last Thanksgiving. Actually, what? He's one of my cousins, peeing and drinking a lot, blah, blah. They come over for Thanksgiving. We had a big party and jokingly tested blood sugar. It was 700

Scott Benner 23:44
Wait, hold on. Cousin has diabetes.

Emma 23:48
Yes, he has diabetes now. Or she

Scott Benner 23:50
just like making fun of him. Or did she know could be something?

Emma 23:54
She knew it could be something because talks about like me a lot in my diabetes, that some of the symptoms were that, because I tell her about some of this stuff sometimes,

Scott Benner 24:04
wow. Okay, so notices peeing a lot, mentions it to who

Emma 24:08
to my parents, because we have, like, a tester, and after we found out he did had diabetes, because we tested a bunch of other people with different needles, the meter was right, and we actually gave him some insulin, so we technically diagnosed him. Oh,

Scott Benner 24:24
look at you take an event. Also, I don't think it's legal to do that, but don't that's okay. No big deal to what you do. Go around the room and test everybody you turn into a party. Well,

Emma 24:32
everyone wanted to because,

Scott Benner 24:36
yeah, all right, let's figure out how. Oh, gosh, okay. Is somebody's kid? Is it your father or mother's brother or sister? It's my mom's sister? Your mom's sister's son has type one diabetes too?

Emma 24:51
Yes, he's had it for like, about either six months or a year. Does your

Scott Benner 24:55
mom have anything like, like, thyroid or any. Me like that, yeah,

Emma 25:00
she has all of thyroid and a few other things. I don't know lupus

Scott Benner 25:04
really, your mom, yeah, she has some more. Oh, she's collecting them, like squishies. Yeah, I got you. Okay, so your mom has thyroid, lupus. How about on your dad's side? Anything over there? Just bandage gymnastics,

Emma 25:16
yeah? But also, he has ADHD on his side,

Scott Benner 25:20
oh, yeah, he has ADHD, or it's in his family. It's in his family, and

Emma 25:24
he has ADHD. It's both. Do you notice that, yes, he has to take meds for it, and my brothers do too.

Scott Benner 25:32
From your perspective, what does ADHD look like on your dad? Pretty

Emma 25:35
like, getting more mad at us sometimes. And he was like, just he was like, it looks like he was going crazy a little bit.

Scott Benner 25:45
Oh, awesome. I think he's gonna love hearing that so but with the medicine, he's less crazy, or not crazy.

Emma 25:53
Oh, he's not as crazy, but he's when he doesn't take it. It makes him feel like, I don't know if it's like, depressed is the word. It makes it feels like sadder and like, madder. Yeah,

Scott Benner 26:05
crazy. That's interesting, huh? And you don't have any of that, no, but you don't think so. You don't think so. I

Emma 26:13
don't think I do.

Scott Benner 26:13
But like, Have you ever had a moment you're like, Oh, I just acted crazy.

Emma 26:17
Not really. I don't think unless, like, I was like, really mad. Gotcha. What would make you mad? Kind of if someone's like, I love we all love animals. We have a lot of cats, chickens and dogs. If someone was like, abusing or hurting an animal or like hurting

Scott Benner 26:33
someone else, the chickens and the cats can't be together, though, right? Oh no. The cats are inside. The chickens are outside, right? You eat the chickens or eat the eggs. We eat the eggs,

Emma 26:43
and sometimes we have to call the chickens, like, kill the roosters. Why? Because they get because we have too many and like, oh yeah, we have too many of them. The eggs are mixing and like, the roosters are getting too mean to each other, I

Scott Benner 26:58
see, so yeah, so you can stop them from being mean by eating them.

Emma 27:02
Whoa, kinda, yeah. Oh, I've watched them be been killed before by my dad. I

Scott Benner 27:07
don't wanna know exactly where you live, but, like, What state do you live in? Maine, you live in Maine,

Emma 27:13
yeah, I live we live in Maine. We're like, at the end of the road. So we could technically have

Scott Benner 27:18
chickens. The end of the road makes a chicken available? Well,

Emma 27:22
kinda, it's like everyone else, like, down the road, except for one person can't have chickens, really? Yeah, I don't know why. Our house where it is, we can,

Scott Benner 27:32
that's interesting. Okay, we have, yeah, it's incredibly cold there in the winter. Yes, yes, very cold. Do you wish that your parents would move somewhere warmer? Kinda, yeah. Where have you been on vacation that you enjoyed?

Emma 27:44
I liked Cape Cod a lot. And I don't remember this one, but I would like to try and go to Florida, because it's really warm.

Scott Benner 27:52
It is really warm. Yeah, it'll definitely be warm and humid. You know what humidity is, I think. So you think so? Yeah, does it get sticky in the summertime there?

Emma 28:02
Uh, yeah, like, inside right now, I don't know if it's the heat or, like, they have the crank the heat cranks. I'm sweating right now,

Scott Benner 28:10
are you or you're in a room, and they close the door too, right? Oh, yeah, and the windows not open. I'm hot when I make this podcast, too, because I turn the air conditioner down so it doesn't make noise. I, like, close the door, and then eventually someone will come in here after I'm done and be like, Oh my god, it's so hot. And I'm like, yeah, no, I know you're welcome. I that's what I say. I'm like, You're welcome for working. You know what? I mean? I know this is weird. Isn't this weird that this is my job talking to you, yeah, don't get full of yourself and think you're gonna get a job like this one day. No, it doesn't work that way. All right. You got to go do a real job. Do you have anything you really enjoy doing? I either want to be a chef or a veterinarian. Why not be a chef for dogs? Perfect. Combine your loves, you know what I mean? Yeah, then you gotta, just gotta find one rich pop star and talk them into letting you cook for their dog, which I'm sure you could do chapel Ronan, looks like she'd go for that in two seconds, doesn't she? Yeah, you could trick one of those. Do you like cooking? Do you get to cook?

Emma 29:09
Yeah, sometimes I cook dinner, not, not a lot, because I don't want to. But sometimes, if it's something I like, Yeah, I do

Scott Benner 29:16
Emma, let me tell you a secret, no one wants to make dinner. Do you have that thing in your house when you go out to eat and nobody can decide where to go? Yeah. Do you guys fight when that happens? Not.

Emma 29:28
Usually. We just have to, like, choose one place. We have to, like, all put in a like, either we use this, like, spinny wheel that we have on our phones, okay, that sometimes, or we just choose a random place. That's not a bad idea, but I do. I don't like McDonald's.

Scott Benner 29:44
No, no, we don't want to go to McDonald's. Yeah, I know this sounds crazy, but we're out of school. They give you a snack at the end of the day you go home, are you very hungry when you get home from school? Usually, yes, all right. Do you eat something? Yes, and your mom's there, because as we went. Over earlier she doesn't work. Is that, right? Yes, you like that. Your mom's at home when she gets when you get home,

Emma 30:06
yeah? Because I get to, like, play with her a little

Scott Benner 30:10
bit. Yeah, she messes around with you guys for a while before she sends you off to do your homework.

Emma 30:13
Yeah? Or she helps me with my homework. Sometimes look at her and she's

Scott Benner 30:17
probably bored, you know what I mean? Yeah. What do you think she does all day when no one's there.

Emma 30:21
I either, like, clean the house a little bit, or like, chillax, because I really don't know, because she had broken her back a while ago, and we had to, I don't know where it was. I forgot where it was. We had to fly somewhere. We had to fix her back. And then when we went back to the airport, and my mom had to walk through, they wouldn't let her go through with the wheelchair, so she had to use a cane. But her back was

Scott Benner 30:45
really she should have been in the wheelchair. Yes, wow, but she gets around. Okay. Now, yes, she can walk a lot better. Now, awesome, like when you leave for school in the morning. You ever go, Hey, why don't you do some laundry or clean this place

Emma 30:58
up a little bit? Sometimes she does do the laundry. My dad doesn't.

Scott Benner 31:02
Oh, really, yeah, I do the laundry almost exclusively here. You know, I wrote a book one time

Emma 31:09
we oh yeah, my, my dad has a bunch of books from you on his toilet.

Scott Benner 31:15
Wait, my, the one with the picture of the guy like holding the laundry is on your toilet.

Emma 31:22
I don't know if it's that one, but we have a bunch of your your books on like the toilet, so we could just read them.

Scott Benner 31:27
No, no, I think you're thinking about me. I only have one book. Oh,

Emma 31:31
my I asked my dad. He said, too. It must be that one. Who's your dad cheating on me with?

Scott Benner 31:38
We'll find out. Yeah. Anyway, I was gonna say the book is called Life is short. Laundry is eternal, because I constantly am doing laundry. Like, yesterday, I was up here programming something for any I can't say what it's for yet, but I was doing something for the podcast, and in the middle of it, like, in the middle of like, Oh, I gotta put laundry in. Like, I ran to put in laundry that it's like, beeping and like, I'm like, Oh, I gotta put the dryer now, okay, now, I gotta fold it so you're at home. Your mom's there. You guys mess around, which is nice. You like that she's there. Yes, somebody's gonna make dinner. It's not you, because you like to cook, but not that much. And you, Bolus again, do you have a snack in the evenings before you go to bed or, like, or is that I'm trying to go through your whole day eating

Emma 32:22
sometimes I have it before bed. Usually we have, like, sugar free ice cream, kind of, like vanilla ice cream. I usually either have, like, a little bit that or just nothing before bed, sugar free ice cream. It's not, like, completely sugar free, is it good? But it's, yeah, it's pretty good. It's vanilla, all

Scott Benner 32:39
right. You like it, so you're not just eating it. Like, oh, I guess this is okay for sugar free, but you actually enjoy it, okay? Yeah,

Emma 32:46
it's not as good as, like, we have a ice cream shop down the street, and it's, yeah,

Scott Benner 32:52
awesome. I wonder if the ice cream shop has a refrigerator, if they just use main to keep their ice cream cold, yeah? I mean, because very cold. Are you near the ocean,

Emma 33:01
we have a river in our backyard, kind of like, if you walk down, we have a campsite, and then if you keep going down, we have a huge

Scott Benner 33:09
river. You know what's so funny when I was young, I remember there being this pretty, like, big creek that ran through my apartment complex. Sorry, I'm not fancy, like you people with the house, but it ran through my apartment complex. We used to play in it and cross it and all this stuff. And in my mind, it was, it's huge, you know? And as an adult, I went back there one time, and it is a trickle of garbage water, barely like, I couldn't believe how small it was compared to my memory. Oh, my God, you know, like, you'll also one day have this experience where you go back to your elementary school and realize that, like, you're you'll feel huge, yeah, in there anyway. Like, it made me wonder, like, Do you have a river in your backyard? Or is it like, or is it just like, this small trickling of water that one day you'll be like, Oh, that was not a river, because a river is, like, pretty specific, is why? Like, you know what I

Emma 34:06
mean, if you go down, there's a bunch of like, huge rocks, like you can walk on them. There's a river in across the rivers, a street with like, more rocks on that side. If you keep going down the rocks, we have that. We call it a cove. It's like a sandy

Scott Benner 34:20
beach. Oh, nice. Yeah, huh, this is fancy. Yeah. You like it? Do you like living there?

Emma 34:27
I do like living here, but the trees, because this place, I don't know how much we got it for. It was like 100 I have no idea.

Scott Benner 34:35
Yeah, you don't need to make up a number. But go ahead, it was

Emma 34:39
less than we expected that it would be now, but why it was, like, so cheap is because there's so many trees here,

Scott Benner 34:45
so a lot of the ground, you have a lot of land, but a lot of it's covered in, like, woods, and there's not a lot you can

Emma 34:50
do with it, yeah, there's, like, a lot of leaves. There is a lot we can do with it, because my dad cut down the tree, a lot of trees to make, like, a

Scott Benner 34:58
pathway down to the river. Yeah. Is your dad? Like a big, strong guy. He

Emma 35:02
looks pretty skinny and weak, but he um, actually lifted 100 something pounds the other

Scott Benner 35:07
day. Wow. He lifted up 100 pounds even though he's skinny and weak. Well, he looks weak,

Emma 35:12
but he um, not what? Yeah, what he says is, um, the muscles are made in the kitchen. That's what he always says. Do you have

Scott Benner 35:21
any idea what he means when he says that,

Emma 35:23
like, eat healthy and that type of stuff? Yeah,

Scott Benner 35:26
that's a good idea. Are

Emma 35:28
there animals in the woods? Sometimes, we see deer a lot, but no bears, not usually we see turkeys in our yard. Sometimes, yeah,

Scott Benner 35:38
turkeys are fun. They're loud, though, aren't they? Yeah, so, so you're not afraid to play in the woods, is what I'm saying. Sometimes,

Emma 35:45
like, I get nervous. If I see like a big footprint, or like, the trees are

Scott Benner 35:52
shaking, I get scared. Yeah, what do you what do you think the footprints from? I

Emma 35:55
honestly don't know. But the other day I was looking it was, I wasn't the other day. It was in winter. I It looked like a moose footprint, like a big moose, yeah, but I think it was just a huge deer, because the footprint was huge and it looked like, um, it wasn't like a human footprint. I

Scott Benner 36:14
hear what you're saying. Do you want me to find out if they're bears where you live? Uh, sure. Honestly, bears in I remember the name of your town, although I'm going to ask Rob to take the name of your town out, but I remember it. So hold on a second. Asking chat. GPT, are you using that,

Emma 36:32
by the way, yeah, I use that sometimes. What important things are you asking it sometimes i i usually just mess around with it. Yeah,

Scott Benner 36:41
just ask it, like, stuff. Do you think it's going to take over for Google, for kids?

Emma 36:47
Oh, yes, yeah. I also asked, like, how many carbs are in like, say, I'm having to see pop as how many grams are in a Tootsie Pop? And,

Scott Benner 36:56
yeah, it knows that, yeah,

Emma 37:00
oh, I actually have a joke for you. Go ahead, tell me the joke. Okay, it's a pretty long one, but so there's 500 bricks on a plane one falls off. How many are left?

Scott Benner 37:09
500 bricks on a plane one falls off. How many are left? 499,

Emma 37:14
yep. And then, how do you put an elephant in a fridge? How

Scott Benner 37:18
do you put an elephant in a fridge? Yes, one piece at a time,

Emma 37:22
you open the door, put the elephant in, and close the door. How do you put a giraffe in a fridge?

Scott Benner 37:28
Maybe you open the door, you put the giraffe in the fridge and you close the door.

Emma 37:32
No, you open the door, take the elephant out, put the giraffe in, close the door.

Scott Benner 37:36
Oh, really. Okay, now the giraffe in the refrigerator. Now what

Emma 37:40
so the lion kings having a birthday party. Every single animal is there except for one animal. Which animal is it? Lion

Scott Benner 37:47
kings, having a birthday party, every single animal is there except for one animal. Which is it? Is it Mufasa? Because he died?

Emma 37:55
No, it's a giraffe because he's in the fridge. Oh, how come? I didn't put that together. Do you think? And then Susie's crossing the alligator like, um, but she survives. How does she survive?

Scott Benner 38:06
Susie's crossing the alligator Lake, and she survives. How does she survive? I don't know,

Emma 38:11
because all the alligators at the birthday party, but she still somehow dies. How does she die? Does she drown? No, the brick from the plane.

Scott Benner 38:21
Oh, it answered that. This is one big joke you're telling me. Yeah, that was the whole joke. That's awesome. Jeez, hey, there are bears in Maine. Oh, yeah. Maine supports 24,000 to 36,000 black bears, the largest population east of the Mississippi River. What that means for where you are, it's prime bear habitat urban edges don't stop bears that follow river corridors and green belts looking for food. Bears are active from early April through November. Residents start reporting sightings each spring. As soon as natural food is become scarce, you're growing up in a world where anything you can ask will get given back to you immediately. Yeah, right. Now, when I grew up, when I was 10, it was 1981 when I was 10, Oh, right. It's crazy, right? Yeah. And back then, there were five stations on my television, right? So you don't even think of it as stations. You think of it as like, apps or, yeah, like, right, YouTube, right? So there was ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, those were the stations I had. They were on one dial of my I know you don't even understand this, but there was a thing you turned on the like a dial, you turned on the television to change the channels, and then there was another dial at the bottom that was UHF, and that had, like, channel 48 channel 29 like, there were, like, they were kind of like junky channels, yeah, right. If you wanted to watch a football game, for example, yeah, you had to sit down when the football game started, and you had to stay sitting there and watch it the whole time because it only played once. You could not record it. You couldn't pause it. Like you. Had to sit there and watch it like that was. How insane is that? Right? Phones hung on the wall. They didn't go in your pocket. They had long cords on them so you could walk around while you're talking on them, but all they did was make phone calls. You couldn't do anything else with them. Oh, there were no computers in your house. Some people didn't have microwaves at that point. What right, how old I am, right? And so then and so, like, a day in my life was like, get up watch cartoons on UHF channels. This is my Saturday, okay? I'd get up really super early. I had to be up at 6am to watch Mighty Mouse. Do you know what Mighty Mouse is? I have no idea. It's a cartoon. Okay, I had to be up at 6am to watch Mighty Mouse, and then I had to sit through some other garbage, religious based cartoons until seven o'clock and then, and then I could watch like super friends and Tom and Jerry and stuff like that. Okay, oh my God. Then it was 8am cartoons were over now, like they would come to an end, and you could feel your soul die because you were like, Oh no, the cartoons are done until next week at 6am oh my god, and then I had to live for the next 12 hours. But what would I do? Think about it. Now, what do I do? I'm dumb. I don't read that already takes out a whole thing. Now, I got to go outside and pull weeds and cut the lawn and like, right, right, right. There's nothing to do. I talked to my grandmother a little bit on a Saturday, maybe my mom, my brothers, we go outside, we play. Our parents would just kick us out of the house. Oh, my God, get outside. Come back later.

Emma 41:50
Okay, all right. My dad had a way different childhood than

Scott Benner 41:54
that. I imagine he did. And I know, hold on, we're gonna find out about your dad's in a second. Okay, all right. And so then eventually I got a computer like, let me tell you. When did the first Radio Shack computer? My god, that's all become available for retail. This is when I bought my first computer. Now keep in mind, I've just asked a prompt on one of my two computers sitting on my on my screen right now. Oh, the TRS 80, which is what I got. Oh, my God, this historically released in 77 but that is not, certainly when I got it originally, like it was available for a long time before people actually use them. Oh, I bought it, I think when I was like, maybe 13 or 14. So this thing's gonna get it, yeah, so it was out already for a few years. When I bought it, I bought it in like, 84 maybe, I don't remember exactly anymore. Now, it didn't do anything. So I returned it like it was literally just you could code on it or program on it for back then, but I didn't know. But I didn't know how to do that, and so I bought it. I was like, oh, man, this thing's gonna be amazing. And then it wasn't, and I returned it. Okay? I saved for how many years to buy the computer? A lot, yeah, four years of saving my money to go buy the computer that when I got it home, I typed from a book. I took a book that had code in it, and I sat down, I typed out that code for days, and then I hit Enter, and it said error. Then I went back to the book, re went through all the code, found the like one place. I made a typo, fixed it. Hit enter and tell me what you think popped up on screen. It didn't work. No, it worked. What did I get? What did you get? It was a stick figure, man. He did one Jumping Jack. Oh, my God, that's right, that's right. And when it did that Jumping Jack, I unplugged that thing, put it back in the box and took it right back to the store. It's like, this ain't ready for prime time. Then my next one was a Commodore 64 and that only really played games and did like, little like, it didn't really do anything. Yeah, right. But even that, like, that was my whole like, day. Like, that, was it like nothing happened. Do you understand? We'd go to school, we'd come home, we'd argue, fight, eat a little food, go to bed. There was nothing to do. You are going to grow up in a world that not only has the internet right, which I know you don't know, is important, but it's super important. You have the internet and you have AI, your life is going to be so incredibly different from mine in ways that we can't even figure out yet. Yeah, like, what do you think you'll like, really, you're like, oh, I want to be a chef or, like, work with animals or something like that. But, like, I mean, will that even exist?

Emma 44:55
Good? I don't

Scott Benner 44:57
even know, right? Like, your dad's job. Didn't exist 20 years ago. Yeah, right. My job didn't, like, think about my job, right? You and I don't know each other. We're talking we're recording it. Yeah, people are gonna listen to it, like, on their phones and their computers all over the world, like somebody right now is listening to this in Australia, England, China, India, Canada, Mexico. Like, like, seriously, like, this conversation, right, right, right, right. It's crazy, right? And so, like, yeah, they can only do that because the internet exists and phones exist, yeah, right. And so before that, if you would have gone back to before the internet, which, you know, or before cell phones, and said, One day people are going to talk about diabetes in their house, record it, and people all around the world are going to listen to it. Nobody would have even understood what you were saying, yeah, right, because they would have said, Wait, they're going to be on the radio. That's what they would have said, Oh, my God. And you would have said, no, no, not on the radio. And then they would not have context for that. So Don't you wonder, what is it you don't have context for right now that's going to happen in your lifetime. Oh, my God. What do you think it could be? Make up. Make a

Emma 46:09
guess, a levitated car or something. Maybe I have no idea. They used

Scott Benner 46:14
to say that when I was a kid. They used to say, like, when you grow up, cars will fly.

Emma 46:17
Oh, my God, they don't fly.

Scott Benner 46:21
Maybe that's not a thing that could happen. Like, it's going to be stuff you don't think of. Yeah, right, oh my god. Like, I imagine one day that you will just sit down at a computer and tell it, like, Hey, here's my charts and my graphs from my blood sugar from this week. Like, what should I change? And it'll just give you, like, oh, like, turn this setting here, do that there. But then one day, what I imagine is that your pump will just do that. Your pump, your pump will just go, you know, okay, like, here's a week's worth of data. Me, because your pump knows where food went in. It knows how many carbs went in, right? It knows what insulin happened. It knows what happened afterwards. If it keeps that information and just goes over it can't it just make adjustments. I mean, it could right like, so maybe one day, that won't even be a thing, you'll have to think about very much. That would be so cool. Yeah, tell me why that would be cool. It would be cool because I wouldn't have to worry about it. Is like, Yeah, and you do think about it. I think about it a lot now, yeah, yeah. Tell me what that means. Like, what does think about it a lot. Mean, let's

Emma 47:32
say in class, if we're right in the middle of something, and I feel I always have to, like, immediately check, let check it. Or else, like, I get nervous and I, I feel like that's one of the things that I depend on, is diabetes and like my pods, is it because

Scott Benner 47:47
you don't want to be different than the other kids, or you just don't want the hassle?

Emma 47:50
I think I just don't want the hassle because I'm fine with being different that

Scott Benner 47:54
you have no trouble with. You don't care about people knowing you have diabetes or anything like that. Nope. And does anybody give you about it?

Emma 48:01
Not really, but a lot of little kids come over say, What's that on your arm? What's it on your leg? And I have to, like, explain it to them.

Scott Benner 48:08
Anybody who would send me an email to complain to me about the way you and I are talking? What should I say? Back to them,

Emma 48:14
shut up. Shut up. Ish, just anything like that. Awesome. Do you think about boys? Yeah, yeah. So

Scott Benner 48:23
are you like, like, lining up, which ones, like, do you guys all have, like, boyfriends at school, kind of thing

Emma 48:28
I did, but I don't anymore. I have a crush. Oh, yeah, yeah. I can't say his name, though he's coming over today. Oh, does he know that you have a crush on him? I don't think so, but I pretty sure he might have a crush on me. Yeah. Why do you think that? Because, um, like, I play Four Square recess, and whenever we're playing four square, even if I know, like, I'm definitely out, he always is like, Oh no, she's not out because blah, blah, blah, but he has a girlfriend, but I don't think like he doesn't seem to like his girlfriend.

Scott Benner 49:00
That goes around sometimes, and vice versa, vice versa. So right now, you're, you're lining up to be a home wrecker. You're trying to, you're trying to get her out so that you can get in. Is that

Emma 49:10
right kind of well, I'm friends with her, so how are we going to handle that? I don't know. I'm just not going to tell them. I'm not going to tell them. So you until,

Scott Benner 49:20
yeah, you keep it to yourself. You let them break up naturally, yeah. And then you, then you come in,

Emma 49:26
yeah. I come take my shot,

Scott Benner 49:27
yeah, take your shot. And where do you think this will go, like, when, when you're 10 and you're dating? What does that mean? I don't know.

Emma 49:34
But a lot of people in like, fourth grade, in fifth grade are dating for I don't even know why. I just like like

Scott Benner 49:41
people, yeah. So what does that really mean? Like you like you walk next to each other in the hall a little

Emma 49:46
bit. You hold hands. I used to kiss my boyfriend. Oh

Scott Benner 49:49
my gosh. When did that? Did it stop for a reason? Did you get in

Emma 49:54
trouble? I just didn't want to, well, I didn't do it at school a lot. I just didn't want to date them anymore. I was just. Done.

Scott Benner 50:01
What did a boy do that made you be done? Well,

Emma 50:04
one of them just, like, just like, didn't care, kind of, like, pushed me a little bit like, so I just, I didn't like him, and the next one, um, like, forced him and yelled at me. So, yeah, I didn't you had a boy yell at you? Yeah, I've had a boy yell at me.

Scott Benner 50:21
Why? Why did he do that?

Emma 50:23
I don't know. I was grumpy from a sleepover and he was mad at me for being grumpy. My

Scott Benner 50:29
wife gets grumpy sometimes. Yeah, I don't push her, though, although I'm sure she would push me. So yeah, like, do a lot of kids date. Uh, yes, and it's like that. That's the level of how it works. Yes, okay, are there any kids your age doing stuff that you're like, Oh God, I don't think they should be doing that. Tongue Kissing, like French kissing, oh my god. Really? Yep, yep, yeah. You know how you can stop that hell. Get married. Yep, yeah. That'll put an end to that real quick. Get rid but we don't want 10 year olds getting married, just so they don't French kiss. Yeah, that would be going too far, probably, yeah, yeah. So like, that gets around, like, somebody French kisses, and then it, like, gets all over the school, and everybody knows about it, yeah, yeah. Is there anything you wanted to talk about? It's been an hour. I didn't ask. Oh,

Emma 51:22
yeah, kind of go ahead. So, um, I have a best friend. Uh, can I say a friend name? I don't care if you're okay with it, I'm okay with it. Yeah, she Oh, she's gonna listen to this, but she's completely fine with it. I asked her before it okay. Her name's Emmy, and her brother's name is Bennett. Bennett was diagnosed September 22 with diabetes. Oh, okay,

Scott Benner 51:42
how old is he? He's four. Oh, how old is she? She's your age.

Emma 51:47
Emmy is 10. Yep, she's a little younger. So I'm pretty sure it's

Scott Benner 51:51
Emma and Emmy. Yeah, and then the doctor's office is Corey and Tori. Corey and Tori. Does everybody's name rhyme with someone else's name and where you live,

Emma 52:02
kind of but, oh, something crazy with that is the Bennet was diagnosed September, like, I don't know what day, but, and then Emmy was diagnosed October, 22 2022 the day before my diversity.

Scott Benner 52:17
Wait, your friend also has type one diabetes, and she was diagnosed and her brother, oh my gosh, yeah. I wonder how that's happening. Maybe the bears are giving it to people. What do you think of that? That'd be, I mean, the bears, the bears eat the honey from the beehives. Oh, yeah, and you fell on a beehive and then got diabetes. Yeah. I mean, science, right? It is, yeah, right, right, right. Well, that Do you know a lot of people who have type one?

Emma 52:45
I'm pretty sure, yeah, oh, this girl named BJ, she's an MMA fighter with diabetes.

Scott Benner 52:50
Wait, she lives locally to you?

Emma 52:53
Yeah, she does MMA, and I'm actually starting it this weekend with her. Wait, you're gonna start doing MMA? Yes, and it's free for me, because I have diabetes.

Scott Benner 53:03
Wait, diabetes makes MMA free. How does that work?

Emma 53:07
She does like a program with all these adults and kids can, but no kids have so far, and she made it so like people with that kids, or like adults with diabetes, can go in for free. I'm gonna be the only kid

Scott Benner 53:20
there? Okay, is she? BJ, Garcia,

Emma 53:25
I don't know. She does pea pods.

Scott Benner 53:28
She does pea pods. What the hell does pea pods mean? Pea

Emma 53:31
pods is, like, it's an event we get to go to for summer and, like, they do pumpkin carving, ice skating events. Okay,

Scott Benner 53:38
got a news report about her, so she's given you, like, free lessons.

Emma 53:42
Yeah, I'm gonna start this Saturday. It's at seven. Are you looking forward to hitting people? Yes, very much. How come tell me about it. I'm really excited for that, because I've technically been practicing with my dad every

Scott Benner 53:55
day. You and your dad fight every day,

Emma 53:59
at night, what we do is I start, we start in the bedroom, and he has to get me to the bathroom, and I'm not allowed to bite, sometimes I'm not allowed to scratch, and he's not allowed to tickle or cover me with a blanket. That seems like good rules. Yeah, we just fight. We just fight to the bathroom. I usually win.

Scott Benner 54:17
Yeah, you think he lets you win? Or do you think you were actually

Emma 54:21
wanting he, most of the time, tries his hardest. And dad, when you listed this,

Scott Benner 54:25
you Oh, there you go. Awesome. I wish I could leave that in for you. Well, I mean, he's so weak. How could he stop you? I know, yeah, he should eat more good food.

Emma 54:35
Yeah. I usually grab the lamps though. You wait, you fight him with lamps. Well, no, when he tries to drag me, I grab onto the lamp, and he has to let go.

Scott Benner 54:46
Oh, I see, I see, because he doesn't want the lamp to fall over,

Emma 54:49
yeah, well, the lamp usually does fall over, so you're cheating. Well, kind of have

Scott Benner 54:56
you ever shot a gun? No, but I really want to really. Yeah, do people around you target shoot or anything like that?

Emma 55:03
My brothers, once in a while, do is my dad and we actually got a place in levant we're gonna get because there was this old man that was my dad's friend for a while, then he died. Yeah, he died, and he had a wife named Carol.

Scott Benner 55:19
So you guys are buying their place. Is that what you're

Emma 55:21
doing? So it's actually 100 acres. And we're, we're in their will, so when Carol dies, we're gonna get the place, and they actually have a shooting range there.

Scott Benner 55:31
Wow. 100 acres in the woods, the 100 Acre Wood, kind

Emma 55:35
of, but it's also, it's like, in the middle of nowhere, kind of, I mean, that's how you get 100 acres, yeah, but it's in LA van. He actually got it for like, a really cheap price. The husband, yeah, and yeah.

Scott Benner 55:48
So listen, I want to tell people something, you know, Emma's dad reaches out and says, like, my daughter could be on the podcast. And people do that once in a while. They're like, my kids, you know, you know, could be on the podcast. And I go, how old? And he says, 10. And I go, Sure, because often kids can't, like, hold up a conversation. They don't know what they think they're you know, they sometimes they lack self confidence. But every once in a while, you meet one who just, like, can really talk like, I'm talking to you right now. I know you're 10, but you are doing such a good job of of representing yourself and holding up your side of the conversation, like, is that something all of your friends are good at at this age now?

Emma 56:26
No, I don't think so. But most people say I talk like an adult and when my dad talks to me, he does like real adult conversations. He's like, I feel like I'm talking to like an A 20 year old. I'm talking to

Scott Benner 56:38
you No kidding, like you really are. Like, you're very easy to say, I don't know. If you don't know, you know you're not, like, cursing, just the curse. Like, you know what I mean. Like, you everything you're doing is very, like, purposeful. It makes me this all makes me very hopeful for the world. Yeah, yeah, no kidding. Like, I am super interested in, like, how, and you're too young to ask, because you don't know. Like, I know I kind of went over it, but you can't grasp yet how much the world's going to look different, like, in the next five or, like, even, maybe by the time you go to college. I have no idea. Are kids cheating with chat GPT now on homework? Yes, right. Like, so that's not going to stop they're gonna have to find a way to fold that into education.

Emma 57:23
Yeah, I don't cheat with, like, any program thing. Yeah, you're

Scott Benner 57:29
already hearing them talk about it, right? Yes, yeah. I mean, that's, I don't believe that's going to stop. Like, you could Google stuff in the past, but when you get you get the return back, you still have to read it, make sense of it, or you had to, like, plagiarize it, like, copy and paste it, which, you know, they quickly made software to catch plagiarism. You know what plagiarism is, right? Yes, yeah, okay. Like, so, like, they quickly made software that's not plagiarism. So people would turn in plagiarized stuff in college and high school. They'd run it through a computer real quick, and they'd say, No, this isn't your work, right? And there's really bad like you, you get kicked out of school for it. So yes, that stopped people from doing that, but chatgpt and other AIS, I don't think that's going to be distinguishable at some point. And just understanding people in general, like I think instead of having to see this as a problem, I think we need to see this as what they would call an inflection point, or as a moment where life changes a little bit, because I don't think you're going backwards from this. Yeah, you know what I mean, like. So I super, I'm super interested in what like school is going to look like for you, like for the next, you know, eight years till you graduate, yeah, it's gonna be something. I mean, I hope I can stay alive long enough to find out what happens, you know you mean, but I'm like, maybe I can come back in a few years. Oh, you were already gonna get invited back. Don't worry about that. That's awesome. I think you should probably come back, like every 24 months till I stop making the podcast, because I see you again at 1212. Is a real interesting time. Yeah, you know you're gonna get your lady time at some point. You know what that is?

Emma 59:08
Yeah, period. I don't want to get my period. Of course not. Who would want that?

Scott Benner 59:11
That's going to change your blood sugar a little bit. You know about that?

Emma 59:14
Yeah, yeah, I'm scared for that. That's one of the things I'm scared of. And my dad's like, I'm just gonna, like, just watch you with their beard, not, not creepily. Just, I want to I'm interested with your

Scott Benner 59:25
blood sugar. Yeah, I say, are you what are you reading a book? What's that noise?

Emma 59:29
I have no idea. Oh, am I boring? You? No, are you sure? Yes, I like talking with you.

Scott Benner 59:36
Awesome. So, like, okay, so you told me about your friend Emma and Bennett, who also have type one diabetes. Me, Emmy, excuse me, you're MX. We always get our names confused. I mean, absolutely, they're in the same class too. Oh, awesome. Do you always think you're hearing your name when it's somebody else's? Yeah,

Emma 59:53
sometimes, like, the teacher calls on me and she's like, Emmy, I was like, That's not my name.

Scott Benner 59:59
That's. Still went over there gotcha Okay, so is there anything else that you wanted to talk

Emma 1:00:04
about that we haven't talked Oh, I do have this other condition. Okay, it's a lung disease, really. Yeah, it's like a lung disease. It's, it's a really hard word to say. It's a really long word. It's nominal, ultra microscopic, so called volcanoconiosis. Have you heard of

Scott Benner 1:00:22
that? Well, I don't even know what you just said. So numeo,

Emma 1:00:26
numeno, ultra microscopic, silico, volcano coniosis, and also that I'm just with you,

Scott Benner 1:00:38
that's something you had planned for today.

Emma 1:00:40
Yes, because it is, it is a real lung disease, but I don't have

Scott Benner 1:00:45
it. You don't have it. No. Oh, what does it do to people? Do you know?

Emma 1:00:50
Um, I know it's a lung disease. I have no idea. I think it's like short of breath or something. Oh, it

Scott Benner 1:00:54
means short of breath. I have no idea. How long have you been planning to tell me

Emma 1:00:59
that? What? Right when my dad said I will be on the podcast.

Scott Benner 1:01:04
So you've been sitting on this for that

Emma 1:01:06
long? Yes, it's been so hard to keep it in.

Scott Benner 1:01:10
Have you been lying to me about anything else today? No. How will I know that for sure now that I know that you've lied about this lung disease? Well, I guess you'll never know it's true. That's very, very true. Oh my gosh. Are you gonna be tall or short? Like, how are your parents?

Emma 1:01:24
They're both very short, but my brothers are both very tall. Like, my 14 year old brother is a lot taller than my 18 year old brother 15. Do you know how tall your tall brother is? No but I know he's taller than my dad and mom, and my dad's really short.

Scott Benner 1:01:40
What else? Let's see, oh yeah, please drive with your seat belt on, yeah, okay, okay, and don't like and when you start driving, be careful. It's gonna be fun to drive fast, but don't do that. Okay, yeah, all right, make sure boys are nice to you, yeah, nobody gets to push you or yell at you. Okay, yep, even if you're grumpy, yeah, all right, anything else you want to talk about?

Emma 1:02:03
Oh, I wrote this one down because my dad wanted to know kind of or I wanted to know, but wait, do you get your eyebrows started? That's what my dad said.

Scott Benner 1:02:13
I do get my eyebrows threaded. Yes. Does it hurt? Okay, so, yeah, I mean, but it's fleeting, but like, you know, like, it's not like it hurts afterwards, but while it's happening, it's feels like someone's pulling like a shard of metal out of your face, like it's just like, it's like, plink, they come out, and you're like, oh, but it really does. It really is, all right, I want to be clear. Okay, I do a couple of things because it's stuff Arden and I do together. Yeah, if Arden didn't say, Hey, I'm gonna go get my eyebrow started. Would you drive me? I would never have done this. Okay, but once I got there and she's like, You should do it, I was like, I'll do it. Like, you know? I was just like, I get did it now it's kind of a thing we do together. And if I'm being honest, it does look a little nicer for me, because my eyebrows have a way of, like, curling down the side of my head, like, like, sad faces. So they do a good job of cleaning them up. So whenever Arden goes, I just go with her and we do it together. Well, that's cool. Exactly same goes for sometimes, every once in a while, in the wintertime, we go, like, to a tanning salon. But that's the thing Arden wants to do. And it started out with me just driving her over there. And then I was like, I'll do it too. So it's like a thing we do together. Like, if, if Arden left, like she moved across the country, I'd never go tanning again, and I'd never get my eyebrows threaded again. It's the thing I do with my daughter. You know what? I mean? Well, yeah, so that's that's it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I once shaved my legs, but that was different one time when we were like, God, were we, like, 19 or, I don't know what we were, but it was summertime, and we were all this week. We were so bored. And everybody, like, everyone was talking about how bored we were because, like, I'm telling you, the world was just different. Like, there was not a lot to do. Okay? We all got around one day and we all said something like, like, let's do something stupid, like, and we all came up with different stupid stuff to do. And I was like, I'll shave my legs. So, like, anyway, it was very itchy when it came back. Oh, my God. I don't remember what my other friends did. We once shaved. We once gave my brother, I think he was maybe like, 13 at the time. We collected money up from a bunch of people. Gave my brother $20 so we could shave his head bald. Oh, my God. And so for $20 my brother let his head get shaved completely bald.

Emma 1:04:49
My dad did it for free. My mom

Scott Benner 1:04:52
was so mad. Oh, my God. She was so incredibly. Be angry, and my brother didn't care. Like, he was just like, he was like, I have $20 like, can you imagine? Can you imagine nowadays? Like, how much if I said to you, am I going to shave your head bald, but you're going to get money for it? How much money would you want

Emma 1:05:14
if it's more than 50 because I am, I am not shaving my head,

Scott Benner 1:05:20
right? It would have to be, to you, would be a lot of money. And to you, $50 is a lot of money.

Emma 1:05:26
Yes, 100 is, like, I've only had ever $100 bill that I've earned. And how did you make the money? I worked six hours with my dad for a whole day. Okay? Would you cleaning the chicken coop and cleaning up the leaves. Very unpleasant. It was disgusting. What'd you do with the money? I think I saved it for a bit, and did I bought some stuff? I should have saved her an Apple Watch, but I was too dumb at the time to know.

Scott Benner 1:05:51
So you kind of like you spent it before you could build up. Yeah, I got you

Emma 1:05:56
that place we're getting we have to mow in last summer. My brother, the younger brother, he earned $1,000 for doing it. So I'm gonna try and plan to mow the summer. Is it a push mower or a rider? Oh, you ride it. I did that last year for a little bit.

Scott Benner 1:06:14
Oh, so you, so you would cut this lawn for the whole summer to make like, $1,000

Emma 1:06:18
Oh, yeah, no, definitely. Yeah. That's not a bad deal. Yeah, you don't have to buy the gas, do you? Oh no. My dad

Scott Benner 1:06:25
does. Oh, awesome. Well, then I would do that. If I was you, they'll let you do that when you're 10.

Emma 1:06:30
Oh yeah, my brothers do? I mean, my dad does. The lady that's there, she gets very, like, scared when I'm out, and my mom is, like, holding her breath. Like, why is she going, Oh,

Scott Benner 1:06:41
I see I say because you're because you're young, right?

Emma 1:06:44
Yeah, but I don't, I don't, I don't feel like I'm young. I feel like I'm older than that.

Scott Benner 1:06:49
You do? You feel like it's safe for you to be doing it?

Emma 1:06:51
Yeah? And a lot of people said I look a lot older because I just, I had really long hair down to like, I don't know how long it was it, but I finally got it so I could put it like over my shoulder and have it there. I cut it all off, not like shaved. Why'd you cut it off? Because I did not like having to take care of it. So now I have this really short haircut. Gotcha? You like that better? Oh, way better. I hated taking care of my head there. Do

Scott Benner 1:07:16
you think? Have you ever thought about, will there become a time where you're get tired of diabetes and you just don't want to do it. Has that ever happened

Emma 1:07:23
to you? I mean, I get like, upset that I haven't but no, I don't think I'd never, I don't think I'd ever, like, not take care of myself for it. What's upset? What do you mean? You get upset like I sometimes when I have to change my podcast, just like, I'm not having a good day, I get really mad about

Scott Benner 1:07:39
it. Yeah, you ever get mad at your parents for trying to help you? No, I don't do that, though. That's good. It doesn't bother you when people are trying to help you, uh, not really. Okay. If that ever, if that ever happens, try hard to fight that feeling. Yeah, okay.

Emma 1:07:54
But sometimes when I, like, uh, let's say I played this new video game the other day, because we're all big gamers, except for my mom. We were playing this game, and I was a new game, and my dad was like, Oh, I can help because I played him for I was like, No, I like doing this stuff by myself. Yeah, you

Scott Benner 1:08:10
like to have something for yourself, right? Yeah, gotcha. How come you're not at

Emma 1:08:14
school today? Oh, I'm skipping it until we're done.

Scott Benner 1:08:18
Oh, okay, yeah, nice. So you'll go to school and say I was on a podcast today, so I couldn't be here on time. Or are you gonna lie and say something else?

Emma 1:08:26
I'm gonna say that, Oh, only one of my friends really cares about this podcast, and it's the one with diabetes me,

Scott Benner 1:08:32
of course. Yeah, nobody else, yes. So I have a last question for you. Said your dad found the podcast the day you were diagnosed, yes, right? And do you guys talk about it, or does he bring ideas to you from the show? Because that's like, six years ago, so he's been listening for a long time. Like, so it's kind of, he's listened to almost all the episodes. Yeah. So it's kind of a part of your like, of your life, a little bit. So like, how does it impact you? Like, does your dad come to you with stuff? Or do you think that doesn't happen?

Emma 1:08:59
He sometimes does that? Yeah, okay. Do you know things

Scott Benner 1:09:03
because of the podcast or no, you know things because your parents? I also listened

Emma 1:09:07
to the school nurse one. Okay, I've listened to a few of them that I really liked, like it was someone in the motorcycle. Oh, Shay. Shay in the motorcycle. Yeah. I just listened to that one. I finished it with my dad. Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:09:20
yeah, so. But do you think, like, some of the ways you manage your diabetes come from this podcast?

Emma 1:09:26
Yes, it definitely does. Like, how my algorithm

Scott Benner 1:09:30
is, okay, all right, well, that's cool. That's really awesome. So, you know what, you have a couple friends with diabetes, which I think will be like, I think that's gonna be great while you're growing up. Yeah, yeah. Do you guys have, like, kind of, like an unspoken kind of club thing. Like, do you, you know what I mean? Like, you feel like you guys are closer than other people,

Emma 1:09:48
kinda like, with Emmy, I'm best friends with her, like, all the way, but with some other people, I have different best friends than

Scott Benner 1:09:57
them. I know what you mean. Like, yeah, like. People are, like, you have like, different relationships with Yes, I gotcha. Okay, all right, listen, I think we're done, but, yeah, but I would, but, but I want you to go to school and try to learn something. You know what I mean? Yeah. What do you think you'll learn today?

Emma 1:10:12
Well, we just finished a new we had test, so a bunch of math, and we're learning in social studies about

Scott Benner 1:10:20
waves, like sound waves or waves,

Emma 1:10:23
sound waves, like actual waves, that type of stuff.

Scott Benner 1:10:27
Yeah, okay. Are you enjoying that? Yes, awesome. Okay, all right. Well, Emma, this was awesome. I really appreciate you doing this with me. Maybe, like I said, couple years from now, you come back and do it again. Okay, yeah, definitely awesome. Can I talk to you? Dad first? Oh, you're very welcome. Let me go grab my dad. Yeah, let me talk to your dad

Emma 1:10:44
for a second. Be right back. Okay.

Scott Benner 1:10:55
The conversation you just heard was sponsored by touched by type one. Check them out please. At touched by type one.org, on Instagram and Facebook, you're gonna love them. I love them. They're helping so many people. At touched by type one.org, this episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by the Omnipod five, and at my link, omnipod.com/juicebox you can get yourself a free, what I just say, a free Omnipod five starter kit, free. Get out of here. Go click on that link, omnipod.com/juicebox check it out. Terms and Conditions apply. Eligibility may vary. Full terms and conditions can be found at omnipod.com/juicebox links in the show notes, links at Juicebox podcast.com Are you tired of getting a rash from your CGM adhesive? Give the ever since 365 a try, ever since cgm.com/juicebox beautiful silicon that they use. It changes every day. Keeps it fresh. Not only that, you only have to change the sensor once a year. So I mean, that's better. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back very soon with another episode of The Juicebox podcast. If you're not already subscribed or following the podcast in your favorite audio app like Spotify or Apple podcasts, please do that now. Seriously, just to hit follow or subscribe will really help the show. If you go a little further in Apple podcasts and set it up so that it downloads all new episodes, I'll be your best friend, and if you leave a five star review, ooh, I'll probably send you a Christmas card. Would you like a Christmas card? I am here to tell you about juice cruise 2026 we will be departing from Miami on June 21 2026 for a seven night trip going to the Caribbean. That's right, we're going to leave Miami and then stop at Coco k in the Bahamas. After that, it's on to Saint Kitts, Saint Thomas and a beautiful cruise through the Virgin Islands. The first juice Cruise was awesome. The second one is going to be bigger, better and bolder. This is your opportunity to relax while making lifelong friends who have type one diabetes. Expand your community and your knowledge on juice cruise 2026 learn more right now at Juicebox podcast.com/juice cruise at that link, you'll also find photographs from the first cruise. The episode you just heard was professionally edited by wrong way recording. Wrong wayrecording.com, you.

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Terri, a 62-year type 1 veteran shares life before tech, college challenges, and 20 years helping others through her work in the diabetes supply world.

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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
Terry, Welcome back friends to another episode of The Juicebox podcast.

Terri 0:16
Hi, I'm Terry. I was diagnosed in 1963 with type one diabetes back in the old days,

Scott Benner 0:28
I am here to tell you about juice cruise 2026 we will be departing from Miami on June 21 2026 for a seven night trip going to the Caribbean. That's right. We're going to leave Miami and then stop at Coco k in the Bahamas. After that, it's on to st, Kitts, St Thomas and a beautiful cruise through the Virgin Islands. The first juice Cruise was awesome. The second one's going to be bigger, better and bolder. This is your opportunity to relax while making lifelong friends who have type one diabetes, expand your community and your knowledge on juice cruise 2026 learn more right now at Juicebox podcast.com/juice. Cruise. At that link, you'll also find photographs from the first cruise. Nothing you hear on the Juicebox podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan or becoming bold with insulin. This episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by us Med, US med.com/juicebox, or call 888-721-1514, 887211514, get your supplies the same way we do from us. Med, the episode you're about to listen to is sponsored by tandem Moby, the impressively small insulin pump. Tandem Moby features tandems newest algorithm control, IQ, plus technology. It's designed for greater discretion, more freedom and improve time and range. Learn more and get started today at tandem diabetes.com/juicebox.

Terri 2:07
Hi, I'm Terry. I was diagnosed in 1963 with type one diabetes back in the old days, 63

Scott Benner 2:17
wait if I'm 53 now, and I was born in 71 then you were diagnosed, 61

Terri 2:23
years ago. Yeah, 60 Yeah, 62 years ago. Wow. How old are you now? Well, at the moment, I'm 76

Scott Benner 2:31
Oh, that's awesome. So you were 14 when you were diagnosed.

Terri 2:35
I was 15 years old. Geez, I was 15 years old and taking Driver's Ed. How did you figure out you had type one? Well, between the driving teacher and me, every time I would get in the car, I'd say, Could you stop at the stop and go 711 I need to get a drink. And we had, I had a partner that was driving with me. We would switch, and he would stop, and I would buy a sprite, and I would guzzle the sprite down. And then 15 minutes later, I'd say, Could you stop again? I have to go the bathroom. And he would stop again. And this, you know, went on and on for and he said, You think that there's something wrong with you. And I said, Well, I'm just thirsty. Apparently, this is what I remember about the whole thing, because it's, you know, it's hard to remember, especially when you're old and moldy like me. My mother saw me getting out of the bathtub. She turned around and she went, Oh my God, you're so skinny. What's the matter with you? And I said, Well, I don't know. I've been going to the bathroom a lot lately. You know, I've been really, really thirsty. It did not dawn on her. She had no earthly idea what was going on, and neither did I. So she said, Well, I think maybe you have a kidney infection. We went to the doctor that day or the next day, and I just remember him listening to everything, and he said, Okay, this is what I want you to do now. This was a general practitioner, you know, my doctor that I had seen since I got out of the pediatrician. I want you to get up in the morning and I want you to eat a really hearty breakfast, like pancakes and syrup and milk and eggs and everything, and then come to the doctor so that that's basically, was my glucose tolerance. Yeah, right, my blood sugar was well into the 400 it's almost 500 I guess. And he told my mother, and, you know, yada yada, she cried. And basically he prescribed a bottle of insulin, a glass syringe, a stainless steel needle, and said, Take 42 units of this medicine every day. I just remember 42 and I. Don't eat sweets, does it was that beef and pork? It was mph,

Scott Benner 5:05
mph, it was okay. It was okay. And so, wow, how about that? That's simple. That was the sum of the diabetes education. What about other people in your family? Like, did you guys know about diabetes?

Terri 5:16
My paternal grandmother had type two diabetes, but she was taking insulin, because I remember the insulin bottle stacked up in her refrigerator. She had many, and when she died, they asked me if I wanted them all. And I went, No, I don't think so. I

Scott Benner 5:32
got my own thanks, though, that's the the extent of the direction that you got. And you're 50, you're 15, you're, I mean, that's young

Terri 5:41
15. That was right in the middle, you know, teenage years, people were going out. We, the group that I was with had a place to go. It was a hamburger place, big boy hamburgers. It was right across the street from the temple, and we would go there, you know, on Friday, Saturday and Saturday nights, basically, after whatever we did, and everybody would have hamburgers and milkshakes. And I remember one kid saying, my mother told me that the milkshakes here were low calorie. And I said, really low calorie, maybe I can eat them. And so I started ordering the milkshakes,

Scott Benner 6:24
but you're not testing your blood sugar. Terry, right? Like you're just giving yourself that big shot in the morning, and that's it. There

Terri 6:30
was no testing, except for the urine testing. And because every time I tested my urine, it turned orange, I just decided not to test anymore. What did orange mean? Orange was high, you know, four plus sugars in your urine or whatever. Occasionally, it would be a different color, but that was if I tested in the morning, right?

Scott Benner 6:52
You have brothers and sisters.

Terri 6:55
I do. I have a sister who is three and a half years younger, and I have a brother who's 12 and a half years younger.

Scott Benner 7:05
And are there other like, does anybody have thyroid issues or celiac or anything like that?

Terri 7:09
Nobody does. Nobody on either side besides my paternal grandmother. Okay, that I know of, I don't know about uncles and aunts and things. Wait, I had an aunt who had rheumatoid arthritis, but I was always told that she got it because she had

Scott Benner 7:27
rheumatic fever. Okay, did you have any, like, big traumas or illnesses before you were diagnosed?

Terri 7:35
I have tried to think about that so many times. I don't remember. It could have been, you know, a cold or the flu or something like that. I did have chicken pox. I did have measles. Those were a lot younger.

Scott Benner 7:50
I just interviewed somebody the other day who had pancreatitis, like, really bad pancreatitis, and then got type one later, and I was like, I looked it up, and sure enough, that can happen. I was like, oh, it's interesting. Okay, so you said your mom cried, like you made a specific point of saying that, was she, like, an involved mom, or did she not? She

Terri 8:08
was very involved. She was okay, she was she Yeah, she was the ruler of the roost. Basically, my father was really laid back, and I never saw him get upset. My mother was the one who did all the discipline and everything. But the more I think about it, the more we didn't know what to do. Yeah, I mean, we didn't. She made healthy dinners, you know, I ate as much as I wanted to, if there was potatoes on the plate, and she served, you know, potatoes I ate, potatoes I ate. I just remember having meat, vegetables and a salad, okay, most of the evenings, and buying my lunch at school, sometimes taking my lunch to school. And as a teenager, mainly buying my lunch. There was no, not a lot of information,

Scott Benner 8:57
right? So not a lot to do. Then, really, you just inject. So you injected in the morning. She didn't help you with that. You with that. You did that

Terri 9:03
well for a long time. I could say, Mom, could you give me my shot today or but I do it too, and it was hard, you know, to learn. Oh, it's a little needle phobic, but I got over it. I mean, you got to get over it sometime. Yeah, I know your daughter is having a hard time? Yeah, it's tough, right? I would go, okay, 123, go.

Scott Benner 9:26
I choose. It's about how it ends up. Yeah. So when do you think it changes? Like, what's the first adjustment to that process of managing yourself? Like, because, I mean, you're saying, like, you do the urine test, it's not even worth doing, because your blood sugar is going to be high anyway. When's the first time that and does it come from you saying I need to do something different? Or is it a doctor making a suggestion?

Terri 9:47
Well, I will tell you as much as I can remember I went through all the way through the rest of high school and most of college with that same doctor and doing. Same thing. I remember going to college taking my insulin. Of course, I had had permission to boil my syringes. I had a little hot plate and, you know, in the dorm, and I could do that, but we didn't have refrigeration. So I would keep my insulin in the cafeteria, and I would go down, probably eat breakfast, get my insulin, put it on the tray, and then go up back upstairs and take my shot.

Scott Benner 10:30
You literally kept your insulin in the refrigerator in your college kitchen. I did. I did. Do you remember? Was there other insulin in there, or was it just yours? I don't

Terri 10:40
remember anybody in my girls dorm that had type one diabetes, and I didn't really look for them. My girlfriends knew what to do. My roommate and my girlfriends around you know, knew what to do. There was a time when we were playing softball. Our dorm was playing softball against another dorm. And I know, I remember walking in after the softball game, and it was hot. I'm in Texas. It's, you know, basically hot all year. I remember walking in and saying, I'm going to sit down here by the elevator. And I sat down, and the next thing I knew, I was in my room, and my girlfriends were stuffing Hershey bars in my mouth, and they had gone through two, and they were getting ready to open the third Hershey bar. You popped up when, when I got my senses and I went, let's don't do that. How often did that happen? Probably not that much, especially lows like that. I'm pretty aware of low blood sugars, even to this day, and which is lucky, because, you know, a lot of people can't feel their lows, but sometimes I can feel my low before the Dexcom tells me, or the Dexcom is a little higher, yeah, you know, and I'm a little lower. But that was one of those times that I really, you know, remembered

Scott Benner 12:03
passing out, yeah and not a seizure, just losing consciousness. Okay?

Terri 12:09
This went on pretty much through college. I remember drinking at fraternity parties. I remember not binging eating, but basically eating what I wanted. I knew about sweets. So, you know, I would have a few bites of desserts and let you know, allow myself that, but not knowing what my blood sugars were and not remembering what I had, you know, the carbs that I had eaten before. Yeah, and I don't think I was encouraged to take, you know, a big step and learn more about it, until the ADA came out with all the exchanges.

Scott Benner 12:51
So that's not even carb counting, really. It's like a certain amount of your plate. Is one thing, a certain amount your plates. The other thing is that how it was right?

Terri 12:58
In fact, I was going through some old papers today last night, and I came across some ADA exchange lists, which were really funny, but that's the way I still

Scott Benner 13:09
think, okay, so you start doing that. What in your early 20s,

Terri 13:13
pretty much. I got married right out of college. Okay? I moved from the Dallas area where I grew up. Went to school in Austin, and then I moved to Houston. The man that I married was from Houston, and I went to his GP, who told me, You are brittle. You are very brittle. You have brittle diabetes, brittle, brittle. That's how I spoke. He was from the old country, yes,

Scott Benner 13:39
through high school through college. Do you remember how you measured success? It was it just injecting every day, and you did a good job. And that's the end of our consideration as to whether or not this was done. Well, let's talk about the tandem mobi insulin pump from today's sponsor tandem diabetes care, their newest algorithm control, iq plus technology and the new tandem Moby pump offer you unique opportunities to have better control. It's the only system with auto Bolus that helps with missed meals and preventing hyperglycemia, the only system with a dedicated sleep setting, and the only system with off or on body wear options. Tandem Moby gives you more discretion, freedom and options for how to manage your diabetes. This is their best algorithm ever, and they'd like you to check it out at tandem diabetes.com/juicebox when you get to my link, you're going to see integrations with Dexcom sensors and a ton of other information that's going to help you learn about tandems, tiny pump that's big on control tandem diabetes.com/juicebox, the tandem mobi system is available for people ages two and up who want an automated delivery system to help them sleep better, wake up in range and address high blood sugars with auto Bolus. I used to hate ordering my daughter's diabetes supplies. I never had a good experience, and it was frustrating. But it hasn't been that way for a while, actually, for about three years now, because that's how long we've been using us Med, us, med.com/juicebox, or call 888-721-1514, us. Med is the number one distributor for FreeStyle Libre systems nationwide. They are the number one specialty distributor for Omnipod, the number one fastest growing tandem distributor nationwide, the number one rated distributor in Dexcom customer satisfaction surveys, they have served over 1 million people with diabetes since 1996 and they always provide 90 days worth of supplies and fast and free shipping. US med carries everything from insulin pumps and diabetes testing supplies to the latest CGM like the libre three and Dexcom g7 they accept Medicare nationwide, and over 800 private insurers find out why us med has an A plus rating with a better business bureau at usmed.com/juicebox, or just call them at 888-721-1514, get started right now, and you'll be getting your supplies the same way we do.

Terri 16:26
Well, you know, when I went for blood tests, I started eating right a week before, you know, eating diet type menus,

Scott Benner 16:38
you thought it would make your blood work better,

Terri 16:41
right? Yeah. Okay, so I don't remember when I went on two injections, not quite sure when I went on two injections, but I think it may have been at that time, okay, I went on two injections, and then early on in Houston, I went to a meeting of people with type one diabetes at the time. It was before the 80s. It was called AIDS, adult Association, insulin dependent, something like that. Okay? And I met a doctor there who had a revolutionary idea. His idea was to take a long acting insulin and then take a short acting insulin before each meal. And I said, that sounds pretty reasonable. I could do that. And I was with him. He's great. He's still practicing. And that was basically in the mid 70s, okay, he also happened to own a diabetes supply company. He was his office was upstairs, and his store was downstairs.

Scott Benner 17:52
That revolutionary idea comes out. Was he ahead of the curve, like, was he taking a risk saying this out loud, being, you know, kind of a was he out on the edge of the sword? I guess I'm asking, like, you

Terri 18:04
think it was, I'm pretty sure it was. He said, This is something that we are trying now, okay? And he gave a speech about and I went up to him later, and I said, you know, I would like to do this. I'm taking two or three shots a day. I think I was on some regular insulin, or two shots a day. I said, you know, I'd like to try this. I'd like to come to you. I've never been to a specialist before, and I think I probably need some, you know, tuning. It was probably about 7273

okay, because in 1970 or maybe it was later than that, because in 1973

I got pregnant, and I went to a regular gynecologist, obstetrician, and about month seven, I started gaining lots and lots of weight every couple weeks, and he did an x ray and found that the baby was not viable. Oh, my and so that was at seven

Scott Benner 19:16
months. You lost that baby at that point.

Terri 19:20
Okay, I did. Now, fast forward 10 years. I did not know the reason for this, for this failed pre pregnancy, until I got pregnant 10 years later with my son and I went to a specialist, you know diabetes? What is it? Perinatologist, she said, Do you know the reason that you had this bad pregnancy? I said, No. She said it was because of high blood sugars. And I went, Oh, nobody ever told me that

Scott Benner 19:55
you had no idea when you got pregnant, the first time that your outcomes were. With your diabetes had any impact at all in the pregnancy.

Terri 20:03
Okay, I knew that I, you know, needed to eat better. You eat a little bit more for two or one and a half or whatever, like that, always hungry. But when a one CS came out, my first a 1c was 13, and I said, is that bad?

Scott Benner 20:21
Do you remember what they told you? They told

Terri 20:24
me it was 13. I said, Okay, is that bad? I

Scott Benner 20:29
said, Yes, it's very bad. What do you think you just weren't taking enough insulin? I mean, the long and the short of it is, you're doing that two or three shots a day, and then you move to so when you have the 13, a, 1c, you're now doing a slow and a long and a fast acting insulin at that point, right? Okay, and so the guy had the revolutionary idea to do a background insulin and a meal insulin, but he didn't talk about how to measure

Terri 20:54
it. I think we, you know, I think we worked on it. I was the type of person that I'm not fooling anybody but myself, but I would eat a little bit more, or have a little bit of dessert, or take a little bit of ice cream, or, you know, or all of these things didn't hurt until blood glucose monitoring came out, and you could see it every time you did it.

Scott Benner 21:20
Yeah, that changed things for you. It really did. Yeah, having a meter and so, so are you trying to tell me you knew you weren't optimally eating and using your insulin, but you just kind of told yourself you were, and you

Terri 21:33
kept going, right? And then when you, you know, when I had a blood test, my blood value would come out 130 and the doctor would say, well, you're doing well, you know, it's 130 it's good.

Scott Benner 21:45
Was that like your fasting number? That was my

Terri 21:47
fasting number. Yeah, right.

Scott Benner 21:49
So I got you all right. So you get a meter for the first time, and do you start using it? Or does the doctor kind of make

Terri 21:55
you I had one of those plug in dial, dial up type meters. I was excited to get a meter, and I could afford to get one of those ones that plugged into the wall, and you had to run water over it, and it took two minutes and so and then you had to dial it. You had to dial these two dials so that they would match. It took like forever to get a blood sugar. And, you know, once I saw the higher blood sugars, the thing to do was just to get on board. I, you know, then I started asking a lot of questions, how can I be better? What can I do to take you know, what can I do to eat better?

Scott Benner 22:39
Does your increased interest coincide with not just getting a meter, but also a second pregnancy? Or do those things kind of happen at the same time? I'm trying to figure out what motivated you to like ask more questions.

Terri 22:51
When I started going to this doctor, I started paying attention to the things in his office, the store that he had downstairs. This all culminated in my jobs for them, you know, for then and after, I started paying more attention to it, reading a lot of things, and kind of educating myself, since nobody else was going to do it for me, since I had, you know, left my family and my mother really didn't know enough to say, let's find out more about this. You know, let's try to help you, and let's see how you know, we can make you live for a long time, I really started doing a lot of these things myself, okay? And I was interested in his business enough to say, I want to work for you. You know, after my second child was born, I want to work for you. And I got involved in marketing and going to doctors offices and just, you know, trying to get people to come into the store. That was about the time. Fast forward to about 1989 when we moved to San Antonio, I opened a store for him here, a diabetes store, right? So I kind of got in the middle of things. I was running a store. I had diabetes books, I had all kinds of papers. I would go to the doctor's offices, I would see what the endocrinologists were doing. I mean, he was an endocrinologist. I got hooked up with a really good endocrinologist here in San Antonio, but I was working in the diabetes field. It made me learn things.

Scott Benner 24:36
Yeah, it just gave you more access to ideas, right?

Terri 24:39
Yeah. I would go to speakers. I would listen. I would go to the diabetes educators in all the hospitals. I would market them, as it turned out, that company, he finally sold the stores to another company who I don't know. I had six or eight name tags on my chest before i. He finally sold to a company who is still in business, a company that is very, very similar to the company that you advertise on on the radio,

Scott Benner 25:10
okay? Some like us, med, they sell devices and things like that. One of their competitors, right, right? And he eventually they bought up his business. Yes, they did. Did you continue to work for them, or was that the end

Terri 25:22
of it? For you, I did. I worked almost 20 years in the diabetes field,

Scott Benner 25:26
no kidding. And so like to go back a little bit. You have a lot of hindsight here, obviously. So in the time of your life, of diagnosis, into your 20s, even through your first pregnancy, there was no other information, right? It's not like it was out there and you didn't know it. It just until the ADA started talking about it. I've heard other people your age talk about this. You were just doing the thing they told you to do, and there was no it wasn't like there was more to learn, and you didn't know it, right? It just didn't exist,

Terri 25:54
pretty much, yeah,

Scott Benner 25:57
okay, then the ADA comes together, starts putting together guidelines for people, you know, there's magazines, and if you ever saw one of those old magazines or not, but like, Oh, see, my,

Terri 26:05
you know, the doctor that owned the business, he put ads in the ADA magazine. He wrote AD. He was, he was the first mail order diabetes supply company. No

Scott Benner 26:17
kidding, yeah, by point for people listening, who are more newly diagnosed, or just, you know, even just half your age, even that's it like there was nothing. Hey, you're lucky we have insulin now. Good luck. And that's the end of it until, until you can start testing your blood sugar in your home. Because people talk about it now like, Oh, I didn't have a CGM. But then i I finally could see how my blood sugars were moving, and it changed how I thought about it, like you test your blood sugar one day and you thought, oh, maybe I should be doing something about this. Let me learn more about this.

Terri 26:48
My daughter, who just turned 50, got here with no glucose monitoring.

Scott Benner 26:53
That's scary through that pregnancy, yeah,

Terri 26:58
you know, I finally got pregnant about six or seven months later, and that pregnancy was fine. By that time, another year and a half later, they figured out that they would take the baby, they would do some testing on their lung capacity, and take the child three weeks early through C section. So she was born three weeks early. She was seven pounds, one ounce at whatever that is, 36 weeks or something. She looks like a moose in the preemie nursery, because they had to keep her in there for a while.

Scott Benner 27:35
They took her early so that she wouldn't gain more weight in those last few weeks. What

Terri 27:39
they said was that babies of diabetic mothers in the last three weeks of pregnancies tend to have mysterious deaths. Okay, so they would take

Scott Benner 27:51
them. Gotcha? Does she have type two diabetes today as an adult?

Terri 27:55
She does not. Okay. She's very thin and very active. She's got psoriasis.

Scott Benner 28:01
She does have a little bit of an autoimmune thing. You said you had a son too, right?

Terri 28:08
My son is perfectly healthy. So far,

Scott Benner 28:11
so far, you said, Hello, so far. He

Terri 28:15
will be 40 on my birthday. He was born on my birthday.

Scott Benner 28:18
Wow. There's a world where you could have a 4050, and 60 year old child, or not 60, but like your kids would have been, if that first pregnancy goes to term, your kids would have been spread out, like, pretty significantly, huh,

Terri 28:31
right? Yeah. I mean, you know, I had a brother who was 12 and a half years younger, and then I did it myself, yeah, but that was due to really bad medical advice, really, because I had a doctor. Finally, when I did get to a specialist with my daughter, who said, Well, you know, you had it. You had one good child. I don't recommend you have any more. And I said, okay, but I will tell you a funny story. When I was working for the doctor. I went to a family practice convention. We had a booth there, and I was handing out all kinds of things to these family practice doctors, and in another booth, do you remember? Did you watch Seinfeld? Of course, yeah, okay. Do you remember the episode with the today's sponge.

Scott Benner 29:23
I mean vaguely, but I don't know if I have enough details, but go ahead, tell

Terri 29:27
me. Elaine, you know, got a whole closet full, you know, she, she bought out the, I don't know, the wholesaler of these today's sponges, and she would have dates with these men and decide if they were sponge worthy or not. It was really a funny show.

Scott Benner 29:47
She didn't want to use up a sponge on a bad guy. Yeah, I got you Okay,

Terri 29:51
right? As it turned out, I changed my contraceptive just because those things came out and sounded like. Those were a lot easier than what I was doing. And so I got pregnant, oops, at this family practice convention, I came by and they said, Oh, you know, how are you? And I'm talking to them. And I they said, Have you ever used our product? And I said, I have. Can you wait a minute? And I went back to the booth, and I got my purse and with my picture of my baby son, and I said, Yes, I've used your product, and here's the

Scott Benner 30:27
result. Yeah, here's how it worked out for me. I tried your contraceptive, and I have this kid.

Terri 30:33
And they looked at me and they said, You may leave this booth right now.

Scott Benner 30:37
Feel free to walk away. Yeah, I love that. So what did you name your son? Is he spongy or what do you call him? You guys ever call him SpongeBob? That'd be awesome.

Terri 30:47
My husband used to call him froggy because he would laugh like, like, froggy the Gremlin. You old enough to remember that the Gremlins movie no was before that? Oh, sorry, was on some, some old black and white TV show, and he would laugh

Scott Benner 31:07
like that. All I can tell you is, I referenced Rocky and Bullwinkle the other day, and I realized that I was watching a television show as a kid. A cartoon is a child that was made like 15 years before I was born. I thought it was brand new. It was already, you know, already you know, it's already 20 years old. When

Terri 31:22
I was watching it, I love that play. I love that show. It was good.

Scott Benner 31:26
Okay, so let's jump forward a little bit. Okay, because here you are. You're 76 years old. You somehow know who I am. That's ridiculous, and you've been through all this stuff. Like, is there a time when you think back and think, this is when my diabetes understanding knowledge and technology became more modern. Like, when do you think of as your you know as your modernization of your diabetes? I think there's two

Terri 31:50
times Well, a couple times once, when I got an insulin pump in 1997 endocrinologist I was doing well at the time, and he said, You're doing so well, you don't need a pump. Now, he was a big name here in the San Antonio area, very big name, I guess he pumps were just becoming the fashion with the type ones, and he didn't think that I needed the but I but I got one anyway. Okay, so I started with a Medtronic 506 or something like that, and I moved up from there with with Medtronic. I decided, after getting all of these electronic devices, that I had to have the newest and the best. Unfortunately, the insurance made you wait four years, of course, you know, to upgrade. I did not go on the pod because I thought it was too bulky at the time. I went on the tandem for a while. I loved the tandem, but I did not like the clip, and I couldn't put it anywhere.

Scott Benner 32:54
Can you imagine it right now? If you're listening in your tandem, you're like, oh, it's the clip we that's how we lost her.

Terri 33:02
The Omnipod, because, of course,

Scott Benner 33:05
probably like, damn it, you just couldn't find a place to comfortably wear the pump at that time. That's

Terri 33:10
great. Too much rolls around my I'm not fat, but I have a roll around my middle. And every time I'd stick it on my waistband and bend over around, it would either stick me or pop off, and it didn't have the right clip to clip it on my bra or in my bra, so I just couldn't find a place to put it. And I would get really frustrated. And then the Omnipod dash came out, and I thought I would try it, and I really liked it. I really liked it. In the last couple years, I would say in the last two and a half years, I decided to really get into the intricacies of learning diabetes. Okay, well, the first thing I did was pay exorbitant amount of money to a guy on the online I'm sure you know who it is, but and I took his class, and I paid half attention to it, I didn't dig deep enough when I finally decided that his method of Teaching was not the way that I wanted to learn. And I had been reading your the Facebook page, like a lot of women or a lot of adults, thinking, Oh, it's just for kids. It's it's parents with kids as asking a lot of questions. And then I would see some questions from adults and go, Well, you know, I'm learning from this. And then I started listening to your podcasts, and that's when I got really, really into it, you know, I'm finally, after 60 some odd years, finally understanding how insulin works.

Scott Benner 34:57
I'm glad that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, that's really great.

Terri 35:01
And I still get frustrated with things, because I think that all pumps need to be on extended Bolus, especially if you eat any protein,

Scott Benner 35:12
even the aid systems, you wish they still had an extended Bolus. The Omnipod

Terri 35:16
five has an extended Bolus, and a lot of times I'm in extended Bolus for at least breakfast and dinner, and then I switch back to auto, and I'll switch back to auto at night, which will be, you know, fine and perfect. Then if you want to eat something in the middle of this extended Bolus, you can't give yourself any more

Scott Benner 35:38
because it's because you just will it cancel the extended Bolus. If you make a new Bolus,

Terri 35:45
you could, okay, you know, I could figure out how much is left and then extend that, you know, take what I want to eat and then wait, and then, you know, and then eat it.

Scott Benner 35:59
Are you using it like automation for overnight and and you're running manual during the day. Do you do that every day? I

Terri 36:06
run manual part of the day. Okay, I try to get back on on auto mode. But then if I eat a lot of protein, I drink a smoothie in the morning. I drink the same smoothie that I've had for probably a year or more. It's got this, you know, the protein powder. It's got peanut butter, almond butter. It's a high calorie, high protein. It's got strawberries and bananas in it, cinnamon, all that stuff. Yeah, it's got about 54 grams of of carbs. Well,

Scott Benner 36:41
I mean, and that's important, right as your age specifically, right, to get that protein in and and to get enough fuel for you during the day. Is it harder to eat when you're older? Do I hear a lot of people say that, like, I'm not hungry anymore? Is that part of your issue?

Terri 36:55
Well, I don't know if that's because of age or the fact that a couple of years ago, I had a bacterial gut infection that just really messed me up. I mean, I lost a bunch of weight and I wasn't hungry for a long time. I bought lost a bunch of muscle, yeah, and I'm trying to get it back by going to Pilates and walking. And I think my face is a little fuller. I mean, put on a couple more pounds and I look, I don't look so gaunt anymore. I eat that because I know I can, I know exactly how many proteins and fats that I have, and I drink that, and I'm not hungry until about two o'clock in the afternoon.

Scott Benner 37:39
Okay, so it's good, it's filling, and it's giving you the micro and macronutrients that you need,

Terri 37:44
right? I probably should add some of that green stuff that you advertise. I

Scott Benner 37:48
mean, listen, if you want to, it's, I think it's drink ag one slash Juicebox.

Terri 37:53
Does it taste funny? Does it taste like green? How does ag

Scott Benner 37:56
one taste I've heard some people describe it as like lemon, but I don't have that feeling about it. What I can tell you is that I tried a number of green drinks. This is the only one that I can actually drink that doesn't make me want to, like, dump it down the sink. It's not like a root beer float or anything like that, but it's it's pleasant, it's not objectionable, it's not gritty. You know, I like it. I think it's the one. It's funny. Because I think people think, well, they just, they buy an ad. So you say you drink it, but it's the one I landed on that I actually liked. So just kind of got lucky that they were interested in doing it. I don't know. You can give it a try, see what you think. If you don't like it, you know, stop doing it. Since I've been on a GLP medication. I use a protein powder too, you know, because sometimes it's just, I mean, I don't know if it's my it's my age or not, but there are days where I feel like, Oh, my God, I do have to eat again. Like, I mean, how long am I going to be alive? You know what? I mean, I don't want any of this anymore. I've eaten this stuff so many times. Like, I find myself wishing all the time it was the Jetsons and I could just take that pill and I'd be done. But, you know, sometimes you get hungry for something, but I don't know, generally speaking, I'm not like a real food person. I don't run around like thinking, oh God, you know, it would be awesome today if I had this or this.

Terri 39:07
Well, as an older person, you do see a lot of older people. I mean, I go out with a group of altar Cockers. Do you know what that is?

Scott Benner 39:16
I know a little Yiddish. I'm good. Go ahead.

Terri 39:19
Okay, that's old people who complain a lot, and most of them will share, you know, share meals, not because of cost, but because they just don't want that much food at night. Yeah,

Scott Benner 39:31
by the way, you're making me think that, if I can, I can keep podcasting another 20 years. I could just make a podcast where I just bitching about stuff constantly. I think that would be awesome, don't you just got on here and just made a list of grievances. One of them would be the kid in the green hat this morning who was texting with both hands while trying to make a right turn in front of me. I'd like to complain about him for about 20 minutes, if I could. Yeah, I'm gonna keep that in mind. I might, I might ditch this diabetes thing one day and just turn into an old guy bitching. That'd be a ghost. I might, I might actually get old guy bitching. Dot com right now, just so I can get, I can get ahead of this. You know, I love to complain. I can't wait to get older. It's going to be awesome. But you guys hate it when each other complains, though, right?

Terri 40:09
We, I know we do, and we and we all talk about, you know, the illness, or how good or bad the illness is at the moment, especially the husbands. A lot of the husbands are failing my my husband passed away 13 years ago, almost 13 years ago.

Scott Benner 40:27
Oh my gosh. And how old were you at that time? In your mid 60s,

Terri 40:30
I was 64 he was 65 he didn't feel good for the longest time. And I kept saying, call the doctor. Call the doctor. I finally, one day, handed him the telephone. I said, this is a telephone. I know you know a phone because you're an attorney and you're on the phone all the time, so, but this is a phone that calls the doctor. I'm leaving, call the doctor now, make an appointment. And the doctor didn't like what he heard when he met with him and said, I'm sending you for a CT scan, full body scan, right now. And he sent him over and came back with he had tumors in his Liver. Liver cancer doesn't come from the liver. It metastasizes to the liver. So they were kind of unsure, even until the day he died, where the cancer really started. But he lived for about 18 months, worked every day, up until two weeks before, called the family, you know, a couple weeks before, before he died, he didn't know he was gonna die, but and he said, Okay, here's the papers for this, and you take this, and I want you to do this. And you know, it's like everything was planned. I couldn't have asked for anything better, right? He was a cool guy. Bernie, the attorney,

Scott Benner 41:55
I'm sorry. Do you think going sooner to the doctor would have changed his outcome or not

Terri 42:00
necessary. It depends on how much sooner, you know, how much sooner, how badly? Because it was stage four at the time, he just kept saying, you know, I just close the door in the afternoon and take a nap in my office. I said, That's

Scott Benner 42:16
not you. Was he on chemo for those 18 months?

Terri 42:19
Yeah, he was, yeah, Geez, that sucks. I'm sorry. It was, did you try to date afterwards?

Scott Benner 42:28
Go ahead, Tara, tell me, how'd it go?

Terri 42:32
Yeah, I did. I had several boyfriends, one for about almost six years. We're still friends. And then a couple here and there I was on dating apps, and I have one who, right now is here. Is he in the

Scott Benner 42:50
house? Now? No, he's not here. But Terry, can I ask a very Listen, I know you're 76 and people are going to think this is indelicate, but I really have a serious question. You were with your husband your whole life, right? So you you age together. So you just, I don't know if people realize this or not, but like, I mean, if you stop every once in a while, you're like, God, I'm older. Like, you can see it, but you don't really feel it day to day, because you're aging together. But once Bernie is gone and the next guy shows up, the first time, all the clothes come off, you think I'm about to have sex with an old man. Does it feel that way? Please tell me, I really want to know, yes, but you don't feel like you should be right? You feel like you'd be like, Oh, I shouldn't be doing this. I'm downgraded. No, no.

Terri 43:32
I you know, nobody feels their age. I mean, some people do, you know, during, you know, it's like, Oh, I feel like I'm 99 today. It can't move in our brains. You know, we still have life and love and vitality, and we think that we're 40,

Scott Benner 43:53
yeah, fairness, Terry, I know what you look like. You don't look like you're 76 right? You know, lately there's been this trend on Tiktok. It's called, this is 50. And there are people are like, you know, they hold their camera. I'm like, Look, here it is. I'm not wearing any makeup. I'm 50 years old. This is what 50 looks like. And I'm looking at some of these people. I'm like, Y'all look like you're 70. I don't look like that. I held my phone up to myself. I was like, I couldn't even do this challenge. These people would get mad at me. They come after me. I've got nice dark hair still, you understand? And I wonder, like, I'm like, that's it's 50 for you. And like, right on, like, I'm glad you're proud and all that stuff. But like, I see people nowadays like you, you look like my dad would have been thrilled to look like you when he was 60. You're 16 years older than that, and you, you spent a half an hour telling me your your a 1c, was probably 13 most of the time, while you were growing up,

Terri 44:42
I was really lucky. I don't know what it was. I just went to the retinologist Yesterday. I have no you know, I had no retinopathy. He said, not only are you the best patient that I have seen today, he said, I haven't seen a patient like. You, I had another doctor say you're my most boring patient.

Scott Benner 45:03
That's awesome, but I said

Terri 45:05
I want to be boring. Yeah,

Scott Benner 45:07
no kidding, don't I don't want to be anybody stored at dinner. I don't

Terri 45:10
know what I did. Maybe I'm better than I thought I was. Maybe I did better at the times that there was no glucose monitoring, right? And the times that I did check that were, you know, that were so, quote, bad, out of control, maybe I should say out of control, were the times that got me depressed or sad and gone. Oh well, you know, there it is again. It's high, but maybe the rest of the time I was okay, or maybe I have good genes. I don't have any neuropathy or retinopathy

Scott Benner 45:45
or lucky, right? Like

Terri 45:46
I yeah, I think it's, you know, it's luck, because I had two friends in high school, Guy and his sister, and both of them are deceased for a long, a long time ago, one was kidney disease, and one, well, she kind of drank her way through college and went blind, but, and those are the things that nobody, you know, want wants to hear. And the parents who listen to this, you know, they don't want their kids to to know these things they want them to know. Like I went to a diabetes camp as a, you know, as a marketer from the from the store that I worked for, right? And we did the diabetes camps here in San Antonio. And one of the girls, you know, saw my pump, and she's, oh, you're on a pump. And I said, yeah, she's, can I ask you a question, do you have any children? And I said, Yeah, I have two children. Shit, you have two children. I can have children. So, you know, I want these parents to say, with all of these gizmos and gadgets now you can do anything,

Scott Benner 46:54
yeah, really, I have to say, Terry, i The longer I do this, the more I think that what people hope is that if you just do all the right things, you have, you know, outcomes that you want. But I'm more inclined to think that people are kind of who they are, of course, you know, if you run into troubles, that's you know, not you know, like diabetes is an example. That's not something you control, but it's probably got more to do with your personality, how you're wired your environment, about how you're going to end up handling those things and being impacted by them. I think that's the stuff that you you have more control over, that you don't realize, and that we always focus on. The other thing, like, well, just Bolus right, or do this right, or, you know, and everything's going to be fine. Like, I think some of your kids are no nicks, and they were gonna turn out poorly whether they got diabetes or not. Now they're having a problem, and they have diabetes, and people blame the diabetes, right? Not to say that diabetes is exciting to have and doesn't have a huge impact on your life, but I wonder sometimes if there wouldn't have been another thing that would've befell them if it wasn't this, because, like, I don't know another way to, like, explain people who just, you know, have type one and RA and hypothyroidism and are just skating through life like, like, there's some magic potion about who they are and how they were brought up and how they think and how they react to things, etc, and so on. That just leads them to a good place, no matter what happens to them before, you know what I mean, there's some people get sad and they're sad for 20 years, then I don't think that's the thing you can control. I don't think you can control any of that. Meaning, like, I don't think you should take the blame for being a depressed person any more than you should take a credit for a person who just skates through things. Like, it's just random almost

Terri 48:39
before all of the technology and even into and now, I never let diabetes be the focal point of me. You know, I was somebody else I was, and hopefully that's what the parents are teaching these kids, diabetes is not your focal point. You just happen to have that, just like somebody else happens to have a bump on their elbow or brown hair or anything like that. Yeah, you know, you are an artist, you are a musician, you are a creative person, you are a mathematician. You are, whatever you are, and you just happen to have diabetes, and you happen to be taking care of something that somebody else doesn't have to take care of. So that makes you even more special. Yeah, listen,

Scott Benner 49:34
if you're a welder or, you know, yeah, you get up during in the morning and you have a good day, or a landscaping job all day long, or, you know, you're standing at a cash register. I mean, whatever it is, like, I want to tell people like, I think you are who you are, and this is an addition to that, and it's not fair and it's not great. But if you think that it's as easy as other people are doing, well, because they don't have diabetes, and you're doing. Poorly, because you do. I mean, I'm not saying that doesn't have a big impact on a life. It certainly does, but there are some people who are getting through it, and I'm also not a person who says, like, so just do what they do, because I don't know that that's possible. I don't know that everybody can just do the things that work for one person then say they're going to just lay over top of another person to work. I'm trying to say that. I think it's more of like, sometimes things just go the way they go for people. Like, I know people who are, they barely pay attention in college. They're incredibly smart and incredibly successful, right? And I know people have a kid. You look at the kid when they're eight years old, you that's, that's a little Ted right there. Like, I can see that. And 10 years later, sure enough, Ted's in a bunch of trouble. And five years after that, Ted's in more trouble. And like I saw this coming 20 years ago now, was that a collection of nature, nurture, wiring, you know, things out of their control, probably. But what I'm trying to say is that I don't think diabetes puts you in a bad situation, like, I think it just ends up enhancing the situation you're in. It might be valuable to look at the big picture and not just blame the diabetes because something's going wrong. I mean, that's my only thought. I don't people be mad at me for saying that, but like, yeah, it's, I mean,

Terri 51:18
look, I didn't, I never had special compensation. I didn't have a 504 plan. I didn't have, you know, I there was nobody. I taught school for 10 years. There was nobody besides the person that was teaching next to me, who I could call on or followed me. I have nobody following me ever. I've never had anybody following me, and that's, you know, it's kind of scary. I've always thought I'm going to handle this myself and I'll deal with it. You know, if the time comes,

Scott Benner 51:52
I'll deal with it. I couldn't be happier for you, Terry, or how things are working out. I'm also saying, though, that you could take another random person, drop them into your life, and they'd have a poorer outcome than you did. Like I do, I do think a lot of it's just the randomness of your wiring and how your brain works and how your emotions work. Does that make sense? I don't know if I'm babbling or not. No,

Terri 52:16
it does, and it's about background and how you managed problems as a child. You know how, how your parents taught you how to manage things as a child? You know it will pass, or it's a big Magilla. It's a big thing.

Scott Benner 52:33
Yeah, a lot of life is the randomness of who you get as a mom and a dad. It really is. A lot of your direction comes from things you don't even you don't even realize, you know. So anyway, are you and I are going to meet? Is that correct?

Terri 52:47
We are in a couple days. That's awesome that

Scott Benner 52:52
you're coming on the cruise. It's going to be so cool.

Terri 52:55
I was so excited. I thought there was going to be, like, hundreds of people that we're gonna sign up, but I'm happy that, you know, it's gonna be a nice group of people. Yeah, we're gonna have an adult dinner.

Scott Benner 53:10
We are, I know I've been told that I have to eat, like, every half an hour, or something like that. Apparently, I'm having dinner with a lot of different people.

Terri 53:18
I was wondering, because, like, our dinner is at 845 and I have a roommate, and she says, I don't eat past seven o'clock. And I said, Well, why don't you eat a little early, and then you can drink the dinner and, you know, have a salad or something like that. And she said, but the food in the dining room is really good. I sent her a, you know, shrug emoji is like, what can I do about it early? Are you?

Scott Benner 53:46
Yeah, well, so we're doing it, and it's about 100 people that are getting together. It's going to be awesome, and we're going to make a decision pretty quickly after that. Like, if people have a good time and it goes off the way we expect it to, then we're probably going to announce another one for the following year, and hope, hope to make it a little bigger the next time. I mean, I think it's for an inaugural try. I'm thrilled with how many people are coming, and I get to drive, yeah, and you live in Texas, so you can just go to the port and jump on the boat. And then we think next time it's going to go out of Miami. I think that, oh, yeah, okay. So the next year, I think in June, end of June, we're going to go out of Miami and do one

Terri 54:23
by that time, I'll be in California. I'm moving to California. Are you my son and two babies and sister and her family? And the only person that's not there is my daughter, who lives in Dallas. I want to see my little grandsons grow up and flying out there is expensive. They call me honey,

Scott Benner 54:46
but that's your grandma. Name honey. That's my grand. My grand. My

Terri 54:49
grandmother was, was honey too, and I loved her so much, so I wanted to keep the name alive. That's lovely. It's funny, when they're in the store, they'll say, Hey, honey, I. Like, what people turn around and say, calling people honey, but that's my grandma name. Oh yeah. And I'm trying to take a very big house and get rid of all the crap. I

Scott Benner 55:14
tell my wife all the time, like, let's get rid of this stuff now. Like, let's get rid of it. Now I still point to something I go that, you know what that box is? That's a box that one day, one of our kids is going to carry out of the basement when we're dead and they're going to curse us all the way up the stairs. I was like, just throw it away. Now, I think I'm getting through to her, so I'm super excited about that. Yeah,

Terri 55:32
do it? Do it. You know, how many of these things do you need? I'm trying to consolidate my closet, because the closet that I'm going to have is like five by five, which is nothing.

Scott Benner 55:45
Do you think you should have moved sooner out of your bigger home? Or are you comfortable with the amount of time you spent

Terri 55:51
there? I like the time that I spent here. I'm just tired of the big expense, yeah, you know the big water bill and the big electric bill, and I have a swimming pool that is really pretty, and very few people get in it. If I, you know, if I get in two or three times a summer, that's a lot, but I have to keep it up,

Scott Benner 56:12
yeah, and pay right? It is one of those things, like, when your kids are younger and they're bringing over friends, it's the greatest thing, right? But then, right, yeah,

Terri 56:19
right. But then it's a lot of upkeep and repairs, and I just had a really big plumbing bill, like, really big, and it wasn't big enough to meet the deductible, but it was big enough to take a chunk out of my pocketbook. Yeah,

Scott Benner 56:34
sucks. So you're gonna go get a smaller place in California. Where is it? Southern, Northern, middle of the state, where you going? Well, my

Terri 56:41
son's in the LA area, okay, all right, so I will be there, and they're building this senior living place, and I think I'm going to move in and have a little place and be next door to somebody else who plays poker and mahjong and, you know, walks and, yeah, have a time, has a dog, has a dog, and all that kind of stuff. And my friends here are sad to see me go, but I think it'll be fun. I think it'll be fun. It'll be something

Scott Benner 57:10
new. You're taking your boy toy with you. You're gonna pick up a new one in LA he's not willing to go. Did you ask?

Terri 57:20
He's a Texan. He just doesn't want to go, and he's good company. I like him. I like him. We we travel and we have a good time, right?

Scott Benner 57:28
What is the um, this is my last question for you. You're married a long time to a guy. It sounds like you really liked 42 years. Yeah. So is it understood? Like no one's trying to like, replace that experience, obviously, and you're not young enough to have it again, like you're not gonna, even if you fell into a great love, right now, it's not gonna go 42 more years, right? So does it make everything feel a little more transactional? Like, hey, he's good company, or he likes the kind of movies I like, or I like the way he does that thing. Like, is that, is it that easy?

Terri 58:00
Pretty much. Yeah, it really, it's, it's, pretty much. I mean, you know, they've got to be fun, funny, funny. It's, is a big thing with me. They have to have a sense of humor and laugh and be fun and like, the same thing, movies, theater, you know, outdoor type activities, even the same TV shows or something like that, because we do sit and watch a lot of television. Yeah,

Scott Benner 58:28
is that freeing that you're not looking for a person to build a life with? It's just fun.

Terri 58:33
Yeah, I bet you know it is. And when I move, you know, I'm not even looking for that. I'm looking for companionship, whether it's male or female. You know, if three girls want to go on a trip, that would be fun. If I meet a guy and he says, you know, let's go to Las Vegas, that would be fun.

Scott Benner 58:56
Yeah, I hear it. That's awesome. I mean, that's really great. And it does. It just feels like a weight lifted, like he's you're not trying to build like a like. It's just different when you're younger, right? You're looking for somebody that you can build a life with, who you think will be good parents, stuff like that. Here, if this guy gets on your nerves, you'd be like, that's enough. We're good. And, yeah, it's not too bad, right? To just say,

Terri 59:17
because they have their own family, usually they'll have their own families. Might seem to have met a couple that don't speak to their families. Unfortunately, most of the men will have a family, and even the family of their deceased, if it's if, just if they are deceased, right? Wife, if they're divorced, they may not be friends with the family, but, but you know, they may have two different sides of the family if you know, if their wife died, if their spouse died, yeah, I see what you mean.

Scott Benner 59:51
Okay, I really appreciate you doing this. First of all, thank you so much. It's a lot of insight. Actually, you, there's no way anybody would think you were 76 listen. Into this just No, just no way. Yeah, it's awesome. Like, I'm happy for you that things are going so well. And you know, if this podcast added anything to your life, that's awesome. Like, I'm just super glad

Terri 1:00:12
I love to talk. I love to talk to people. My daughter tells me, I'll talk to a telephone pole if it say anything back to

Scott Benner 1:00:19
me, not back at you a little bit. I listen. I love talking to I'm not going to argue about that. I think it's, you're very you're very natural at this

Terri 1:00:25
really good. And I can't wait to meet you like in person,

Scott Benner 1:00:29
genuinely. I'm excited. Yeah. So, yeah, no. I mean, it's, it's literally, uh, let's see, one week I fly to Galveston in 11 days so, and then we're just gonna go out in the sun and have a nice time. And I already told the person who's coordinating all this like, I want to spend my entire time just meeting people and talking to people. I said, I'm going to accomplish that for sure. You're not going to do any tours. I think I have one excursion set up with I think most of the group experts from the Facebook page. We're going to go to a beach for one of the excursions. But I really do. I mean, I think you guys listen, it's a vacation for people, and that's awesome, but it was also not cheap, and I really want to spend time saying hello to everybody, and not just in passing, like, I'd really like to sit with people and get to know them and and, you know, I'd like to build my

Terri 1:01:20
question is Nico gonna be there? She's not, no, she's not.

Scott Benner 1:01:25
Who will be there?

Terri 1:01:27
Suzanne would not tell me who the speakers

Scott Benner 1:01:29
were, yeah. Oh, it's gonna be me. And then virtually, Jenny's gonna do a talk, and virtually and virtually Eric is gonna do a talk. Okay, that good. Yeah. It took us a little while to figure it out we were actually, we were genuinely trying to get both of them on the ship. One of them had a personal reason. They couldn't come, but wanted to come. And the other thing was, is that it was just expensive to get them there. And the truth is, is that this is a break even. So I don't know the exact accounting, but I don't think I'm going to make like, $1 on this, like, this is just going to be an event for me, like a thing to do and to meet people. I tell you what, I'll buy you a drink. That's lovely. I don't even drink, so you don't have to worry about it. I'll buy you a soda. Thank you. But, you know, no lie, the goal is that if we do it again the following year, that it attracts more people, and then the money that we make with that attraction, I would very much like to bring Jenny and Erica onto the ship too. So that's my goal. But we're gonna have some swag there from like Omnipod and some other companies, and it's gonna be a good time. We're just gonna have fun and meet people. That's my my real goal is to help people build a community. I hope people leave there with, like, personal relationships that they take home with them and keep going.

Terri 1:02:43
Well, you know, I've got this new roommate. We've been talking and I'm anxious to meet her and see how her life is going. I think she was newly diagnosed the right way as a type one, not too long ago, not the way you were. You mean, well, no, I mean as an adult, yeah, oh, yeah. And, you know, just a few months or years ago, the correct way, I think she went along being Lata for a long time.

Scott Benner 1:03:11
Oh, I see, okay, yeah, I can't wait. I can't wait to hear your everyone's story. I mean, I know most of yours now, but All right. Well, Terry, thank you so much for doing this with me. I really appreciate it. Thank you. You're welcome. Hold on one Oh, it's my pleasure. Hold on one second, okay?

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Brandon, 20, has lived with T1D for 4 years and is currently studying to become a nurse.

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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
Hello friends, and welcome back to another episode of The Juicebox podcast.

Brandon 0:14
Hi. My name is Brandon. Let's see. I've had type one diabetes for four years now, and I am currently a nursing student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. If

Scott Benner 0:25
this is your first time listening to the Juicebox podcast and you'd like to hear more, download Apple podcasts or Spotify, really, any audio app at all, look for the Juicebox podcast and follow or subscribe. We put out new content every day that you'll enjoy. Want to learn more about your diabetes management. Go to Juicebox podcast.com up in the menu and look for bold Beginnings The Diabetes Pro Tip series and much more. This podcast is full of collections and series of information that will help you to live better with insulin. Please don't forget that nothing you hear on the Juicebox podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your healthcare plan or becoming bold with insulin. The episode you're listening to is sponsored by us Med, US med.com/juicebox, or call 888-721-1514, you can get your diabetes testing supplies the same way we do from us med. A huge thanks to my longest sponsor, Omnipod. Check out the Omnipod five now with my link, omnipod.com/juicebox you may be eligible for a free starter kit, a free Omnipod five starter kit at my link. Go check it out. Omnipod.com/juicebox Terms and Conditions apply. Full terms and conditions can be found at omnipod.com/juicebox today's episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by the ever since 365 the one year where CGM that's one insertion a year. That's it. And here's a little bonus for you. How about there's no limit on how many friends and family you can share your data with, with the ever since now app, no limits ever

Brandon 2:18
since. Hi, my name is Brandon. Let's see. I've had type one diabetes for four years now, and I am currently a nursing student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Awesome. How old are you? I am 20 years old. So my birthday is in August, so I'll turn 21 before the start of my senior year. Wow, you're 20?

Scott Benner 2:38
Yeah, I'm kind of young. No, no. That is, it feels, I think it's because Arden is 20. It probably feels particularly yelling to me. So you were diagnosed right around your 16th birthday, around that time,

Brandon 2:48
yeah, that's, that's right, I was, it was March 27 of 2021, so 16 years old, and it was kind of like a big shift in life. I guess you could say at that time, still sort of feels like it, but I've definitely gotten quite acquainted with it.

Scott Benner 3:06
Yeah, you have, how long do you think it took to go from big shift to acquainted?

Brandon 3:11
Well, for the first month, we ate just box food, because it had the carbs on it. After three months, I think I got my first CGM, which was the FreeStyle Libre two, which was, like, it worked fine, but you had to, like, scan it, which was kind of weird. And so I wasn't like, a huge fan of that. Yeah, I would say after that point, like, after I got that CGM, because I would just scan it basically, like, every, like, two minutes, every five minutes, whatever it was, just because I was not paranoid, but I was very curious. I kind of treated it like a video game, almost like I wanted to keep my blood sugar in between the two lines that kind of thing. Yes. So

Scott Benner 3:47
gamify diabetes Exactly, exactly. There have been a couple of companies who have tried, over the years to gamify diabetes with apps, and I'm sure for the people that they work for like They're awesome, but it doesn't seem to be a a widespread idea. So, yeah, tell me what you liked about it, though. Well,

Brandon 4:06
so I've seen those apps as well, and I haven't liked those apps, but I did have to download a few of them, like, like, it was a really weird chain, because when I had my I got the FreeStyle Libre three eventually, which I actually really loved. I think I prefer it over what I'm using now, which I'm on, the Omnipod five and Dexcom six. I think I like the FreeStyle Libre three more because it gave me that update every minute, so it allowed me to adjust faster. And yeah, so I had to, like, do this, like chain of apps so that I could get my libre data onto my Apple watch. It was like the weirdest thing ever, and it worked like half of the time. So that is the one thing that Dexcom does have, is they have just, like, direct connect. And I don't have to think about

Scott Benner 4:47
it. And then with libre, that doesn't work that way any longer, either, I don't think so. Yeah, that was people just making something work the way that. You know, Can I say something about technology? You're young man, so sure. I won't mention it again. But you are young, like you can see you, you might not know this, right? There is constantly stuff coming out, right? And people have to make a decision, where do I jump in on this? Yeah, do I get in now? Do I get in later? Like people are going through that with chat GPT right now and other AI models, right? Some people early adopt, which is awesome, but some people don't know that they're early adopting, and they end up with a CGM that doesn't talk to the thing. But then there's a guy online who makes an app that makes you that, and you're like and it can become frustrating if you stay in that early adopter space too long. You can feel like you're spending your whole life adjusting your tech. And I think there are some people who probably love that, which is awesome, and that's, I think, how it gets moved forward. But for the other people, like they're not looking for that they want on works, that's it, right? So when you dug into it, did you know you were digging into being early on that? Or did you did you think, Oh, this is just the way it works, and I have to adapt it to my needs.

Brandon 5:58
Yeah, I think it's the second. I think I just wanted to make the technology work for me. I wanted to have my blood sugar on my Apple watch, you know, so that I when I was walking around campus, I don't have to, like, pull my phone out and look at my phone. I just want to turn and look at my watch real quick and see, okay, that's where, that's where I'm at. You

Scott Benner 6:16
don't want to do it for convenience sake or cause you're not you're not up for people knowing you have diabetes.

Brandon 6:22
Oh no, no. Just for convenience sake. Okay, I don't really care. I tell, actually, I tell, like, not everybody, but I'm a very, like, widespread advocate, like, especially in the nursing school, about diabetes, and I kind of have been even before nursing school. I guess maybe I could explain a little bit the program like it's a two year program of, like, doing pre requisites, and then it's two years you have to apply to the nursing school, and then two years in the nursing school. So when I say in nursing school, I mean, like, my junior and senior year, yeah. So, like, before nursing school, yeah, even in high school, like, I kind of had been like, yeah, look, I'm a diabetic. And I was always really weird, like, when I first got home, like, because my cousin has diabetes as well, but it's not blood related. I talked to her and her family, and I was kind of like, look, I really want to be like an advocate for diabetes and kind of just be like, Look, I'm a type one diabetic, and this doesn't mean that I, you know, ate bad food, or, etc, etc, or, you know, type two is actually a lot of genetic as well. What

Scott Benner 7:20
made you want to be like that, like, that? Like, what made you want to be out in front of it? I don't know. I

Brandon 7:25
feel like I'm I've kind of been like a, maybe an extroverted person for most of my life, and so like just talking to people comes natural, which makes sense for me. Doing nursing. I don't know. I think I just wanted to help share, yeah, about diabetes, because it's not like, widely recognized or known about. Sometimes, do

Scott Benner 7:44
you think that that's you wanting to help others, or you wanting to make sure that people know the thing about you? Like, I didn't do anything wrong. I

Brandon 7:52
see, I see, no, I don't think it's that. I think it is mainly about helping others, which is like it, which kind of tailors into like, why my career as well? Like, I want to eventually maybe get like, an NP, like, a nurse, practitioning degree and work with diabetes, you know, and other endocrine disorders. I just want to help other people. And like, your podcast has been a help to me, and so I try to, like, spread the word to other people. Like, hey, look at this podcast. Or, like, here's this idea that the podcast gave me, and I'm giving it to you now so you can help better your care, so all

Scott Benner 8:24
that kind of thing. Thank you. Was nursing always your focus? Or did that happen after your diagnosis?

Brandon 8:30
Yeah, that happened after the diagnosis. It was when I was in the hospital that I kind of realized, wow, these nurses are really awesome, and had made my experience here really fantastic, to the point where I, you know, I wrote about them in my my intro or my essay to get into nursing school, I was like, Look, these guys have made huge impact. Like, I still remember their names, you know, yeah, and I want to be able to give that back to other people. And I remember specifically when I was in the hospital, I didn't really want to listen to any physicians or nurses or anything who didn't have diabetes, for some reason, yeah, well, no, it makes sense, because I'm like, Well, look, you haven't experienced this, like, firsthand. You don't really you can understand it medically. We don't personally understand it, maybe, and so I wanted to kind of be that that bridge almost,

Scott Benner 9:26
yeah, when you said that they these people that helped you were so lovely. Was it about vibe and feeling or about knowledge? Like, where do you think they were stronger?

Brandon 9:37
It was definitely about vibe and feeling like the nurse's job is definitely to have knowledge, like I've learned that, you know, we have to know all this stuff, but it's about how you make your patient feel, and how comfortable they feel and how because, I mean, going to the hospital is not comfortable in any way, you know, so just them being able to go. Comfort me, helped me feel, allowed me, like, take in more information and, like, remember stuff better, I think, and just feel

Scott Benner 10:08
better, right? It's interesting, because Arden was in the ER for a hot minute a week or so ago, and wow, and she just needed, like, an IV antibiotic for like, like, a tonsillitis that got out of hand. Oh, man, but, but point being that the nurse that helped us was light on information, but had a great way about her. And I realize, as you're talking, that if you would have asked me, how was the nurse in the ER that night, I would have said, Oh, she was great. But the one thing I asked her, she was so wrong about that my answer should be, well, she wasn't really very helpful. That really does kind of show what that job is about. She did a great job with the IV. You know, she didn't do anything technically incorrect, but we asked her question like, hey, this medication you're giving her. How long until this happens? And she was off by days. It's really wrong and but yet, I have a good vibe about her after leaving the hospital. It's interesting. Yeah, it's

Brandon 11:05
interesting. Stuff like that is definitely hard to remember, but the one thing that kind of nursing is about is patient centered care and focused care and making sure that the patient is getting what they need. Basically,

Scott Benner 11:19
what's the breakdown of your schooling? Technical to how to be a good nurse? Do they do? They talk to you about both of those things we don't

Brandon 11:28
really have, like, how to be a good nurse classes. It's mainly look. Here is your medic, medications that you need to remember. Here's like, all these diseases you need to remember and how they work in the body. You also need to know how the medications work in the body. There's a few classes about, like professionalism, or like evidence based practice, like research stuff like that. And then we have, for the first year, a, we call it C 10, or like skills lab. And that is, like, every Friday for like, four hours, and you are just learning a new skill, or learning a couple new skills, and just like, practicing and getting it under

Scott Benner 12:04
your like, placement or something like that, like an actual, yeah, like, hands on stuff like that. Okay, interesting. Is there anything about nursing that you don't like? I

Brandon 12:13
don't like the fact that, I mean, it kind of makes sense, but I don't like the fact that I can't, like, diagnose stuff. It's just so frustrating because, like, when you look at certain lab values, you're like, that is extremely concerning. And you definitely have X, Y, Z disease. But I can't say that. I just have to pretend like, oh yeah, everything. Maybe not pretend it's fine, but be like, Yeah, I'm just gonna take care of you until your doctor gets here as soon as possible to tell you what's wrong, that kind of

Scott Benner 12:40
thing. So having a person stand right in front of you and you have some knowledge about them that they don't have yet, you feel weird holding it back. Yeah,

Brandon 12:47
it just kills me on the inside. And like, for some of our simulations, like we one of the simulations I did, I it was like a UTI, and I was like, well, says there's bacteria in your urine. And I is fed in the simulation, yes, it looks like you have UTI. And I was, I got critique for that, because they're like, Look, you can't diagnose. I'm

Scott Benner 13:06
like, also, it's right there. It may not have been a clean catch. That's a phrase I know

Brandon 13:11
Correct. Yeah. I mean, it's totally possible. They would probably order another test and then see what happens there. So

Scott Benner 13:19
Brandon, I just took a victory lap with my arm. Nobody's here to see it. This is I knew a phrase. I mean, you, yeah, yeah, you're right. I was like, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Could not have been a clean cut possible. Okay, so two year program. How long have you been in

Brandon 13:35
it? I just finished my third year, and then I'll graduate next year. Okay,

Scott Benner 13:39
cool. Four Year program. Four year, excuse me, I was gonna say like, you're doing it wrong. Sorry. Four Year program and you graduate next, do you go right into a job? Does the nursing school help you get work, or is there just a lot of work to have? Like, how does that? How does that all shake out when you think of a CGM and all the good that it brings in your life, is the first thing you think about I love that I have to change it all the time. I love the warm up period every time I have to change it. I love that when I bump into a door frame, sometimes it gets ripped off. I love that the adhesive kind of gets mushy sometimes when I sweat and falls off. No, these are not the things that you love about a CGM. Today's episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by the Eversense 365 the only CGM that you only have to put on once a year, and the only CGM that won't give you any of those problems. The Eversense 365 is the only one year CGM designed to minimize the vice frustration. It has exceptional accuracy for one year with almost no false alarms from compression lows while you're sleeping, you can manage your diabetes instead of your CGM with the ever since 365 learn more and get started today at ever since cgm.com/juicebox, one year, one CGM. This episode is brought to you by a. Omnipod Would you ever buy a car without test driving it first? That's a big risk to take on a pretty large investment. You wouldn't do that, right? So why would you do it? When it comes to choosing an insulin pump, most pumps come with a four year lock in period through the DME channel, and you don't even get to try it first. But not Omnipod five. Omnipod five is available exclusively through the pharmacy, which means it doesn't come with a typical four year DME lock in period. Plus you can get started with a free 30 day trial to be sure it's the right choice for you or your family, my daughter has been wearing an Omnipod every day for 17 years. Are you ready to give Omnipod five a try. Request your free Starter Kit today at my link, omnipod.com/juicebox Terms and Conditions apply. Eligibility may vary. Full terms and conditions can be found at omnipod.com/juicebox find my link in the show notes of this podcast player, or at Juicebox podcast.com a

Brandon 16:01
little bit of both. There's a lot of jobs right now for nurses. And on top of that, the nursing school also, like, helps you with figuring out, like, regulations and licensing and stuff like that. Because if you get a license in, for example, my state, Wisconsin, that transfers to, like, I think, like 20 ish other states and I don't have to do any extra licensing, but I want to go to, like, California or Minnesota, or, I don't know, like New York, probably there's like, additional licensing stuff that I have to take care of for the National, like board certification exam. So they help us figure out, like, the details, and also help us, like, apply for jobs and stuff like that. So they're helpful in that regard.

Scott Benner 16:42
When you're growing up through the idea of maybe becoming a nurse, it's also during the time of, like, right after covid, where people are talking about like, nurses are bailing on nursing like did did that not impact you one way or the other. I think after

Brandon 16:56
being in the hospital, I understand why that happened, and I don't blame any of the nurses that did that. I kind of, I have thought about that as well, like, what if another pandemic happens? It's probable that it will occur. In my personal opinion, this is no, this is no, like, you don't know, I don't have any insider knowledge, but I just with those, you know, global warming, etc. I just think that it's possible that another pandemic could occur in the future. And I thought about that, like, Would I be able to stay through it? And I don't know. I guess I'll figure that out when I get that out, but for now, I'm just going to do my best.

Scott Benner 17:33
That's awesome. It's nice that you're not deterred. Have you talked to other practicing nurses before you make a decision like that before, like, before you like, I'm going to nursing school. Maybe I ought to go talk to a few people about what the jobs like, or did you just be like, sorry, I'm going to make my way through it.

Brandon 17:49
That's actually, that's a good question. I think before I was, like, doing nursing school, not really. I did definitely talk to, like, a lot of the nurse practitioners, kind of, like, gaging, oh, you know, like, what is your job? How do I get your job? Like, what's your salary, etc. But not really, like the bedside nurses, I haven't really, I didn't really talk to them before nursing school. It was only, like, after I was in clinicals and things like that, that I was able to, like, understand what their job was. Like, okay, so I don't

Scott Benner 18:17
want to get you in trouble here. Okay, so, okay, but, but you listen to the podcast, you've heard a lot of people's stories about being diagnosed or going in for help and getting, like, shaky care. Yeah, and you've heard a lot of stories from people who've gotten awesome care. When you hear about the shaky care side, does it hurt you? Does it feel like somebody's coming after your profession, or you like, because you know how hard you're working at something. You know other people who are doing the same. Is it hard to hear someone be critical?

Brandon 18:49
Not really well. I mean, like, maybe a little bit, because I would like to assume that all people and nurses have like people's best interests in mind, but I've run into my fair share of nurses who I'm like, I don't know how you have a certification. Like, I don't know how you have your your certification. So there's just, like, you know, there's a few bad apples in every profession, I would say. So people who have had, you know, experienced poor care. That's super valid. You know your care and your experience is, you know what it was, right? And maybe it's because you had a nurse or a doctor who just was tuned out that day. Or maybe they're just not, you know, a great nurse or doctor, right? Yeah, it's just kind of healthcare. You know, there's nothing's perfect, so it can't, I can't say that someone else's experience is invalid because, you know, they felt a

Scott Benner 19:42
certain way, sure, but it doesn't make you feel a certain way. Doesn't make you feel attacked, maybe a little

Brandon 19:46
bit, you know, I again, Nursing is a hard job, and I don't think people would like truly understand, you know, like, if you're in the hospital and you're working with your nurse, you're not seeing how many other patients they have and how much work behind. Scenes they're doing, talking to providers, talking to pharmacy, you know, coordinating with, you know, or whatever it is. There's a lot going on. So,

Scott Benner 20:08
yeah, it's insane. Also, I feel like it can seem to the patient like a service industry. Do you know what I mean? Like, like you're a waiter.

Brandon 20:15
That's kind of how I and some other nurses describe it, yeah, sometimes, like, it is kind of a service industry trying to keep your kitchen, running back

Scott Benner 20:22
to the table, running to the kitchen, running back to the table. Like, can I get this? Can I get that? You got to keep it all in your head as you pass by people, they're yelling out the door. And for a shift that can be, how long most shifts are, standard is 12 hours. Yeah, that's a long time. How do you practice or prepare for running around for that long with type one. I have always disliked ordering diabetes supplies. I'm guessing you have as well. It hasn't been a problem for us for the last few years, though, because we began using us Med, you can too us med.com/juicebox, or call 888-721-1514, to get your free benefits. Check us med has served over 1 million people living with diabetes since 1996 they carry everything you need, from CGM to insulin pumps and diabetes testing supplies and more. I'm talking about all the good ones, all your favorites, libre three, Dexcom g7 and pumps like Omnipod five, Omnipod tandem, and most recently, the eyelet pump from beta bionics, the stuff you're looking for, they have it at us. Med, 888-721-1514, or go to us. Med, Comm, slash Juicebox to get started now, use my link to support the podcast that's usmed.com/juicebox, or call 888-721-1514,

Brandon 21:49
thankfully, I have the the algorithm working for me, so that's taking care of most stuff in the background. But you know, there's some days where you don't get to lunch until one or 2pm Yeah. And for me, I don't eat breakfast because I try to do like, a little bit of intermittent fasting. So, you know, making my schedule, you know, eating my first meal at like, one or 2pm and it can, you know, my blood sugar can be fluctuating throughout the day, so I just have like, glucose tablets with me to help regulate in case, like, I start going low. So when

Scott Benner 22:19
you get to that time, when it's time to eat, you need to eat, but that's not always going to going to be the case,

Brandon 22:24
right? Sometimes you don't get a lunch either. So yeah, that's another thing you have to think about.

Scott Benner 22:30
Eat out of your dirty pocket, right? Do you have any brothers sisters?

Brandon 22:36
Yeah, I have of a younger sister,

Scott Benner 22:38
yeah. Is she concerned about diabetes at all, I

Brandon 22:43
think a little bit, she's talked to me sometimes where she's like, I've been peeing a lot. Can I test my blood sugar? I'm like, Yeah, sure, go

Scott Benner 22:50
for it. So it is in her head. She does think about it a little bit. It's in her head. Yeah,

Brandon 22:55
I tell her not to worry too much about it, and even if she does get it, you know, like she has me and my aunt and my cousin as a resource to help her, but I understand her

Scott Benner 23:05
fear. Yeah. What did you mean? Your cousin has type one, but they're not blood

Brandon 23:09
related? Yeah? Sorry, so the type one isn't blood related. It was married in to that side of the family, so we like her grandfather, who is not my grandfather, so that kind of makes my uncle, my aunt is my blood relative, and my uncle is not, and my uncle's mom had type one.

Scott Benner 23:29
Gotcha. Okay, so it's somebody you know, because you're related to them. But, I mean, I assumed that. But I was just I wasn't like, yeah, sorry, yeah, no, Brent, I wasn't, I wasn't like, What's this magic where you're related but you're not related? I just I wasn't confused, yeah. How did you find the podcast?

Brandon 23:43
Actually, through my aunt, when I was diagnosed, like my aunt was doing a good job with my cousin, for sure, for I don't even know how many years it would have been at that time, like seven years, but after I got diagnosed, she kind of, like, I don't know how necessarily to like, communicate all this information that I've learned to you to help you without overwhelming you. So she went and looked for resources online and found the podcast and then shared it with me. Oh, no. And then we both started kind of like listening to it at the same time together.

Scott Benner 24:13
Oh, that's interesting. So she wasn't a listener. She was just trying to help you,

Brandon 24:16
yeah. And then it ended up helping my cousin as well. Oh, awesome. Well,

Scott Benner 24:20
hi to everybody. That's, that's really what? Oh, what a, what a lovely thing to do for somebody. Yeah, no, she's fantastic. Yeah, no kidding. Usually, when you ask somebody for help, they'll help you, if it's like, right there, you know, he's like, oh, yeah, I know what to do. Here's the thing. No problem. I gotta go look for it. You don't usually get out of people. Oh, what a nice person. Yeah,

Brandon 24:40
no, she's lovely, and she helped me, you know, get to where I am, where I haven't had an A 1c above six for like, three years now. So good

Scott Benner 24:48
for you. Man, that's awesome. How about your parents? Because that's such an in between age. Like, did they look at you and go, Oh, he's old enough he can do this. Or were they trying to help or, you know what I mean? Like, I feel like there's this thing that happens where, when the kids are at a certain age, when they're diagnosed, the parents don't want to, like, push themselves into it where they should, like, does that make sense?

Brandon 25:10
Yeah, that one's a little bit trickier. I would say, oh, is your dad in prison? No, no, nothing like that. Nothing like that. No, both my parents were in the hospital with me, and for the first few months they they were kind of like my guide, because I was kind of tuned out at the hospital, and so I was using what information they had to kind of like guide my care a little bit. They didn't get to do injections, though, because they each did one injection, and it went awfully so I said, I will take care of that part. It's true. I mean, my dad, first time he did it, he put in my arm, and then he injected it, and immediately pulled it out, and I saw, like, four or five units spill onto the floor. And I was like, Huh, okay, so yeah, they didn't do injections for me, but they did help me with, like, figuring out carbs. And we even, you know, we did the scales and stuff at the beginning. We're like, two blueberries, is this many carbs, right? So we did all that so that we could, you know, kind of get Gage, oh, okay, a piece of bread. It's like, 1015, to 20, whatever it is, right? Depending on the size. And after we kind of, like, got that basis, I kind of just took over for the most part. And they kind of were just like, you know, checked in every once in a while, like, Hey, how's it going, how's this going, right? And, you know, sometimes you don't want your parents to know. Oh, yeah, my blood sugar has been 200 all day or whatever, right? But after a certain point, you know, I got

Scott Benner 26:37
it under control. Have you ever said the phrase, it's fine. I've got it.

Brandon 26:41
That was my coined phrase from the age of 16 to about 19. So yes, no, if

Scott Benner 26:46
you ever want to marry a girl in New Jersey and make a baby that's definitely gonna have diabetes, she knows that phrase too. You can come right over and start chatting with her.

Brandon 26:55
It's fine. I got it fine. I've used that one before too.

Scott Benner 27:01
I feel fine. It's fine. I've got it. Dad, leave me alone. Stop. It's just such a balance. Like, so your parents let you lead the way a little bit. Do you think that when they stepped back? Have you ever talked to them about it like was their expectation? Like they really thought you had it? Or they were like, well, you know, he's not doing great, but it seems like a like a pain point that we don't want to push through.

Brandon 27:22
I never had officially, like, talked to them about it, but I think they kind of just wanted to see how it worked out for me. And I think they trusted me, because I have been pretty responsible for most of my life, so I think they trusted me in figuring it out. Yeah, kind of that

Scott Benner 27:39
makes sense. One of the hardest things to do, I think, parenting wise, is like, people will say it like, oh, to watch your kids make mistakes, but, you know, they have to do them. I don't think of it as even a mistake. It's a it's like a learning process. And, you know, like when the learning process is touching the stove and it's hot, you want to step in and say, don't touch the stove, right? And you do when they're young, and you should, right? But then where does that line get drawn? Like, do you let them fall? Do you let them, like, linger after they've fallen? Do you let them make friends with somebody where it's not going to work out? Like, do you let them, you know, do you while they're dating somebody that you're like, This is not right. And it's not just me being a jerk here, like this, this person's not right for a reason. I should point out. Do you say that? Do you hold it inside like you go through this constantly, but when you get to diabetes, especially when you've raised a kid with it, and you're like, you know, years into it, and you know, if we Bolus right here. If we do this with the temp basal, if we do that, your blood sugar is never getting high. Like, but once they take the reins, like, stepping back and saying, I know there's value in this learning experience, but I don't want the learning experience to tip over into a bad habit, like, how do you stay in the Batman I'm telling you, yeah, it's a tightrope walk that just it sucks. I don't know another way to say it.

Brandon 29:08
Roy, yeah. I think the weird part about my situation is that because I was diagnosed so late and my parents were only involved for a certain amount of time, they kind of lack that knowledge and experience that even my aunt had, that my aunt has, right because she took care of it for you know, I think it's like 14 years at this point, something like that might be even longer. So sorry, tired to my aunt, if she's listening, because she probably will. They don't have that knowledge. So it's kind of just on me, especially now. And I think a year ago, I kind of was like, Well, I wish they knew more, because there's times where they, you know, they'll make a comment, or they'll say something, and I'm like, No man, that's that's not even close to being right, but yeah, and I maybe I'll say, well, and I don't think so right, but,

Scott Benner 29:55
but they were never really in the fight, so they didn't really have to learn the tools

Brandon 29:59
Exactly. Thing. And that doesn't mean that they're not supportive still, and they want the best for me, it's just that they don't maybe fully understand it.

Scott Benner 30:06
Yeah, of course. Because how would they even do that? Right? Like you imagine you're taking care of it. There's already you're 16, there's already a parental child struggle that goes on one way or the other. And if they were like, listen, you're taking care of this, that's great, but teach us as you're learning, because we want to know too. You would have been like, Get away from me. Right, right? Yeah, definitely. And you seem like a pretty level headed person. Thank you. Yeah, were you when you were 16 for

Brandon 30:31
the most part? Yeah, you haven't been a real dick to your parents at any point. Maybe not, maybe a little bit. I mean, that's obviously me talking about myself in front of a million people, but hard to know. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I guess I probably don't have the same perspective that I have. Like, but now you're not dude.

Scott Benner 30:48
You weren't doing heroin and like stuff like that, yeah, going crazy. You weren't somebody who, like, every five seconds they were like, oh my god, what is he doing now? Like, it wasn't like that.

Brandon 30:57
No, they kind of just like, let me be for the most part, because I would just kind of stay out of trouble and do good in school. So

Scott Benner 31:04
all right, trying to figure out, because you said you were a little disconnected in the hospital, which I understand, you're probably in shock about all this stuff going on, right? So your parents are taking in information, but it pretty quickly pivots to you, you go to your your did you go to your aunt? Or did your aunt go to you?

Brandon 31:19
I mean, she kind of like helped me get diagnosed in a way, like she had a post on Facebook that my sister saw that was, like a reoccurring post every year about like signs and symptoms of type one, and then my sister would talk to my mom, and my mom took me to my aunt, and then she helped me get, like a finger stick. And then she was like, go to the hospital. And then she kind of was involved in my care a little bit after that, just kind of like calling and checking in, like, Hey, do you need? Hey, do you need anything? Yeah, we, at that time, we only lived like a block or two away from them as well, and this was also during, like, the pandemic, though, a little bit, so we were cautious, but she did, you know, come and help, like,

Scott Benner 31:54
you're acquainted a little bit. Your little sister diagnosed your diabetes from your aunt's Facebook post, yeah, basically here, that's awesome,

Brandon 32:03
yeah, I know, and I have to live every day knowing that my sister can hold that over

Scott Benner 32:08
me. Now, no kidding, how much younger than you is she? I think she's three years younger. So your 13 year old sister comes to you one day and goes, Hey, you have diabetes. No, she went to my parents. Your parents said, Hey, this one over here is peeing a lot. We got to do something. I saw something online. No kidding. Wow, that's crazy. Good for her. What's her name? Her name's Caitlin. Caitlin saves the day. That's awesome. Good job. So did you not know anything was wrong?

Brandon 32:36
I guess, kind of like while I was living it, not really like I knew I felt very depressed and always tired, but I assumed that was because there was a global pandemic happening, and I hadn't talked to people in like, a long time, but I knew I was eating like five meals a day and drinking like 100 something ounces of water every day. So

Scott Benner 32:56
do you remember the moment that you're I'm assuming your mom got tasked to come to you and say, Hey, Caitlin thinks you have type one diabetes. We should go. Were you like, What the What are you talking about? Yeah,

Brandon 33:06
for sure. I was like, Heck no, that's not possible. Because, I mean, at this time, I had no idea anything about medical field, anything, yeah, the signs were there, for sure. But I was like, hell no, I don't have that

Scott Benner 33:18
must have been insane. I would I imagine the look on your face was these two big like, oh god. I almost made a reference that maybe is 40 years old.

Brandon 33:27
Oh man, oh my

Scott Benner 33:29
God. Have you ever seen the wolf in the old cartoons that sees the pretty girl and its eyes bug out?

Brandon 33:34
There's Oh, Looney Tunes. Well,

Scott Benner 33:38
yeah. I mean, yeah, you know that. Okay, yeah, I kind of know you're talking. I like, I see you, like, like, with your just your eyes, like, bugging out of your head. Like, what are you talking about? And now, by the way, I'm seeing a thumbnail for your episode, which is a young nurse with his eyes bugging.

Brandon 33:54
I like it, yeah, you

Scott Benner 33:56
must have been like, what is happening right now? That's a crazy way to find out.

Brandon 33:59
Yeah. And then blood sugar was like, 350 or 360 or something about it's like, let's do that again. Let's just wash your hands. And then she's like, You should probably go to ER.

Scott Benner 34:08
So by the way, the most frequently word heard words before a type one diabetes diagnosis are, let's wash your hands and try that again. I guarantee it. So your sister just rolled past you every once in a while and go, Hey, do you remember that time I diagnosed you? Time I diagnosed

Brandon 34:23
you with diabetes? Yeah, that happens. Oh, I would do that for sure. I still live at home so she Oh no for 100%

Scott Benner 34:28
like, even in the middle of an argument. If you're like, hey, you know your shoes are always in the floor, I'd be like, Oh, my God, they are. I'll get them right after I remind you that I helped you with your diabetes that time. Yeah, yeah. I'd be a dick about it, for sure, in a fun way. I just want to say yeah, for sure. Awesome. So okay, all right. So let me go back to my question, what, what? And by the way, good job keeping me on track. I got you what kind of nursing is attractive to you?

Brandon 34:54
So yes, it is like that. You can kind of choose where you want to go. Mm. And for me, I want to do diabetes stuff in the long term, but in the short term, it's not super possible with like, just a bachelor's degree. Like, I could go work at like, a clinic, but then I would kind of only be doing like that intake stuff. Like, Hey, what's your name, etc, right? You want to get your hours right, right? I'm going to take your a 1c right? Yeah, that's not really what I want to do. I want to be more on the MP side of things where I am helping you help, like, with care. Like, hey, I need new insulin prescription. I need, I want a Dexcom, right? Stuff like that. Like, that's what I want to be doing long term. But for short term, I have no idea. So I've kind of just, like, left it up in the air. I'm like, maybe I'll go work bedside. Maybe I'll go work in a clinic. Maybe I'll work in cardiology. Who knows, right? Yeah, I'll just, I'll figure it out. Game experiences, whoever offers me the most money, I'll go there.

Scott Benner 35:52
Would you ever do travel nursing? Yeah, you would okay, you have no problems, like, like, like, just leaving the state and going somewhere and trying somewhere

Brandon 35:59
else. Yeah, sounds good, as long as, like, again, it's like, the whole licensing thing, right? You got to figure that out. But, yeah, I'll do that. That sounds like fun. Hey, yeah, I'll go to Miami, pick me, get me out of Wisconsin.

Scott Benner 36:11
Cold. My friend's daughter does it right now, I think she's pretty happy where she is at the moment. But she's been in, like, Arizona, Hawaii, Baltimore. She actually left Baltimore, like, she went to her mom and said, I have to get out of this hospital. I'm no longer shocked by seeing someone be shot. I need to leave that. That's how she told her mom, like, she's like, I'm numb to a gunshot. And I think that means I have enough experience. I gotta go. So, yeah, that's fair, yeah. So she went somewhere else. Now you're listening to the podcast, and people are talking about their experiences with doctors and nurses and healthcare in general. Is that helping to inform how you want to do your job?

Brandon 36:50
Certainly, yeah, that is like kind of what I have drawn on for, even just like our general care, I just want to make sure that people have a good experience in the hospital, you know, maybe not to the point so much where they like remember my name, like I did with my nurses. But I just want them to help ease their pain and help them get acquainted to like their new lives, if they're, you know, going through major surgery, etc, or whatever it is, you know, it's, it's not easy, and I just want to make it as easy as I can for them.

Scott Benner 37:23
Did you hear the Grand Rounds series? No, okay, so there's a series in the podcast, and it's just called Grand Rounds. But what I did was I went into the Facebook group and I collected, I mean, we made an exhaustive, seriously exhaustive list of what people wished their doctors would have done or not have done during their their intake, their early days, you know, through diagnosis, through learning, and then beyond. And we ordered those things as far as, like you know, at the hospital, like, you know, going home, like, kind of in that, like, chronological order, we took all of their feedback, and Jenny and I sat down and talked through it all. And then after that, I brought in, I think there's at least five or six different physicians, endocrinologists, sometimes people with type one diabetes who are endocrinologist people who have type one in their lives, but are different kinds of doctors, and we talked with each of them about what they thought care should look like.

Brandon 38:27
That sounds really interesting.

Scott Benner 38:30
It might be. And I'm wondering, if you end up going through it, what you'll find you're just kind of like in the perfect position, because I keep wondering, like, you know, your aunt finds the podcast. She gets it over to you. You've got an A, 1c, under six. That's awesome. But, like, I keep thinking, like, is there a way to get to doctors too? Like, you know, there's this podcast has been going on for a long time. Now. People are going to grow up listening to it who have type one diabetes. Some of them are going to become nurses and physicians and MPs and etc, right, I'm trying to figure out, like, how can we get the message from people going through it back to doctors so that they can make you know better decisions, or know what to look out for anyway? On my website now, under guides, there's two links. One's called improving type one diabetes care, a guide for physicians, and there's one called Juicebox for Doc's Grand Rounds takeaways. And they're both, like, pretty exhaustive. I mean, I'd almost call them like research reports, but they're made with an AI model, but only from the transcripts from the Grand Rounds series.

Brandon 39:42
Yeah, sure, yeah. I mean, I'm all good with AI. So,

Scott Benner 39:46
yeah, no, you're young. You don't care. But my point is, is that some people listening, right there he is, again with the AI. Here's what I can tell you, I had upwards of like 20 hours of recordings. Wow, with doctors talking about their experiences with Jenny, and I really picking through everybody's feedback. And there's a lot in there. And I'm not, I don't know who you all think I am, but if I sit down to pick through 20 hours of this, to take, you know, to write down takeaways and take notes as I'm going through like that's never, I'm never gonna get that accomplished, right? So at one point it wasn't so much so, but at this point now, like these AI models are much better writers than they used to be even nine months ago, and they're much better at pulling out information. And you can kind of keep them on task by telling them, like, do not leave this information, do not go to the internet. Don't put in your own thoughts. Just pull this information out, and then you can go back and hand check it afterwards, which is what we did, right? Yep, if you're looking for, you know, basically 90 people's thoughts about what they wish would have happened for them, and six really awesome physicians thoughts on what they think they should be doing, all collected together. It's a good read. Yeah, I don't know how to get it out into the world. I look at it, I think, I don't think anybody's seeing this, because what are you gonna do? Right? Like, we didn't send an email to a doctor's office and go, you should read this. Like they'll be like, Oh, good,

Brandon 41:15
yeah. Be like, all right. And next email, Hey, I got an email

Scott Benner 41:19
from a podcaster who thinks they know how to be a doctor, that's how it's gonna feel, right? So it's up to people like you, or people in healthcare to, first of all, actually believe in it, and then secondly, give it to somebody else. And that's, you know, what I'm hoping for, I guess,

Brandon 41:36
yeah, no, I've, I've kind of thought about that as well from the podcast. Like just being able to like you are kind of raising a generation of people who are learning about this information, and we can go into the field. And I mean to be honest, when I am talking about diabetes, even to like my nursing cohort, like I that was one thing I tried to do, is educate them on type one diabetes, be a one on other, like 159 of us, whatever there is. I want them to be able to go into the healthcare field and be like, Oh, I remember the thing that Brandon told me at, you know, whenever, when I was talking about this nursing research before class started, or when we were just having a conversation in the lounge, right? I'm trying to educate them, mostly with stuff from the podcast and also from stuff from my life about type one diabetes, break those stereotypes and help them, kind of like, understand what it is to have type one diabetes and how to take care of people who have type one diabetes, so that they don't have those experiences. Yeah, but I didn't know about that series, because I've just been listening from zero forward, basically, oh yeah,

Scott Benner 42:46
no, I figured that out. Because earlier you said something about like, like, Oh, I didn't realize you did that. Or something like, Oh, you, hi. You hired an editor. Like, yeah, yeah, you're not up to that part yet. No, no, and I'm going to tell you something Brandon like, this will sound self serving, but it's not you listen to this podcast straight through, I think you'll be an excellent diabetes educator. Yeah, yeah, I

Brandon 43:09
really. I think so too. And that's kind of what I found. Like, I'm only like, 600 episodes in something like that. It's a small things like being able to just glean that small information from people talking about their their time. You can hear their tone right, right? And you can hear how that experience impacted the rest of their their care. So it's really important to get it right at the beginning.

Scott Benner 43:32
Yeah, that's such my takeaway after making grand rounds, actually. And you'll hear me harp on it when you get to it. But the way they start is often the way they finish. And you just don't realize what a misplaced word or sentiment or ill timed piece of advice or an idea could throw somebody so far off the track that they can't find their way back, you know, and then once they even if they realize they're in trouble, if they intersect another person who doesn't know how to get them back quickly. It just spins out of control. Yeah, and then I end up interviewing those people when they're 35 and 40 and 45 years old, and they're like, Oh God, I found the podcast last year. And they say stuff like, why didn't I find this earlier? Because they're thinking about their lost time and their lost health. And if you could hear those stories, and you were the person intersecting somebody on day one with their diagnosis, I think it would change how you spoke to them. It definitely would, yeah, but I don't think that sitting in a room in an hour and a half class where somebody puts that up in bullet points in front of you is going to make the same impact

Brandon 44:41
Exactly. And, I mean, that's kind of my little thing, like I've seen. We've had lectures on diabetes, but it mainly focuses on type two, because that's just the, you know, it's the more common one. It makes sense that I would, if I was making material, I would do that too, yeah, but we have done a little bit of type one. But. It's not satisfactory for me personally. And so there's times where I just like ask a question that I obviously know the answer to, but I just want my professor to say a certain phrase or sentence so that maybe that sticks with the people in my class. You know, things like that. I just want to try to educate them. Even

Scott Benner 45:20
with teaching, you get lucky and you get unlucky sometimes, like, sometimes, right? You just you get a great instructor, somebody who cares, and they're thoughtful, and they get it, and then sometimes you don't, and that's not even under your control either, like, so you might go through an entire course and not get the same takeaway you would have gotten if you randomly got placed with a different instructor, and there's, there's nothing you can do. But this, again, I know this sounds self serving, but like this podcast is the best way to disseminate this information, because, man, at 20 years old, you just said, sometimes you just hear a tone in their voice, and you can kind of like, get what they're saying differently. Like, I was so touched by that, because I spent a lot of time talking to people and getting them comfortable and saying stupid stuff to them so they're not nervous, so that they might say five things in an hour, that somebody, at the end goes, Oh, that's the stuff that's going to stick with me when it's over. And those are the things that make it easier to keep your a 1c under six or help you when you know it's the middle of the night and you're sick and your blood sugar is like, rocketing up. And like, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. And then you think, no, I do know what to do. Because some lady on some episode said a thing that stuck with you and you, and you pull that out like your Batman, and it's like, and you're like, boom, this is the tool I need. Like, right off my belt. Like I didn't, yeah, I didn't even remember it was there. But now that I know I need it, whoa, here it is, and I know how to use it,

Brandon 46:46
Yeah, certainly. And I mean, I feel, I feel especially that way, because, you know, that is my job as a nurse. Our job is about education as well. That's like, the big part of it is we're learning our material so that we can teach you when we end up taking care of you. And so the more I can do now to help educate my classmates, the more that they can do to help educate other people in the

Scott Benner 47:09
future. I'm super excited to hear you say that, because a second ago, you said, look, they spend a lot more time telling us about type two diabetes and type one because it's more you know, frequently seen. But you ever meet people with type two diabetes, they don't know anything about their type two diabetes, like, so that means they're spending extra time teaching you something, and it's still not actually impacting the end user. Do you know you mean, like, you know more about it, hopefully. But there's something about the process that doesn't leave people informed. And it's not just diabetes, I'm telling you, it's not just diabetes, it's everything. Anytime you hear somebody deal with a medical issue, that's not one and done, that's not a pill and it's over, right? Because I don't need to know how you fix my shoulder. Like, it's cool. It works again. Like, thank you. It's awesome. Let me definitely pay the bill, and I might even send a card over and say, thanks. So if I bump into you at the grocery store, grocery store to shake your hand right? Like, that's awesome. If something I'm dealing with every day isn't understood, then we all tend to, like, try to let it melt into the background. We ignore it. It's where phrases like, oh, that's just diabetes comes from. You know, like, Oh, your blood sugar has been 300 all day. Yeah, it's just diabetes. Nothing I can do it. Nothing I can do about it. You know, I've got the sugars, whatever, like, version of that, wherever you are in the country, you know, I've heard people say, Oh, it's my whole family's got it. It's gonna get me one day. Like, wow, you're 28 years old, and you've already resolved yourself to the fact that you're gonna die early from type two diabetes, because you've seen it happen to a few people in your family. I'm like, right? That's crazy. I don't know what to do about that systemically, other than to say that a person like you, like a front lines person, right, who has the knowledge coupled with the understanding of what it's like to live with it. I think you will probably be responsible for more good launches for people over a 30 year career than you'll be able to count. And I'm telling you, man, like I find a ton of value in what I do, and personal value too. Like, I was just standing with Arden's endocrinologist yesterday. We were chatting, and she told me about a person she helped recently, like no big details, but like, this person had PCOS, and nobody would help her. And so this doctor got her onto a GLP, and it alleviated her symptoms so significantly, and her pain and her struggle so significantly that the next time she saw her, the woman just walked into the office and grabbed her and started crying and just hugged her, like hugged the doctor, because of the relief that was been brought to her. Yep. And she said to me, Well, you know what I'm talking about. And I said, I do. And I told her I was like, if you would have met me 30 years ago. Know, you would not have been like, I bet that guy, one day is going to find a ton of comfort and value in helping people live better with diabetes. I'm like, Yeah, that was not me. Like, actually, if you knew me back, then you'd be laughing right now, how ridiculous that sounds, right? But at the same time, the next thing I said to her was, I'm so happy, and I feel so valuable. And every time I look up and hear from somebody, or see somebody doing better, I think like, you know, that's another kind of I don't know like, root in the world, or tentacle, that that is an offshoot of the thing I do every day. And I try to think of it as like, not just like, you know, you reach a mom today who maybe helps raise a kid who's never gonna have a bunch of problems because they understood this stuff, but then one day, that kid might have a kid who has diabetes. By having these conversations, we all might be helping somebody who isn't gonna be born for 20 years. And I think that's awesome. I think you could do that too,

Brandon 51:05
yeah? And, I mean, that's kind of what I hope to do, but and make some money, as you said earlier, yeah, and make some money. But, you know, it's not just that's not just me. Though anyone can kind of do this, right, like anyone can be an advocate for diabetes. And, you know, talk about, yeah, this is kind of what my life is like. And you can talk to your doctors, your nurses, things like that, and kind of be like, Hey, this is how diabetes has affected me, right? And give your story to them. And who knows, maybe that changes the way they look at it in the future as well.

Scott Benner 51:37
And you're not going to save everyone, and everybody's not of the same mindset, right? Like, so you might give somebody a great launch, and they might just not care, and I don't think it's because they don't care. I mean, if you listen to the podcast, I don't think anybody doesn't care about their health, right? I think that people are often impacted by other psychological, financial, et cetera, like situations that can stop them from taking as good care of themselves, like just being super busy, like, you know, like working 12 hours a day. How do you prioritize things? Like, it's, it's almost impossible, right? Yeah. Like, but for those people that you get a hold of, and not only have you given them a good launch, but you've given them good tools, now they can break it all down and make it make sense for themselves, and then when they need help, they won't be lost about how to go find more help either. Like, you know, you say to people, like, advocate for yourself. You know, most people don't know what that means, right, right? Like most Yeah, yeah. Most people assume I go to get my tires changed, I don't need to advocate that the guy puts the stem cap back on right? Like he should know how to do that. All of those situations like you just expect people to know, and you don't think I have to advocate for this. Like no one goes to a doctor thinking, I better make sure they do the right thing.

Brandon 52:56
I think the best way that I've learned like this was a my my pediatric endocrinologist made this a goal for me, like, learn how to advocate for yourself. And first I was like, what does that mean? But eventually, I kind of realized that it is getting as much knowledge as you can, arming yourself with that knowledge, and then feel free to question your doctors and your nurses right, challenge them in a respectful way, because maybe it'll help them think about whatever the problem is in a different way, in a different light. Just try something because they have a lot of patience and a lot of other things maybe going in their lives. So if you challenge that thought, you might break them out of that autopilot for a little bit and just kind of help you get the best care that you can

Scott Benner 53:43
have. But I'm saying that next step, like, say, You challenge a healthcare provider and they don't really know the answer, they could ball up and just play defense right. Their ego could get in the way. They could get embarrassed. They could just be like, Oh, you're a pain. Like, do you know, how many people I know have advocated for themselves, and in their chart, it says that they're problematic.

Brandon 54:05
Yeah, I hate when I hear nurses being like, Oh, this person's uncompliant. I'm like, yeah, they try other things. Or are they just talking and advocating for themselves? You know, exactly,

Scott Benner 54:16
like there's a difference between, hey, you need to take this pill at three, six and nine, and they don't do it, and you saying something incorrect to them and then pushing back, and they're not listening to me, right, right, right? That's a big difference. And so, you know, in the end, right? That's, that's just people like, you know, some people are gonna take that job and be right for it. Some people are gonna be a nurse and not be right for it. Some people might be very caring and human, but not very technically adept, or vice versa. You're not getting a robot, you know what I mean. So although, let me ask you about that, Brian, you're 20 years old, AI is doubling on itself. A. About every six months, right? Yeah, did you ever think I might have picked something that that might not be the same in my lifetime?

Brandon 55:08
I mean, I kind of hope it's not the same in my lifetime. Actually, this is interesting. Our school is very AI, I guess, and they actually encourage us to use it for, you know, not for cheating purposes, but for, like, prepping and stuff. So like, I've used it for, like, preparing for boarding, like the board exam, like I can just ask, Hey, make a question that the board exam would ask me about this problem, right? But in practice, I'm very excited for what it will look like in the next 2030, years, even when in the way that we can, like, save time, like aI listening to your conversation and recording it and auto charting it for you, saving me, like 10 minutes of that conversation, like I have to go chart that eventually. But if it just is auto charted, and I can just look through it and be like, yeah, that looks accurate to what we talked about, then I can move on to the next patient and just start doing that right? Or, I don't know, I did some research recently, or, like, helped participate in some research about, you know, delivering water and delivering messages through robots. And I thought that was really interesting and cool, because it takes more off of the nurses plate, so they can do other things as well. So I'm hoping in the future that AI does take parts of my job, because I want to be able to do the other parts of my job even

Scott Benner 56:27
better. Yeah, oh, see, this is exciting to me. I like, I like talking to somebody your age that's in your position right now. That's, that's really great, because I feel the same way, right? I mean, listen for those people like, I don't know, that sounds like something that's gonna like, you know, they're thinking Terminator when they hear it right now, I'm not saying it can't end up being that. I'm just saying, right, right. Okay, you're asking 20 year old Brandon to go to school and learn something and then learn a lot of things. And he's already telling you they don't really teach us much about type one diabetes, for example. There's also a lot of other things they're not teaching him about. Imagine that our lovely brand in here could learn everything, right? Everything, and that when you asked him a question, he just said the answer, and he knew it immediately. That's what you're talking about. When you're talking about AI, you're talking about a large language model that is trained only on the information that you want it to have, right? So you go get all the information in the world you need about nursing, and you put it into this model. You give people a prompt to ask a question that you could give it a voice prompt like, if none of you have yet downloaded the chat GPT app for your iPhone and just had a conversation with it about something, it's a great way to learn about what I'm talking about, right? And I mean a literal, out loud conversation, not even texting it, questions, like, because you realize you hear something and that makes you think something else. It's the way I interview people, right? Like you and I don't know each other. There's no notes here. Like, I'm not following a format. When I'm talking to you, you said something, it made me think something. I asked a question. Sometimes it leads to nothing, sometimes it leads to something. Sometimes I ask a person a question and I get back an answer on my car, and I guess I probably could have skipped that. Sometimes I get back. Oh, yeah, no, Scott, I am a little upset because my father used to beat me and blah, and then you go, like, you learn something from somebody, right? So you can do that with AI. So try to imagine that AI has all the current medical knowledge that we hold, and you get to ask it a question, hey, my fever is this? I felt like this over the last three days. Here's some background on me. I have type one diabetes, I have Hashimotos, I have acne, I have heavy periods. I This that, imagine you said it to that, and then five seconds later it came back and it said, Oh, you're probably anemic. Your blah, blah, blah needs to be stronger. This needs to happen. That that's information that, if you're lucky, you'll get out of your doctor over 18 months of visits every three months, if that doctor can hold all that stuff in their head about what's wrong with you, which they're not going to so you go to them in June and you just mention, my periods have been heavy. That's it. You that You say that right when you come back three months later, they don't remember that like they don't. But you might say the next piece that, along with the heavy periods, would lead them to go, oh, this plus this is that that's not going to happen for you, unless you're lucky, unless you're advocating, and you get a great doctor, and you get lucky and you look into it, and blah, blah, blah, otherwise, imagine if you just kept saying that to an AI, and one day it just spit back to you, like, here's all the things you've said to me. Here are the things I think we should look into. Take that to a doctor,

Brandon 59:42
right? And then you just think about the situation you talked about at the beginning of our conversation. Like, what does this medication do? Or, like, how long does it take for it to do its thing right? It just be like, Yeah, three days, whatever it is, right? And you don't have to rely on that. I mean, I don't. Remember all of that stuff, man, like she I'll try my best. I'll probably have to go look it up after you ask me. I'll be like, All right, let me go quickly, look at my encyclopedia of drugs and just be like, okay, yep, I remember it

Scott Benner 1:00:11
now. This wasn't a bad person. And for clarity, I said Arden was getting an IV steroid. And I said, How long do you think it's going to take for her her blood sugar, because I was thinking, because we need to, like, we're going to ramp up her, her basal and get ahead of it. And she goes three days. And I was like, Okay, thank you. And then she walked 24 hours, by the way. Then my human nature jumped in. I was like, this lady, don't know what she's talking about. What she was probably thinking was like, how soon until she's getting maybe, I don't know what she was thinking. It doesn't even matter, right? Like, but she did not understand type one diabetes well enough to know that what I meant was, How long until this makes her blood sugar higher. I assumed she'd understand that, and then when she didn't, I got gruff about it, like, not outwardly, but in my head, I was like, All right, well, I gotta talk to her anymore about stuff like this, right? Like this, right, right. Here's the thing I haven't shared yet. Is that a half an hour before Arden and I left for the hospital, I did two things. I spoke to her physician, because I said, this looks like it's becoming emergent. I don't know that we should be waiting until tomorrow, right? And I so I spoke on the phone to her physician, who said, I agree with you. I think you should go to the hospital. I was like, Okay. And then I spent, I'm gonna tell you, four minutes while Arden was upstairs, getting her charger and putting on more comfortable clothing to go to the hospital with, and all that stuff, I spent four minutes on my phone explaining to chat GPT what had been going on with Arden for the last week and a half. And then I asked it what to expect when I got to the hospital and Brandon, I am not lying to you. I know we got a good NP that night, because everything she did was literally what chat GPT said she was going to do. And in the order that she did it is the order it gave it back to it had,

Brandon 1:02:01
that's crazy. I mean, not, not too crazy, though, because it makes sense, like we follow procedures,

Scott Benner 1:02:07
yeah, because that lady learned from procedures, and so did chat GPT, right? I knew I had a good person standing in front of me, because she was recalling what she was taught in almost a robotic way. So I was like, All right, she knows what she's doing. So I got comfortable, like, I'm gonna listen to her. Then we got to a point in the evening, I'm going to tell you it was at 230 in the morning. Oh my where she wanted to keep Arden overnight to get another round of IV antibiotics. And I did not want that to happen, but I also wanted to make sure that it wasn't medically necessary. So while she was gone, I asked all of my questions to chat GPT to find out what her concerns might be. And then when she came back, I said to her, can you tell me why you're asking her to stay the night? What is your real concern? Because we can go pick up more antibiotics in the morning orally, and keep going like she's got the IV infusion of it. It's gonna last until midday tomorrow. You're gonna, right? You're gonna tell me to get up, go to the pharmacy, take get this Med, start taking it. That's what you're gonna tell me, right? And she said, Yes. And I said, Okay, why does she need to get it by an IV one more time? I'm like, what are you really worried about? Now I already knew what she was really worried about, because the computer told me okay, but also because I had my own intuition about what it was. But I didn't lead her to the answer. I let her tell me what she thought she was worried about, obstruction. I see okay, because Arden's tonsils were overlapping.

Brandon 1:03:42
Yep, like that makes sense. So what? Airway obstruction?

Scott Benner 1:03:45
Yes. Okay, so she said, I'm worried about airway obstruction. I said, Okay, I thought that might be what you're saying. So this has nothing to do with the antibiotics or clearing up what's going on. She goes, No. I said, well, she's been like this for seven days. This is exactly what I said. She's been like this for seven days, and she's not dead yet, so I assume this is going to be okay. And I do also think that the broad spectrum antibiotics you hit her with are going to work pretty quickly, because Arden had already tried two different antibiotics the week before that didn't touch her problem. I said, do you agree with that? And she said, Yes. And I said, Okay, if I promise to take her to an ENT tomorrow. If there's any problems, do you have any trouble with her leaving? And she said, Nope, that sounds good. I didn't push her into it. I wasn't being difficult, right? She and I together got to a comfortable decision that I was only able to really get to because I used AI to find out what it was she

Brandon 1:04:38
was thinking, Yeah, and you respectfully challenged her, right?

Scott Benner 1:04:41
And I checked myself too, with AI, like, if I thought something, like, I at one point, I said to it, I'd like to take her home, but I don't want to cause a medical emergency. Like, what are all the reasons why I wouldn't want to take her home right now? Like, so I knew before I anyway, like, I'm just telling you, like, that's a. Long way to say, I think there's going to be a time in the very near future where you're going to be recorded while you're talking to your patients, I hope so, everything you're saying and everything they're saying, and then you're going to go back to a screen or a terminal, and it's already going to tell you what you should be thinking about. Yep, yeah.

Brandon 1:05:21
And, I mean, to be fair, like there are some limitations, and we we explored that, like one of our professors wanted us to explore what the limitations are right now, but that's right now, and who's, who's to say in a few years that those limitations are going to be gone, and we don't have to worry about them as much.

Scott Benner 1:05:39
Listen half the people listening to this, not half of them, but a lot of people listening to this right now are probably living with undiagnosed something right like hypothyroidism or anemia or low vitamin D or any number of things. It's really genuinely, meaningfully impacting your health and happiness. And you are just saying things to yourself like, well, I'm older now. I get you know I was I was, I was going to gain weight, I got older, I was going to be more tired. This happened to me. I have diabetes. That makes sense. That's not true. I put up an episode last week. It's just with this girl. She's like, in her mid 20s, and she's a little on her own. You know what I mean? Like, she doesn't really have very helpful parents. She's got a number of different medical issues, and they're not being addressed. It took me a half an hour of talking to her. I was like, Hey, I think you're anemic. Hey, I think you have this. Are you being treated for your thyroid situation? Oh, they said it wasn't bad enough. Oh, what the does that mean? Right? You have all these thyroid symptoms. They're not giving you the medication. She goes, No, they said it's not bad enough. I'm like, Is your hair falling out? Are you tired all the time? Are you lethargic? Do you feel depressed? She's like, yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm like, seems bad to me over Hey, I've even done that in episodes where I've sat down with somebody and just said, Tell me everything that's wrong with you. We just beat it into an AI model, and it comes back. And I'm like, here, like, take that to your doctor. Like, you know what? I mean, it's just, I get very frustrated by it. But of course, I think it's because I have a lot of conversations people who are generally speaking in that situation. But anyway, you all got to get out of your own way and just do what's going to help people, and not do what you think is going to save your job or your but I mean, that's what we're going to run into, is that they're going to be people fighting against this stuff, tooth and nail, some for very good reasons, and I'm not unaware of those reasons, by the way, what's the great example? Like, if you told a robot, like, make as many paper clips as you can, don't let anything stand in your way. Like, what happens when, like, they run out of metal and they don't know to stop, and they start, you know, rip their robots rip down the buildings to melt the I beams, to make more paper clips, like that, like like that. All needs to be worked out, obviously. And there are going to be plenty of people Brandon who are going to use this stuff in a nefarious way, right? Yeah, you're going

Brandon 1:07:53
to get, I mean, like, it's like, I said, you put the nurses at the beginning. There's a few bad apples in every profession, right? It happens.

Scott Benner 1:07:59
Yeah. I'm just telling you, like, try to imagine a world where you sit down in front of your computer, explain how you feel, and before you even reach a clinician, you know what's wrong, and you can then send it to them and let them re evaluate it. Now you've got human eyes on it, right and and, boom, you're to your answer right away, Yep,

Brandon 1:08:21
yeah, I agree. I will have to put one caveat in here, please, for right now, please do not be Dr Google and like, fight against your healthcare professionals like hell because you found something online that said XYZ, yes, it's good to respectfully challenge them, like Scott was talking about in his example, be like, hey, question. I'm gonna ask this question, I'm gonna ask this question, and I'm gonna state My reasoning for why I'm thinking this. But don't be like, Well, Google said this. So this is true. They are still. They have gone through hundreds of 1000s of hours of medical training and experience. They we do know what we're talking about most of the time. There's just, like, some small things. So please be respectful to your healthcare workers. Thank you. Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:09:07
there's a ton of things you might not know to ask, right? So if you don't know to ask, you're not going to get the answer back and listen. Also, many of you are going to go to awesome doctors and nurses, like, absolutely awesome. But that's not why the conversation needs to happen. The conversation needs to happen because a you don't know which is which Right. Like, if I go to a doctor, my expectation is they're a great doctor. If they're not, how do I know that right? That's good. That's a good question. How do I know I'm not getting the care I should like? If I if there are two people in front of me, like a game show, and I picked the left door, not the right door, and I would have got a better answer in the right door. I'm never gonna know, because the doctor in the left door is gonna go, oh, Brandon, here's your problem, yeah, and here's what we're gonna do. And blah, blah, blah. And six months later, you're like, still, like, hey man, my ass is still dragging, you know what I mean? Like, I don't like, you're not even gonna think maybe the guy sent me the wrong way. Like, maybe. Maybe she didn't know what she was talking about. Like, that's not it. Here's a big picture answer to my question. Generally speaking, how many visits to a doctor does it take to get an answer? Everyday acute issues like strep throat, UTIs and ankle sprains, one visit, sometimes two if you need tests, okay, new but common, chronic conditions like high blood pressure, type two diabetes, thyroid troubles, takes one to two visits tough to sort out problems that need a specialist, like an autoimmune issue or a migraine, for example, can take between three and five encounters with a doctor to come to some sort of an answer. Rare Diseases seven different physicians over a five year average.

Brandon 1:10:43
Okay, yeah, yeah, that's what. That's a long time. Yeah, that's a long time. And no one should have to wait that long.

Scott Benner 1:10:49
You're living your life while that's happening, right? That's my point. My point is that the quicker you can get to it, the quicker you can hopefully get back to your life, or get an answer, or, you know, whatever ends whatever's gonna happen next. And this is not because doctors are bad people. This is just again. This is the limits of humans like and the system and insurance and healthcare in general and all that stuff. I'm gonna ask you one last question. I'll let you go. All right, sounds good. You seem like a really decent guy. Thank you. And the way the system is set No, you're welcome. And the way the system's set up is you're basically working for a bank that sells band aids. How do you reconcile that the healthcare system is not perfect? And I think probably everybody listening recognizes that even the medical professionals, right? We realize it's not a perfect system, and the only real way that we can try to change it is by trying to get ahead of things, like the upstream approach, or has a lot of different names. So trying to get ahead of things and trying to shift our healthcare system instead of treating symptoms, you know, finding the root cause of a problem and treating that ahead of time. And that's kind of a goal that I have as well. It's just trying to, like, help people before it becomes an issue, so that they can live their lives to the best of their ability. Brand, you did not answer my question. Oh, I'm so sorry. Don't be sorry. What I'm saying is, that hospitals are, generally speaking, owned by major conglomerates. They you know, if you look at, if you look at most big businesses, they don't the thing they make their money with is not the thing they are. They usually are lending money, or they have a lot of money, and they and they make that money by selling health care, and but you're the person who's like, I'm trying to help people like that and not that, maybe we're not all in that situation. I mean, honestly, I think if you stop and think about it, we're probably all in that situation to one degree or another. When you are such a like heart first person like, what do you think is going to be your first feeling when you realize you have to order a test that you think isn't necessary, because the diagnosis allows it, and we're allowed to bill for it, so we're going to do it. Yeah,

Brandon 1:13:06
it's going to suck. Like, I know I'm going to have to probably do things like that that I'm not wanting to do, per se, or that is not necessary. I guess at the end of the day, I'm just living my life. You know, I got to earn my paycheck, and I also got to take care of my patients, and whether or not I'm ordering, you know, an extra test or whatever else, I'm still trying my best to help them in any way that I can. And so maybe it's not ideal, not maybe it isn't ideal to be, you know, working for the system. That's not really working for us, but I'm just going to try my best to do what I can

Scott Benner 1:13:47
good answer, and I think it's a very reasonable answer too. I also think you might turn into one of those guys who like slowly closes his eyes and nods his head no while he's saying something, once in a while you need a test from don't do it. Say no and I don't think there's anybody not in that situation, right? Like, if you're working at the Apple Store, you know, 17 rows down the line from you as a kid in a mine, digging up minerals for batteries somewhere. Like, you know what I mean? Like, there's everybody's gonna get caught in that to some degree or another. But it just, it's very in your face, because people are so aware that they feel like they're being ripped off when they're involved in their healthcare. You're a good dude, and I really appreciate this conversation, and I think from all of us, we're super happy you're gonna be out there trying to help people with diabetes. So thank you very much.

Brandon 1:14:36
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the talk. I had a great time. I'm definitely a lot more comfortable than I was at

Scott Benner 1:14:41
the beginning. All right, man, hold on a second. A huge thanks to my longest sponsor, Omnipod. Check out the Omnipod five now with my link, omnipod.com/g Box, you may be eligible for a free starter kit, a free Omnipod five starter kit at my link, go check it out. Omnipod.com/juicebox Terms and Conditions apply. Full terms and conditions can be found at omnipod.com/juicebox Are you tired of getting a rash from your CGM adhesive. Give the ever since 365 a try, ever since cgm.com/juicebox beautiful silicon that they use it changes every day. Keeps it fresh. Not only that, you only have to change the sensor once a year. So I mean, that's better. A huge thanks to us, med for sponsoring this episode of The Juicebox podcast. Don't forget us, med.com/juicebox This is where we get our diabetes supplies from. You can as well, use the link or call 888-721-1514, use the link or call the number get your free benefits check so that you can start getting your diabetes supplies the way we do from us met. Hey, thanks for listening all the way to the end. I really appreciate your loyalty and listenership. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back very soon with another episode of The Juicebox podcast. You

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