Scott Benner 9/23/24 Scott Benner 9/23/24

#1313 Mr. Anderson

Beth is the mother of a five year old type 1.

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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.

We got Beth today. She's 32 years old, the mother of four children, including her son, who has type one diabetes. His name is Paul. Paul is using loop. We're going to talk about that and other things while you're listening. Please remember that nothing you hear on the juicebox podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise. Always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan. Sit back and relax and get ready to listen to Mr. Anderson. Does everybody remember that from the Matrix? Mr. Anderson, don't forget to save 40% off of your entire order@cozyearth.com All you have to do is use the offer code juicebox at checkout. That's juicebox at checkout to save 40 percent@cozyearth.com when you place your first order for AG, one, with my link, you'll get five free travel packs and a free year supply of vitamin D drink. AG, one.com/juice, box. Guys, don't forget to check out the private Facebook group juicebox podcast, type one diabetes. There's links in the show notes. I think you're going to enjoy it. I appreciate you guys downloading and listening. Please make sure you're subscribed or following in your favorite podcast app.

Today's podcast is sponsored by us med. Usmed.com/juice box. You can get your diabetes supplies from the same place that we do, and I'm talking about Dexcom libre, OmniPod, tandem, and so much more US med.com/juice box, or call 888-721-1514, this episode of The juicebox podcast is sponsored by the continuous glucose monitor that my daughter wears, the Dexcom g7 dexcom.com/juice dot com, slash juicebox. Use my link by typing it into a browser or click on it right there in the show notes of your podcast player. That link is also available at juicebox podcast.com

Beth 2:12
so my name is Beth. I am married to Danny, and we have four kids. My oldest is 10. My next oldest is five. His name is Paul, and he has type one diabetes. And then I have Anna is three, and my youngest is three months.

Scott Benner 2:29
Holy, Oh,

Unknown Speaker 2:30
yeah. You

Scott Benner 2:31
know my first question Beth, right?

Unknown Speaker 2:32
No,

Scott Benner 2:33
you doing this for the Lord? Or why we making all these babies? You build an army?

Speaker 1 2:37
We are Christian family, but I don't know that that's the reason why we have all these kids. My oldest is adopted, so we have grown in different ways. But yeah, we love them all. They're great.

Scott Benner 2:48
Beth you adopted a baby?

Speaker 1 2:50
How long ago? Well, I actually he came to our home when he was almost six through foster care, and then we finalized his adoption last year, when he was 10.

Scott Benner 3:01
So you Alright, hold on a second. So you had wait. I'm trying to why is my brain not working?

Speaker 1 3:09
Well, the timeline is funny. So my five year old Paul was one was was the first in our home, once we did foster before, but he was the first permanent child in our home. So he was born in 2018 and then the next year, my oldest King came to join us when he was almost six. And then the next year, my three year old, Anna, was born in 2020 okay. And then we had a little break. And then three months ago, Lydia, yeah. Wait,

Scott Benner 3:39
hold on a second. Did you say King?

Unknown Speaker 3:41
King?

Scott Benner 3:42
Did you leave that out because of my comment about building a an army for the Lord or No, no,

Unknown Speaker 3:48
it wasn't intentional.

Scott Benner 3:49
Did he have a name leader? I guess, hey, with a kid, you don't get to rename them, right? Like you have to keep a name they come with. It could be a

Speaker 1 3:56
choice that some people make. I would think when they're as old as he was when he joined our family, most people would not

Scott Benner 4:03
make that choice a six year old. Hey, listen, you're Jimmy now, okay, yeah,

Speaker 1 4:08
I would hope they would involve the child in that decision, but I

Scott Benner 4:12
would have a hard time changing an animal's name that I don't think would know the difference. True. Oh, my God. Okay, good times, is that it? Or you just rest in that? I'm just gonna say resting that thing up and you're gonna go one more time. But what's your plan?

Speaker 1 4:26
You know, that's probably it, but we'll see what happens in the

Scott Benner 4:30
future. Wow. Well, that's a it's a nice family. How old are you? Yeah, I'm 32 god damn Beth way to jump in the game and start playing both hands. Well, King was actually

Speaker 1 4:41
making fun of me last night because I had to think about my age for a minute, and he thought that made me seem old, which I guess so, but at least I was practiced for this moment.

Scott Benner 4:49
Yeah, no kidding. I hate when I don't know how old I am, but it happens a lot. All right, so Paul has type one. Does anyone else have any autoimmune issues?

Speaker 1 4:58
I come from a. Large family. So the only one person I can pinpoint is my mom's cousin's son has type one. But I don't know if that's just because there's enough people that it would have happened eventually. There's no no large spread autoimmune you

Scott Benner 5:16
don't see any thyroid stuff,

Speaker 1 5:19
not that I'm aware of interesting Paul. We had a little scare with Paul, but his numbers are back down to normal now, so they bounced a little. Yeah, my endo said it's normal for kids, but we had his, it was around 1.2 when he was diagnosed, and then two years later, when they did the routine check, it went up to three point something. And she wasn't concerned about that, but I kind of was, so we rechecked it again a few months later, and it was 4.9 his TSH, yeah. And then she's and then we rechecked it again, I think a month after that, and it was back down to 1.6 so it's certainly something in the back of my head. But for now, nothing

Scott Benner 5:59
was he symptomatic during that time at all, so

Speaker 1 6:02
nothing major. The only thing that I noticed was he would sometimes be cold more than I would anticipate. Like most kids are cold getting out of the bath, but I feel like he talked about it more, or there was one time he had a snow cone, even though it was hot outside, he was cold for like an hour. Nothing like no tiredness or fatigue or hair falling out or anything,

Scott Benner 6:23
right? Maybe he's just like me. I would have relished the chance to bitch about something.

Unknown Speaker 6:29
I mean, he's five, so it comes with the territory. I'm

Scott Benner 6:31
telling you. I was at a garden center yesterday picking up a couple of small shrubberies. I don't know why that made me laugh and and there were, it was cold. It was like, you know that springtime, I don't know where you live in the country, but there's that part in spring where you like, trick yourself into thinking it's going to be warm, and then you go outside and you're like, why is it's got that cold wetness that that was yesterday here. And there are a bunch of ladies working at the garden center, and they're outside bundled up and just eating lunch. And I said to one of them, I'm so impressed that you're just sitting out here eating. And she looks at me like, like, this woman had a look on her face, like she had been through it. You know what I mean? Like, I don't think you end up working at a garden center in your 50s if, like, Goldman Sachs worked out you just shifted right. So she's like, she looked like she had had a tough life. And she looks at me half crazy, like, What are you talking about? I'm like, it's so cold out here. How do you eat it when it's this cold? And she's like, Hey, you just eat was such a funny like response. And I was like, oh, and she looked at me and I said, I'd be complaining just out of both sides of my face. Yeah,

Speaker 1 7:32
I my I work closely with one other person, and I think several times this week, I told her about how cold it is in the office, and that was indoors.

Scott Benner 7:42
No, I love the bitch. No kidding. Okay, let's see what made you want to come on the podcast. I

Speaker 1 7:49
guess a few motivations. I don't know that our story is necessarily unique or interesting or anything, but I

Scott Benner 7:56
Beth, don't start like that. We want them to keep listening, and the advertisers would really like it if they made it to an ad at least. So go very unique

Speaker 1 8:04
and interesting. So my son was pretty young when he was diagnosed, and you know, that's not statistic wise, the most common thing. So I it is always nice for me to be able to hear from other families who have dealt with diabetes in a child so young, and I guess probably when I reached out to we were having a hard time, and I thought, well, maybe Scott can weigh in on this hard time, but you know, then it's six months later, so I can't even remember what was going on. Isn't that so

Scott Benner 8:31
let's talk about that for a second. Sure. How quickly? So how old was he again, when he was diagnosed,

Unknown Speaker 8:37
he was two, almost three, all right, so

Scott Benner 8:39
you've been at this a couple of years now, a little longer, almost three years. Yeah. So what makes you email a stranger and go, Hey, I need help. What was like? Do you remember what was happening? Or can you think of things that have been happening? Dexcom g7 offers an easier way to manage diabetes without finger sticks. It is a simple CGM system that delivers real time glucose numbers to your smartphone, your smartwatch, and it effortlessly allows you to see your glucose levels and where they're headed. My daughter is wearing a Dexcom g7 right now, and I can't recommend it enough, whether you have commercial insurance, Medicare coverage or no CGM coverage at all Dexcom can help you. Go to my link, dexcom.com/juicebox, and look for that button that says, Get a free benefits check that'll get you going with Dexcom when you're there, check out the Dexcom clarity app or the follow. Did you know that people can follow your Dexcom up to 10 people can follow you. Right now I'm following my daughter, but my wife is also following her. Her roommates at school are following her. So I guess Arden's being followed right now by five people who are concerned for her health and welfare. And you can do the same thing, school nurses, your neighbor, people in your family, everyone. Can have access to that information if you want them to have it, or if you're an adult and you don't want anyone to know, you don't have to share with anybody. It's completely up to you. Dexcom.com/juicebox, links in the show notes. Links at juicebox podcast.com. I don't know how you guys order your diabetes supplies, like CGMS, pumps and testing equipment. But at our house, we use us Med, and I'm gonna walk you through the entire process right now. I'm looking at the email from us med. It says it's time to refill your prescription, dear Arden, please click the button below to place your next order. Then you click the button that was it. Two days later, I got this email, thank you for your order from us. Med. We wanted to let you know that your order, and it gives you an order number was shipped via UPS ground. You can track your package anytime using the link below, and then there was a link, and then it showed up at our house. Now I'm going to walk you through the entire chain of events. On the 29th which was the Saturday I clicked on the email. On that Monday, the first, I got an email that said the order had been sent. Four days later. On the fifth, the package arrived. If you can do it easier than that, you go get it. But if you can't, us, med.com/juice, box or call 888-721-1514, get started today with us Med, get your diabetes supplies the same way we do.

Speaker 1 11:32
I think it was around the time. I can't remember exactly, no, we've we've had so many changes, but the timeline isn't matching up in my head. So it was probably just all the variables that go into play with diabetes, especially for a child who's growing it was probably just something changed, and it was the fourth change that happened that week, and we were trying to keep up with it. But what led me to reach out and think that this could potentially be helpful is that the podcast has been the most helpful thing in our journey with diabetes, so far, as far as knowing how to manage his care.

Scott Benner 12:06
Okay, all right. Well, we'll get to that for sure, sure. In your note, you say trialing multiple therapies, and you list like, different CGMS, different insulins, different, you know, algorithms. So tell me a little bit about like, what have you been doing? Are you like a mad scientist over there?

Speaker 1 12:24
I'm not a mad scientist, but I am the type of person who's going to try to find the best solution right now. Paul uses loop with OmniPod dash and Dexcom g7 and his insulin is fiasp. We started off just MDI, as everyone does. So we left the hospital with Lantus for his long acting in violin syringe, and then I believe it was Novolog, whatever insulin ass part is, for his fast acting in a pen. So we did that for about two months before, we convinced the endocrinologist to put him on a pump, we were kind of getting the routine we need to do MDI for quite a while first, but since he was so young, we really wanted the micro dosing that the pump could offer, sure, so we switched to OmniPod dash at that time, ultimately switched To OmniPod five as soon as it was available. After he was on OmniPod five, we switched to fiasp, which was another thing I had to kind of bring up with the endo several times she was concerned about, I guess this the clinical trial, when they were bringing FDA clearance for fiasp in young children, noted a slight increase of hypoglycemia. So she was concerned about that, but eventually wrote us the prescription. He did use g6 with the OmniPod five for a while, and then our one of our big motivations to switch to loop was because we wanted him to be able to use the g7 we've had a decent amount of issues with Dexcom, even though it's life saving and not anything we would ever want to give up. We we have ongoing issues with Dexcom, and we're hopeful that switching from g6 to g7 might work, but okay, I think that covers most of it all. Right. Cool.

Scott Benner 14:13
So what makes you go manual, automated, then automated? DIY. How come you switch from OmniPod five?

Speaker 1 14:23
The biggest motivator for us is we wanted him on the g7 and it was not compatible. Still, at this point, is not compatible with the OmniPod five, but we still wanted an algorithm. I also like that DIY includes a few more features that OmniPod five at this time doesn't have available, for example, the caregiver us on our phones being able to see his current insulin on board and carbs on board, and things. And the fact that I just think DIY loop has a better handle on all of the different variables of. OmniPod of diabetes compared to OmniPod five. So the fact that you get to choose kind of how the carbs are expected to impact him with timing, OmniPod five was not as adaptable to the changing needs of our young child as we needed it to be. So for example, you know, let's say Halloween, where he likes to eat, you know, 200 carbs or so, then we'd see OmniPod five being more aggressive over the next week or so, because it saw that his insulin needs rose after that day. Versus, I feel like with DIY loop, we have more of an opportunity to manage and adjust for expected changes. So for me,

Scott Benner 15:45
I'm sorry, almost like if you could just tell OmniPod five, hey, this is an excursion we expected, right? Yes, yeah, this isn't a trend change. This is a this is a steak and a potato and and ice cream like that kind of thing. Yeah, yes.

Speaker 1 15:58
I certainly don't think DIY loop is for everyone, but for us, it's been great because we're willing to put in the time to learn about all the variables and all of the different insulin to carb ratio and the correction factor, all the different parts and pieces that you have to kind of fine tune. I think for someone who knows and understands those as thoroughly as you can, loop makes a lot of sense, because you can manipulate them in ways that work for your case, or your child versus OmniPod five. You kind of leave a lot of it to the system to handle, which I'm not very good at, and I don't think in our case, worked as well. It's

Scott Benner 16:35
kind of funny that how companies, I'm not even just singling one out here, but how companies sometimes like, you know, we'll take it over, like, we'll automate it. And you're like, I'd like to be able to see the switches and the and the and the knobs, if you don't mind, because I might want to turn one of them. But they, you know, I get their point too, and I also see their perspective. You listen to this podcast, and you would think that everybody that has type one diabetes is out there, just like, I know what to do. I'll make my instant sensitivity 1.5 weaker. And I'm gonna do like that most people are not in that scenario. And, you know, if you can put them in an automated system, it keeps them, you know, in a somewhere in a six, A, 1c, like, Geez, what a godsend, really, you know. And I think maybe that's the market there that they find themselves in and I understand that

Speaker 1 17:23
I'm a health care provider, I'm an audiologist, so I work with families with different medical needs, and so I I kind of understand the spectrum of what caretakers are are taking on in different roles. So I agree with you that for the vast majority of people, the algorithms that are available on the market are fantastic for us, people like me who want a little bit more tweaking and control. Yeah, why is Yeah,

Scott Benner 17:46
you like to have access. I mean, listen audiology. So if you put, I don't know, a hearing aid on somebody who doesn't completely understand how it works, they just missed, like, part of the Rockford Files, you know, like, it's not like their blood sugar is going to get super low or something like that. So, you know, it's, but it is really about people's ability. You can't make a thing for everybody. It just, it just won't work that way. So you make something that's safe for the most amount of, I guess, targeted audience, right? You know, it's, um, but, but I take your point. Look, Arden uses Iaps right now, and if something better came along, I'd go to that. I mean, like, I'd be, like, let me try this. Like, I thought loop was terrific, but Iaps works like, really well. So

Speaker 1 18:33
I've, I've heard a little about that one and considered it, but I haven't done enough looking into it to find out if it would do anything better for us or not, what's

Scott Benner 18:41
your outcomes with loop and g7 like

Speaker 1 18:45
good, I have a hard time keeping up with the changes, and I'm hopeful that as he gets bigger, that might get better, until we hit puberty. Then I'm sure it's going to be crazy for several years. But for us, I feel like we'll nail things down and it's going well, and the blood sugar's doing what you expected to do. And then the next day, he things go crazy. And then two days later, you find out, Oh, he was getting a stomach bug. And then, of course, with a stomach bug, things are messed up for weeks afterwards. And with a five year old in school, I feel like that's constantly happening because there's

Scott Benner 19:17
dirty little I was going to curse, but those dirty little kids are like, they're always getting each other sick.

Speaker 1 19:22
Yes, I think we've had four stomach bugs this year, and that's the worst one to try to manage. So we should

Scott Benner 19:30
be able to rename them without them having a say. That's what I think. At this point, we're

Unknown Speaker 19:36
satisfied with everyone's names.

Scott Benner 19:37
No, I mean even other people's children. I'd like to, like, just walk around and be like, You look more like a hiring. So you mentioned the stomach bugs and things are different afterwards. For you. Is it a lower need of insulin afterwards? Generally?

Speaker 1 19:51
Yeah. So usually, when a stomach bug happens for the few days, he's in it, our insulin needs are very, very minimal, I'd say. A third to a fourth of what he's usually doing, and then we've had stomach bugs where he's been at like half of his insulin needs for four or six weeks after. I don't know if that's typical, but it's definitely been the case for us, or sometimes a few days later, it slowly goes back up to normal, and then we're fine, but you never quite know which one it's going to be.

Scott Benner 20:20
Yeah, you hear that story so much. I wonder if somebody's studying that, you know, trying to figure out what that, what that is. Because, I mean, if we could just keep everybody low level sick,

Speaker 2 20:31
they'd use less insulin. Pros and cons of that, yeah. I mean, you know, the downside, of course, is the nausea and vomiting and stuff like that. When you said you wanted to get to the g7

Scott Benner 20:43
why? Why were you hot to get to it?

Speaker 1 20:45
So I guess I'm a little torn, because I don't know how honest I should be about our Dexcom. Hold on

Scott Benner 20:51
a second. Let me be clear about something I don't care. Just say what happened to you. Like, Listen, if Dexcom or any of my sponsors stopped buying ads because somebody came on here and told their honest opinion of what happened. I would probably call them out on it afterwards. I'd probably say, Hey, you're not going to hear ads from blah blah blah anymore because they had a little fcking, you know, nutty after somebody said blah blah blah because, I mean, these things just don't work the same for everybody. And I say it all the time, Dexcom just works for Arden, yeah, I've talked to people who can't get a decent reading out of a CGM Dexcom libre doesn't know. It's like their body chemistry doesn't work with the CGMS for some reason, so I don't know why, but yeah, tell your story. Go ahead. What would we say in church? Testify. Go ahead. Testify. Got

Speaker 1 21:38
it. Yes. I'll testify. So I do, like you said, I think we're in a very small minority of people, but I do see other stories similar to ours online. So my best guess is that Dexcom just does not jive super well with his body chemistry. For he started Dexcom in May of 2021 so very early on in our diabetes journey, he's been wearing it continually since then, and for, I'd say, three or four months, it worked well. We would get the 10 days aside from adhesive issues, which, with a three year old, things come off. But in the fall of 2021 our our sensors just stopped lasting for 10 days. I'd say, since then, I've had less than 10 sensors that have made it to 10 days. And it's a variety of things that happen for us. The I'd say the most common one is day four or five, but sometimes earlier or later, we just start getting sensor errors that pop on, pop off, pop on, pop off. So then you're not really getting any usable data for several hours. And then, I don't know, we've had a few times where we've waited that out for long enough that it's gotten back on. But sometimes you wait it out and then it ends in the sensor failure. And sometimes you wait it out and just give up. Well, with a sensor error, no. The guidelines I have for myself, as far as calibrating is, I only try to calibrate it if we're getting good, continuous data, and it's like straight as it can be, and if we're having off readings. But this is just with the sensor areas where we're not getting, you know, it'll go for a while, and then it'll just be blank for an hour, 30 minutes, or whatever. That happens most commonly, but we also pretty frequently have sensors that just start reading artificially low. And it's not because of compression. It's just, you know, he's coasting along at 100, 120 or something, but his sensor is reading 4050, and those I do try to calibrate, but sometimes it works, and most of the times it doesn't, and we'll just have it looking like that for hours, and then eventually need to change it, especially with, you know, an automated system that's not helpful. Yeah, with the g6 I'd say on average, sensors would last five or six days for us, and we're switching to something else. Thankfully, Dexcom has always been very good about replacing if we need to pull it early for some reason, but we were hoping switching from g6 to g7 would eliminate the issues, which didn't end up happening. I would say it's better, but we have the improvement that we do see is we don't have to wait the two hour warm up time when we are switching from one sensor to another. So that's been helpful with the g7 to have just a 30 minute warm up, or even shorter at some times. So yeah, that was our biggest motivation. I mentioned in the web page. I think that when I wrote into that, we also did use the FreeStyle Libre for a bit, and mostly we never, we never got off of Dexcom. But we could get the libre and either, like a couple times, our endos office gave us a sample to try, or we would purchase it out of pocket, so that, let's say we were going on a vacation or something where we wanted to not have to worry about the Dexcom issues. We could. Uh, have the Dexcom on him. And then if we started having issues, we would put a libre on him as well, and be able to, you know, track what was going on that. How

Scott Benner 25:08
did you find the libre good? We the libre

Speaker 1 25:11
three was fantastic. It worked really well for him. It's teeny tiny. The thing I don't love about libre compared to Dexcom, is the alerts and alarms, they're not as customizable. And I just, yeah, I don't, I don't feel ready to make a switch. And I know as far as looping goes at this time, it's not as compatible with loop. There are ways to do it, but it's just more of a workaround. So we've stuck with Dexcom, but not sure what the future will look like. We we did not have issues as far as like sensor errors and the readings being off with the libre that we've had with the Dexcom. But I'm not sure if that's just because we only used it occasionally, or Yeah, or whatnot.

Scott Benner 25:56
But How great is it to go into the loop settings and just be like, I'm gonna wear a g6 No, I'm gonna wear a g7 that just like, switches, yeah, yes. And then the other companies are like, we can't get this to work. I'm like, I mean, a guy got it to work,

Unknown Speaker 26:12
you probably could, yeah. I

Scott Benner 26:13
mean, I hope to one day meet the person. But whoever Ivan is, like, he's my go to name. Like, Ivan figured it out. I love it. I just love it when they're like, it's hard to make something work with Android. It's hard to make something work with Apple. It's hard. I'm like, Ah, the guy did it, right? Ivan, he did Yes. Ivan, Hey, Ivan, if you're out there, man, big fan, yes, absolutely. But yeah, isn't that fascinating? Like, just really, like, like, oh, we can't get it straight. I'm like, you can't like, or we can't get it through the FDA, or it's taken forever. I know, listen, I know. Ivan doesn't have to go to a governing body afterwards and say, Uh, hey, this, uh, you guys happy with this and test it with however many people, etc, but, um, have you ever once heard somebody in the DIY community complain about some catastrophic failure, commiserate with what the retail companies are telling you that they're worried about? And no, like, I've never heard someone say like, Oh my God. Like, you know, they made it work with the g7 but it's unreliable, or it's about it just, you know, hold on a second. I have to text Arden sure she thinks she knows something. I just had to let her know she didn't All right, now she knows how she realizes again, that I'm that the parent is always right, yes, that I know things she doesn't know. Oh, she was very, uh, she was very nice about it. That's good. Oh, good. Sometimes they fight. They think, actually, that's more me, my wife's like, you're still arguing. You know you're wrong. I'm like, I know, but I think my argument is rock solid. She's at school. She needed two tires on her car. Hold on a second, and so she took it to a dealership first. And I was like, Oh, don't do that. And they, you know, the price wasn't bad. Can I read this on a podcast recording? I hope she lets me

Speaker 1 28:11
I was gonna say, I think she's gonna say no, based

Scott Benner 28:15
on like, this would be so funny. You know her better. So, so I said, um, they wanted to put the same damn tire on the car that rotted out from under the car, like the first time. And I'm like, no, like, we're gonna go get better, like, better tires. So I told her, I'm gonna send you to a place up the street, I'm gonna have them order tires, and you can have them put on right? And so it's just now she texts and goes, the price here wasn't that much better than the other price. And I said, No, but these are better tires. And and she goes, Okay, gotcha. And then I'm done. Oh God, I want to redo what she just said, Oh my god, okay, I'll go back to it shows if she, I hope she lets me read this. It's so interesting doing stuff like distance wise with her, yeah, you know, because she's very far away. And so I was like, Oh, I'll get I'll take care of ordering them, like I said, I'll move money into your account that you can pay, like, pay with. And she's like, okay, but then, you know, this is her day off, so this is the one day a week she doesn't have classes. Okay, oh, I can read this all right, okay, I'll say thank you. How long until you're home? Okay, so the price here was not that much different. I said better tires than they were, and then they were going to use. Gotcha ready. It is 11:26am on a Friday, and I am at Discount Tire. My makeup from yesterday is on my face. My boobs are half out, and doja cat is playing.

Unknown Speaker 29:49
That's quite a picture.

Scott Benner 29:52
She speaks in words like a pictures. Excuse me anyway. So this is where she's at, not bothering me, by the way, she knows I'm recording. But that didn't seem to stop her. Well, yeah, yeah, they told her that she'd be in and out in an hour, and now they're telling her an hour and a half. Oh, I think she'll live through it, since I'm paying, since I'm paying for the tires, back to the CGM thing. So you tried libre. Liked it, but had limited case, you know, use for you didn't use it a ton. So you didn't, you weren't dissatisfied with Dexcom enough to be like, let's just keep using the libres.

Speaker 1 30:27
Yes, yes. Well, Dexcom, despite the issues that we have, it, is the most flexible as far as connecting to the pump, which is non negotiable for us, and then having different alerts and alarms on his phone versus our phones, and just being able to keep up with, yeah, with the alarm. So we're, we've always been on Dexcom. We're, I will say, so thankful for it. And I know people who have had diabetes for decades like, you know this is a non issue, and I'm sure it is, but, yeah, it's been good to us, despite the difficult.

Scott Benner 31:04
It's interesting to hear people who are more newly diagnosed talk about technology because you don't have like you didn't have to, like your kid, didn't shoot, you know, regular and mph and do the exchange diet or whatever. So this is the world you were dropped into. They tell you, Hey, this is what the thing does. And when the thing doesn't do it all the time, you're like, hey, you told me it did that. And so, I mean, I always say I don't have one piece of technology that really works exactly the way they say it's going to. I have, like, even down to my monitors on my computer, like, sometimes they just won't wake up. I don't know why. I have to pull the video cable out of the back of the back of the computer and plug it back in to get the monitor to come back on. I want to be clear with you, the monitor cost 800 goddamn dollars. It should work. You know what I mean. And if you're like, oh my god, $800 it's big, wide monitor because I'm old and I have to edit on and I can't see a goddamn thing. So don't give me about my monitor being expensive, but it doesn't work all the time, and it my phone freezes for reasons I don't understand, and stuff reboots all the time, and blah, blah, blah. And then when something related to health does that, we're like, oh, like, we're all just like, like, you know, we act like we're a virgin. And we're like, oh my God, I don't believe this is happening. It is what it is like. Should it be No. Do we want it to get better? Yes, but you go ahead and live without a CGM for a year after having one, and tell me if you wouldn't take a couple of false readings? Yep, yeah, absolutely. And the one thing I can never quantify for people is you hear this question a lot from people who are considering algorithms, if I lose my CGM signal, like, what happens, or if it's reading falsely high or falsely low, like, aren't I going to get too much insulin or not enough insulin? And the only answer I've ever had that I know is not satisfactory is my daughter's been doing this a long time. It's never really been a problem.

Speaker 1 32:54
Yeah, yeah. I agree. When we're having issues, we'll just turn off the algorithm for a bit. One thing that's really nice with DIY loop is, if we are having times when we don't have the data we need, we can go in and enter a manual blood sugar, and then it still is kind of considering that when it's making its decision. So that's been nice, but yeah, it's I feel like using the algorithm 90 95% of the time is great. And then when we need to turn it off for a little bit because our technology is being unruly, then, then

Scott Benner 33:27
that's what it is, yeah, and listen, and if it happens all the time, I get it. But you're also, like, I said this once on a recording, but I said it with a guy from Dexcom, so I imagine that cynical people thought I was defending them. But I really think this, like, it's a piece of like technology, like metal and plastic and electronics intersecting with the liquid in your body, right? Like, just be amazed by it. Like you don't even just stand back and go, I can't believe this does this fascinating. And instead, people are like, mine only makes it eight days or something, you know, and then I'll be like, did they send you new ones to go? Yeah, I'm like, so you tell me you had to send an email. Is this the, this is your hardship? Like, so I don't know. I'd like to hear about the diagnosis that you that you had with your son, and because you said it was during potty training, and you said that, like it was specific, I want

Speaker 1 34:23
to know why. Yes, I in my head, I think we, we potty trained him into DKA. It was when you look back, you can see the signs of diabetes. Had already kind of settled in for weeks, but we had scheduled this weekend to do potty training with him, and the method that we used was essentially pumping him full of liquids so that he would have to go to the bathroom a lot and then practice using the toilet. Okay? And so that included juice and, you know, high sugar, things that we didn't usually have around. And so we were just kind of. Was through the potty training process, giving him a lot of extra fast acting carbs that we didn't know were just trying to kill him. So it was a Friday, we started potty training, and then through the weekend, and then that Monday, I believe, was when we finally brought him into the pediatrician and ended up at the hospital after that. And you know, he was not doing well before again, when you look back, you can see the signs, but it was, I think, that extra that made him go into DK and have the by the time we were there, he was having the respirations, the shallow breathing and just was not staying awake and things like that. And I did have some background knowledge of diabetes, but I kept kind of writing it off over the previous weeks. And I do remember at one point in the potty training process, he said that he didn't want the juice anymore. And in the back of my head, I said, Man, if this really is diabetes, then this kid is like evolved enough to know that this is not good for his body. But I didn't. I didn't know I was still writing it off. You know, I didn't know enough about the seriousness of it to actually take the next step. But it was just,

Scott Benner 36:13
you have to tell me why you thought diabetes what it was your background knowledge.

Speaker 1 36:17
I had dated someone when I was 17, 1819, who had type one. So that's another interesting story. Yeah, so that. And then I also, I was in an organization in college, and the the philanthropy that the organization had was JDRF, so I knew, yeah, maybe

Scott Benner 36:36
you've been destined to this for some reason, I

Speaker 1 36:38
guess so. Yeah, I obviously, well, I married someone different from that Boyfriend Back in the day, and ended up still with a child with type one diabetes. The odds

Scott Benner 36:49
can't get away from this Exactly. How long did you date that kid?

Speaker 1 36:53
Um, it was a couple of years. He was young too, so and was not managing his diabetes or handling his diabetes well. So it's very interesting to think about that time versus being in a totally different role and and caring for diabetes. But he was kind of in that stage of he was diagnosed in his teens, and then now this was, he was an old teen or young 20 something, and was in the stage of not wanting to do anything about it, just wanting to ignore it, kind of a thing. So

Scott Benner 37:22
did your experience in that dating experience? Did it make you think diabetes was something that it wasn't or were you even aware back then that he wasn't doing well enough for himself?

Speaker 1 37:32
I was aware that he was not doing well for himself. I'm sure it. It colored how I interpreted diabetes at the beginning, but I think that probably changed quickly as I gathered much more knowledge about it. But at that time he was he was on MDI. He really wanted a an insulin pump, but the way his parents, who were the in the insurance carriers in the family, they wouldn't let him get an insulin pump until he was doing better with his management. So we were in that kind of cycle of, you know, he didn't, he wanted to ignore it, but you can't really, well, you can never ignore it. But with MDI, you have to be pretty, you know, doing the injections all the time. And that was one big thing that he had a hard time with, and just coping with the fact that he had diabetes, is that, you know, every time I have to eat or I want to eat something, I have to take an injection. And so it was, it was not a good situation. I know he was in DKA at least once during our when we were dating. And then he just was always, I think, running high. So of course,

Scott Benner 38:32
I don't ever understand that perspective. I know that if they think somebody's just not taking care of themselves, their concern is, if we take them off MDI and they don't put their pump on, or they let their pump run out of insulin, they're going to go into DKA and drop dead. So at least if they're injecting their basal insulin, they've got something going but, boy, that's such a least common nut denominator way of thinking about things. You know, yeah. I mean, it sounds more to me like this kid just didn't want to inject insulin all the time, but insulin all the time with a needle, like, give him a pump so he could push a button. Yeah. And then people are so certain, like, we're not gonna let you do this until that I'm like, What do you know about anything? You know? You mean, like, everybody's got opinions. I mean, I have a ton of opinions, but, you know, I'm saying, okay, so looking forward. I mean, Paul's pretty young still. Yeah. How involved is he in his management?

Speaker 1 39:27
Pretty much zero at this point. He is welcome to be involved like every once while. I'll see if he wants to do his finger stick or things like that, because he can do it, but he's just not interested. He wants things to be done as quickly as possible so he can move on to something else. The one thing I've been thinking I need to focus on a little bit more with him is having him practice and understand that he can't just eat things without thinking about it ahead of time, because we try to, when we're managing his diabetes at home, we try not to make it a big deal, you know, like. I'm not talking every time before we have a meal about like, Oh, I'm giving your insulin now and things like that. But I think that can have consequences. As far as he could be out and about, and someone could offer him a cookie and he wouldn't think anything, you know, like, if his cousin, when we're visiting gave him a cookie or something, he would just eat it and not think about it. So that's one thing. I think he's ready for some more responsibility. But overall, he's not involved.

Scott Benner 40:22
Are you gonna go with that? Basically, the way I did it, just kind of talk out loud about it until it seems like it's commonplace. Yeah, probably, yeah. I think. I mean, it worked for Arden. I don't know. I don't know if it'll work for everybody else, but yeah, I am stunned at her level of understanding, sometimes based on how little effort she appears to put into understanding it, you

Speaker 1 40:45
know, just became a background of how she lived her life. Just

Scott Benner 40:49
seems like she knows, yeah, to the point where now, if you, like, text her and you're like, Hey, she's like, I gotta leave me alone. Stop. I'm like, All right, fine. Like, she's like, Do you really think she said to me one time? Do you really think my blood sugar's 60 and I'm not doing anything about it? I'm anything about it? I'm like, No,

Speaker 1 41:04
as a parent, though you sometimes do you like, go to worst case scenario, but

Scott Benner 41:08
yeah, no, of course. Like, I'll say no, I genuinely believe you are. But if, for some reason, that CGM is wrong and you're actually 30 and it came on you quickly and you didn't realize it, or you're asleep or something like that, then, I mean, I feel it feels incumbent upon me to do this. And she's like, I took care of it already. I'm like, Okay. She'll be like, I'm fine. This thing's wrong. She'll say that sometimes, though. And I'm like, Just test, uh, test like, Orange. Just test real quick. Fine.

Speaker 1 41:44
Yeah, I do think too about where management will be in 13 years. I you know, I don't anticipate we'll have a cure by then, as I've heard from so many people that that was promised for so long, but I'm sure things will be different. So just thinking about him being off on his own, and who knows how long, it seems pretty far away at this point. I'm sure.

Scott Benner 42:06
I hope that every one of those pump companies is working on an AI based system to Yeah, to learn that can actually kind of learn your situation, learn the variables and make adjustments I'm seeing. So I'll tell you this now, because it's nobody's gonna hear it for six months, and then it's just between you and I, and you seem like I could just tell you, like you're gonna go to hell if you say this and you won't say it. So I've just signed an agreement with a company. It's a startup, but they're going to index my entire podcast, and they have a proprietary AI system that pulls information from the entirety of the podcast, and so you'll get a prompt on a website where you can ask it a question and that it'll It's like, it's like, you're Googling just the juicebox podcast, if that makes sense, yeah. And so I'm hoping that that's going to be a way that people can ask diabetes questions to, you know, to this thing. And of course, you know it's going to be, it's a tough decision that I made, because it could be wrong. First of all, I could be wrong. It could misinterpret something that was correctly said, like, who knows, right? So it's gonna, you know, it's gonna be disclaimer doubts out the ass, basically. But at the same time, you know, when you Google something, nothing says you're gonna get the right answer back, right? You know, I think the world understands that. Now and then, I just entered into something with another company. They are developing an AI doctor. So, I mean, that's actually like a pay like service where you'll be able to, again, ask an AI doctor questions. And they wanted to incorporate the podcast into their database as well. I haven't agreed to that yet. I've entered into an agreement with them to be like, they'll come to me when they have questions with the consultant. I've entered into a consulting agreement with them, in case you're all like, oh my god, it pays nothing. So just be like, switch to I have a quarter percent of a stock if this company goes, you know, to bazillion dollars, then Scotty, then I'll be I'll be rich then. And that's probably not going to happen. No disrespect to the gentleman who's working, you know, his his ass off on it, but it's just, you know, unlikely. But if it goes public and it goes big, I'll make some money that way. This is not a thing where I'm going to make money if somebody uses it or not. I've been thinking about this now for a couple of years. Yeah, you know, I was listening to a couple of interviews with people talking about AI, and I kept thinking, like, what if this large language model was just trained on the podcast like this? I don't imagine. There isn't anything that we haven't talked about in here, right? You know. And one of the biggest problems that I've seen over the last 15 or so years being in this space is these people, like, write these amazing blog posts, and then they're gone. Like, you know, they're read by 20 people, they're read by 100 people, they're, you know, and it's gone. Or somebody puts up this thoughtful post on Instagram, people like, oh my god, that really helped me. And then 24 hours later, it doesn't exist anymore. This keeps happening. We keep you know, I put all this information together. If I stop making the podcast, people like, Why do you put out so many episodes? I'm like, if the podcast doesn't stay popular, the information dies. Like, so I put the podcast out every day so that hopefully it's more of an entertainment thing for people that's mixed in with diabetes, and honestly, then I'm looking to basically trick you into taking care of yourself, or almost the way I tricked Arn into understanding diabetes. Basically, I'm doing to you guys what I did to her, and I'm just talking about diabetes out loud without you feeling like you're being like spoken to by a teacher, I guess. Yeah, the idea. And so I want this stuff to stay behind, and they're telling me that it's not crazy to think that one day you'll ask it a question, and that it'll literally answer in my voice. Oh, and I'm like, that's creepy, but yeah, I do want that. I don't know how they would make that happen, because I've recorded my voice so much it can be sampled, like, like an algorithm will actually be able to just rebuild my voice from the sounds that I've already made. It'll be like, you're a robot, yeah, but my kids will be able to talk to me when I'm dead, even if, as long as they only ask about, No, probably not. Isn't that an interesting question. So are your parents with us? You're young. They are right. Beth. You seem like an older person with your measurements, like your your personality, you come off in your 40s. Are you the person I'm thinking? Are you very responsible and even tempered and that kind of stuff? Yeah, it's how you sound. Did you know people sound like that? I guess

Speaker 1 47:01
I wouldn't say people sound like that, but in having a long enough conversation, I guess you would get that vibe.

Scott Benner 47:06
I get it from you right away, just from the sound of your voice. I'm very happy to jump to conclusion people like you shouldn't generalize. I'm like, that's how I do everything. It

Unknown Speaker 47:14
works a lot of

Scott Benner 47:16
fun. Like you, I shouldn't do that. It's all I do. Yeah. So like, would you go to a prompt at a computer and talk to a dead relative, knowing that it's not really them, but it's got so much of their thoughts and conversations archived that it could approximate how they would answer?

Speaker 1 47:36
So I'm not my first thought in that would be, I probably wouldn't do that for someone like my husband or my parents, who I, you know, spent my life with and got to talk with them regularly, but like maybe my grandmother, who passed away when I was young, just to, like, get more quote, unquote, time with her. But not sure,

Scott Benner 47:59
I think, I think overall, it's interesting and valuable. I think if you got confused into believing you were actually talking to that person, then it would borderline on sad and creepy. But, yeah, but imagine if you had that like, I'm not trying to brush your husband out the door, but imagine your husband's gone right, and you knew that you could ask that prompt certain questions, and it would answer, and he would say something like, Beth, I love you and I miss you, yeah? Like, you might do that, yeah, probably the picture of my mom in my office. It doesn't talk to me, but yeah, I do have some of her voicemails, yeah, and I listen to them sometimes, and it makes me feel nice when she's like, I'll call you later. And I think, Oh, I'm gonna talk to my mom later. Yeah, yeah. And then I know I'm not really going to, but it feels nice for a second. Would my kids jump onto this? Listen? I can say this. I think if there's a portal online that Arden can go ask it diabetes questions as she's growing up, and my voice answers her back, I think it would be really nice. Yeah,

Speaker 1 49:06
yeah. I'm curious to see how that ends up, like what the answers will be, and how the AI will take into account podcast episodes that are older versus newer. You know, because a question could be asked now and the answer would be potentially different than what it was five years ago. But, well,

Scott Benner 49:26
yeah, that would be for you to dig through. But I'm going to tell you, I've seen the returns that come back, and they are astonishingly accurate and valuable, nice, uh, astonishing, yeah. So imagine this too, with the AI doctor, which will be called, I think it's called, it's going to be called Vision AI. It's going to have access to your live CGM data. So how about when I demoed it? It was hooked to a live person, and I said to it, hey, what's my blood sugar? And it said, your blood sugar is currently 78 it's been stable for the last blah, blah, blah, like it. Laid out my blood sugar, and I said, Do you think I'm gonna get low in the next hour? And it said that it didn't expect that we were gonna get low in the next hour, but that if I was concerned about it, I should have this many carbs right now. And I was like, God, damn, really? And this is not, like, fully fleshed out yet, like it's still being built. And I said, um, I'm going to eat a 60 carb meal. How much should I bolus and how long should I wait before I begin to eat? And it gave me a number for both. Well, so if you don't know what you're doing, imagine if it if it knew, and then eventually maybe you'd learn, and you could stop paying for the service and move on. And

Speaker 1 50:43
I guess the hope with AI is that it could incorporate more variables than like the current algorithms do. Oh,

Scott Benner 50:50
yeah, like where you are, what restaurant you're at, what was your outcome the last time you ate at this restaurant on a Friday versus what was your outcome the last time you ate at this restaurant on a Tuesday

Speaker 1 51:00
or even, like your activity low, like your heart rate over the last couple hours, and how that might,

Scott Benner 51:05
right? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah. I don't see any reason why it couldn't do that. I was in a meeting the other day about one of these companies, and I asked the question, I can't be specific. I was like, Can it do this? And the guy goes, no, but asked me again in six months, oh, like that, quickly, quickly, yeah. And I was like, okay, he goes six months from now to be able to do that. Wow, my God, damn. What is it? I don't understand that's happening in the world. You know what I mean. So anyway, I don't know good or bad how it's going to be, but I think this is the direction that I'm seeing things going in. I kind of want to be along for the ride to see what happens. Yeah, definitely. We'll see what happens. And I want you all to know if that stock should go public and make me rich. The first thing I'm going to do, and I hope they're not listening, is I'm going to drop all my advertisers, so I don't have to do that anymore. And I'm just going to make the podcast. I'm going to be like, Oh my god, I finally don't have to make those ads anymore. Not that I don't love the advertisers. They're actually all really terrific and very supportive and wonderful. And I'm not saying a bad thing about them. It's just so much extra work. Well,

Speaker 1 52:11
if the advertisers are listening, we did choose OmniPod, mostly because of the juicebox podcast. I was really thinking T slim, but my husband was hooked by that so see, they'll stay on,

Scott Benner 52:23
shut up and send me money. No, I'm just kidding. You should hear how they complain to me, Doc, not OmniPod, but some of them, your clicks are down this month. I'm like, leave me alone. Your blah, blah, blah rate is this one company was like, like, I said, I'm selling these things in the doctor's office, not online. I'm like, No one's buying that online. Like, stop it. Yeah, they get. People get into the doctor's office and they're asked a question, and people go, Oh, you know what I've heard, I'd like try this, please. Like, you think people are going online to buy glucagon? Like as an example, like, who's doing that? You know what I mean? No one, no one. But the world's all metric stuff, anybody who doesn't have to be involved in advertising and all of the pressure that comes with it, like, Count yourself lucky, because, yes, I basically feel like I work for every one of the advertisers, yeah, like so you know, when your boss expects something from you and how much pressure that is, I have 10 people that treat me that way, so it ain't fun. Yeah, Beth, what did I not let you talk about that you wanted to

Speaker 1 53:33
talk about. I didn't want to talk about managing a young child with diabetes. And I know that's a huge, broad topic, but the thing that always comes to mind for me when I'm listening to these episodes of parents who are managing their children is, it seems to me that for a young child who's smaller in stature weight and therefore has generally lower insulin needs for us, one little misstep can impact their blood sugar, and it seems like such a bigger way. So for example, with Paul, especially when he was younger, if we missed by point one units of insulin, you know that was going to impact his blood sugar probably 50 points down the road, versus an older child, I would imagine, like Arden now, maybe wouldn't even point one unit. It wouldn't make a difference, right, right? So I don't know. I've been trying to come up with a good metaphor for it, and the only I'm hoping maybe you have an idea, because the only thing for me that comes to mind is thinking about reality shows like Survivor, where they're trying to do those competitions. And I'm thinking like with a an older child. So the vision in my head is someone trying to balance on, like a flat, like a plate, but it's totally flat, trying to balance the ball without the ball falling off the edges. And I think about an older child being like a pool, like a billiards ball that's heavier. And, you know. Know, even if you shift it a little way, still have a decent amount of leverage to get it back where you needed to go, versus, like a ping pong ball, this small child that's, you know, the wind blows and it's off the edge. But I don't know that's one thing that for me, it's been hard listening to the podcast episodes and trying to compare my situation to others, and just feeling like, even though I'm trying my best we end up so veered off to the side so often, but I do think a part of that is just because he's small.

Scott Benner 55:26
Okay, so my my question is, I get this sometimes, not just on this topic, not just like you know you're talking about this, but my kids younger, I get well, everything seems like you're talking about pumping, but I'm on MDR or, you know, this is outdated, like, this is a conversation about loop from three years ago. I wish people could understand, and they will, after time, it's all the same in one way or another. It's all timing and amount. That really is the truth. Like, everything about managing insulin is using the right amount of insulin at the right time, whether it's point one, you know, or 20 units, or something like that. The basis of the ideas are all the same. Now, what happens afterwards? Feels different when your kid's younger, when they're smaller, when they're more active, less active, etc, when to an adult versus a kid, but the bedrock of it is always going to be the same, yeah, even when it's one day in magic algorithm that is like, oh, you're a Pizza Hut. And the last time you were a Pizza Hut, it took this many units to blah, blah, blah. Like, it's all still going to be timing an amount true. That's it. So the way I figure it is, there's nothing really to say to you as I mean, unless I'm missing the boat, there's nothing I can say to you that's going to help you in the current situation you're in, other than to tell you you're going to have an amazing understanding of how insulin works. He's going to put on weight, and these small amounts are not going to mean the same anymore. Yeah, it'll get better, and that will come more quickly than you believe. Yeah, that's pretty much it like, there, there are some questions around these, these diabetes things that don't have answers. And sometimes the answer is, wait till the honeymoon ends, or wait till you gain 10 pounds, that kind of stuff, like, so I don't know, like, it sucks. I mean, I had a little kid with diabetes. Arden was two when she was diagnosed, and it was, you know, and we used the, I did the whole thing with syringes. Yeah, I didn't even have a pen. As a matter of fact, Arden's never used an insulin pen. And people find that, like, astonishing, but I don't know what happened. Like, nobody ever said to me, do you want to try an insulin pen? I was like, Oh, this is fine. I just got, I just got syringes that did half units. This will be okay, yeah. And when people say the MDI thing, it's frustrating to me sometimes, because I over and over again, I'll say, look, the only difference between MDI and pumping like just regular manual pumping, is that you can't do extended boluses. You can't do temp basals off and on, or higher and lower. And other than that, MDI is pretty much the same thing. Just you'll have to inject more often to accomplish these things. Yeah. And they're like, Well, I want more MDI content. I'm like, that was it right there? Like, that sentence is the MDI content. And I think people don't believe that. I think I think sometimes they think I'm ignoring them, sure, because everybody uses pumps, but the truth is, is most people don't use pumps. Did you know that, like, people with type one diabetes mostly inject, makes sense? Yeah. You just, you're hearing a podcast where people talk about, you know, like, kind of high level management stuff all the time. So you see more people with pumps? Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I don't know, feed that kid more. Stretch him out. Get a Time Machine. Jump forward. Yeah. Is he very active? Does he have like, five he's not really doing a lot of sports or anything. Is he No,

Speaker 1 58:53
no organized sports, no. But he does like to run around and get sweaty and, yeah, active.

Scott Benner 58:59
Make his blood sugar go down. Yeah, absolutely. Make you cry in the bathroom. I

Speaker 1 59:04
know the trampoline can be the best and the worst thing, depending on what the blood sugar is at when you start.

Scott Benner 59:09
How would you say that you're dealing with it, like, like, emotionally, generally,

Speaker 1 59:13
good. But I do have times where it seems like everything's changing and we don't have a handle on it, that it feels really hard. I haven't had any times where I would say I was burnt out, or, you know, totally overwhelmed. But there's just, there's days and moments that feel like it's a lot, too much. No, I wouldn't say too much. Just I'm I maybe it's personality thing, but it's kind of just, it is what it is, right? It's not like you can pretend it doesn't exist.

Scott Benner 59:44
Did you grow up in a very blue collar way,

Speaker 1 59:48
moderately? Yeah. Okay, yeah. And I guess to me, one thing that does feel like a big blessing with how young he was diagnosed, is that we as his parents came. Can be the ones shouldering most of the burden. You know, of course, he's the one living it and experiencing in his body, but the fact that we can be the ones who are investing the time and figuring out the right technologies and the right dosages and all of that stuff and that he can just be oblivious to it, I'm thankful for that.

Scott Benner 1:00:20
I agree. I think that they need to understand, but they don't need to be burdened, and especially at five. Like, you know, I mean, what the hell are we expecting from him? Yeah, you know what? I mean, seriously, I love, I love when you hear people's like, well, it's their disease. I'm like, well, she's seven. Like, I mean, she can't get her room clean. We should put her in charge of extended boluses. I'm not sure. Yeah, I think that sometimes people don't see the expanse of time that this process is going to take. Yeah, you know, like you're not trying to get to this by Friday, yeah, and it's not a thing. We're going to have this all straightened out by next summer. Like it's, it's a much slower process than that, true.

Speaker 1 1:00:59
Yeah, I remember listening to the podcasts and being, you know, in the same kind of management role six months and a year into his diagnosis, and just thinking like, well, I already have so much knowledge and information like, how can it possibly get better? But I think just the and, you know, we're three years in now, so I'm hoping in the future, it'll be even more, but just the ability to see something happen over and over again and experience it. But that's almost what makes caregiving and thinking about passing off the caregiving role, either in the future or just to someone else, like at school or to some like a babysitter, hard is that I know I'm not perfect, but it's taken years of experience to get to where I am. So expecting someone else to, yeah, take that on is not easy, but then we get the benefit of having all the remote features and following opportunities and things. So

Scott Benner 1:01:57
yeah, no, it makes it makes the remote management so much easier, even just texting. I remember when I figured that out, I was like, wow, this really just leveled us up. Probably been years since I've said this on the podcast, but it really is about having an experience, learning from it, doing it again, over and over. And I don't just mean a couple days in a row or something like that. I mean over six months, a year, or two years, to the point where, like, I genuinely don't know what could happen with diabetes, that I wouldn't immediately know what the answer was to it, and that just comes from time, like and, and I've tried to explain it like by saying, you know, you don't walk out of a room with a closed door and think about, oh, I'm going To Turn the doorknob as you're walking towards it, right? It just happens. You just literally, you never consider that the room is closed, that the door is closed, and you somehow end up on the outside of it. And that's how diabetes feels to me now, like I just walk through life and whatever I'm intersected with with diabetes, my body, my brain, knows what to do automatically, yeah, but it takes a lot of time, yeah. And I used to have the greatest way of putting it, but at the end of the first Matrix movie, when Neo figures out the matrix and everyone's shooting at him, and suddenly he just freezes all the bullets in there and just kind of walks between them. That's how diabetes feels to me now, yeah, I see all the bullets, but I'm not going to walk into them, so it's not going to be a problem. Yeah. And I just make my way kind of ever slowly through them, just kind of brushing them aside, and then I come out the other end, and then the guy looks at you all weird. What was his name, Mr. Anderson. And then he knows I kicked his ass. And then diabetes is Mr. Anderson. There you go. Oh my God, that's what we're going to call your episode. Diabetes is Mr. Anderson, perfect. I mean, that's a little long. We'll figure it out. That's your job. Yes. Beth, thank you for putting that on my shoulders. Beth, listen to the thing I tell people all the time that's 100% true, is this is hard. It sucks. It's never not gonna suck, and it's never gonna be easy. But one day, you'll be so good at it, it might feel easy, and that's not bad, yeah, so just got to hang in and keep doing what you're doing. Yeah. Hey, you guys are sounds like you're doing great, actually, all right. Well, I really appreciate you doing this with me. Thank you very much.

Unknown Speaker 1:04:14
Thank you. You

Scott Benner 1:04:20
on this, Arden has been getting her diabetes supplies from us med for three years. You can as well usmed.com/juice box, or call 888-721-1514, my thanks to us, med for sponsoring this episode and for being long time sponsors of the juicebox podcast. There are links in the show notes and links at juicebox podcast.com to us, med and all the sponsors. Today's episode of The juicebox podcast is sponsored by the Dexcom g7 which now integrates with the tandem T slim x2 system. Learn more and get started today at Dexcom. Dot com slash juicebox,

if you or a loved one, was just diagnosed with type one diabetes, and you're looking for some fresh perspective, the bold beginning series from the juicebox podcast is a terrific place to start. That series is with myself and Jenny Smith. Jenny is a CD CES, a registered dietitian and a type one for over 35 years, and in the bowl beginning series, Jenny and I are going to answer the questions that most people have after a type one diabetes diagnosis. The series begins at episode 698, in your podcast player, or you can go to juicebox podcast.com and click on bold beginnings in the menu. I want to thank you so much for listening and remind you please subscribe and follow to the podcast wherever you're listening right now, if it's YouTube, Apple podcast, Spotify, or any other audio app, go hit follow or subscribe, whichever your app allows for and set up those downloads so you never miss an episode, especially an apple podcast. Go into your settings and choose download all new episodes. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back very soon with another episode of The juicebox podcast. The episode you just heard was professionally edited by wrong way recording, wrongwayrecording.com. You.

#1312 Defining Diabetes: PCOS

Scott and Jenny Smith define diabetes terms In this Defining Diabetes episode we PCOS.

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Scott Benner 0:00
Hello friends, and welcome back to another episode of The juicebox podcast.

Jenny's back, and we're going to do another defining diabetes episode today. So buckle up and we'll define PCOS. 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. A diabetes diagnosis comes with a lot of new terms, and you're not going to understand most of them. That's why we made defining diabetes. Go to juicebox podcast.com up into the menu and click on defining diabetes to find the series that will tell you what all of those words mean, short, fun and informative that's defining diabetes. Don't forget to save 40% off of your entire order at cozy earth.com All you have to do is use the offer code juicebox at checkout. That's juicebox at checkout to save 40 percent@cozyearth.com if you're a US resident who has type one, or is the caregiver of someone with type one, you can write from your right, from your couch, right from your phone. You can add your help to type one diabetes research by completing the survey AT T 1d exchange.org/juice, box. This show is sponsored today by the glucagon that my daughter carries, gvoke hypopen. Find out more at gvoke glucagon.com. Forward slash juicebox. This episode of The juicebox podcast is sponsored by Eversense. The Eversense CGM is more convenient, requiring only one sensor every six months. It offers more flexibility with its easy on, easy off, smart transmitter, and allows you to take a break when needed. Eversense cgm.com/juicebox, I'd like to define PCOS, oh, for the kids. Yeah, yeah, excited.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 2:10
Okay, yeah, that's, I mean, I do a lot in women's health. And as you know, I've said many times before, a lot of women in that sort of time of life where they may very well be considering kids. So I'm surprised we didn't talk about PCOS before, but maybe we haven't. I

Scott Benner 2:28
just don't think we've specifically given it its own defining diabetes. Now wait, let me make sure we haven't. Hold on a second. That's a good point. Maybe Scott just isn't good at keeping his list up. Give me one second.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 2:39
The list is pretty low. I don't they don't even know how long the defining is it? We did quite a number of things. Oh,

Scott Benner 2:45
it's over 50 at this point. And But you just said something that just really made me think, like, let me just double check, because that's pretty smart, because we could pivot to another one if I'm if I'm wrong about this and that people will just get the laugh. Hold on a second. Nope, we haven't. Yay, good job, but I didn't know, honestly, something

Jennifer Smith, CDE 3:06
new to talk about. Oh, it's not really. It's not new by any means.

Scott Benner 3:09
No, is it something that many women might be suffering with, and their doctors never even give like a name or a voice to it. They just treat them like, Oh, you. You have tough periods or something like that,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 3:23
I would say I see that more and more and more, especially since in the years of having diabetes myself, I think it's really just been the past 10 ish years that I've heard more about PCOS, and especially just the past couple of years alone, more women who've actually had a more proper diagnosis of PCOS from providers who help them look further into some of the issues that they've had for a long time, maybe since they were a teenager, a young adult, you know. And I think I get to see it, especially, as I said, because some people end up trying and trying and trying to conceive, and at that point further testing, especially if you move into more fertility management, there are a lot more tests that end up being done just because you you are going to a specialist who should be evaluating All these things, hormone levels, you know? I mean, PCOS is, do you know what the acronym is, right? Actually,

Scott Benner 4:27
I know this one without looking. I know it's polycystic ovarian syndrome.

Jennifer Smith, CDE 4:34
Yeah, polycystic ovary, ovarian or ovaries, Ovary Syndrome, okay, so we know that it would affect hormones, right? Mainly because ovaries are the big thing that's impacted here, and they produce a lot of hormones in a woman's body. I mean, they're the little places that all the eggs that a woman has are kind of packed into, yeah,

Scott Benner 4:58
I think of it as an egg person. Course, that's a yes. There

Jennifer Smith, CDE 5:01
you go. Thank you. An egg bank.

Scott Benner 5:04
I also don't know why I think of it as anything, but that is how it pops up in my head I have here. PCOS is a common hormonal disorder that affects women of reproductive age. It is characterized by a combination of symptoms and physical findings that include irregular menstrual periods, excess androgen levels, polycystic ovaries. So

Jennifer Smith, CDE 5:27
a lot of the times, it's because the hormones, they're not regulated the right way in order for ovulation to happen on a monthly cycle, or that 28 to 32 day kind of normal cycle that we call normal, right? When somebody doesn't ovulate, essentially, you get these cysts. So that's where the polycystic many cysts, right? That's what the word means. Comes from these little like cysts that kind of hack around the ovaries. And you can actually in the right type of testing, in the right time of the month, you could actually see more of those SACS or cysts at certain times. So evaluation is really, really valuable. I think the other piece to proper diagnosis is talking to a woman who has symptoms that sound like it might be PCOS. But the other unfortunate thing is that PCOS is commonly thought to kind of also go along with a particular body type, being more overweight, obese, already having issues with different metabolic kind of systems, high cholesterol levels, blood sugar levels that are unmanaged. Insulin resistance is a hallmark of PCOS, kind of similar in type two diabetes, right? So when you talk about type one diabetes, I've had a number of women who, by visually looking and diagnosis of type one would never have been thought that that they could possibly have PCOS, and they do,

Scott Benner 7:01
yeah, I think Arden has it. And, yeah, she doesn't fit the stereotype. It's tough because, you know, years ago, when they're trying to figure things out, we don't really understand as much as we do. You start saying, Oh, well, a lot of these ladies look like this. So it must be you're having this problem. Because you're instead of saying, maybe my body style is like this because of the PCOS or other factors, you know, kind of put the cart before the horse. I want to read this, please. PCOS can also lead to long term health problems such as type two diabetes, heart disease and issues with fertility. The exact cause of PCOS is unknown, but factors like insulin resistance, inflammation and genetics are believed to play a role. Treatment typically focuses on managing individual symptoms. This is the problem, and may include lifestyle changes, medication and hormonal therapy. The problem is, is that we manage PCOS with Advil. Do you know what I mean? Like, oh, you know you're having a painful period, right? I think the reason that you're hearing more about it now, in a Zeitgeist again, is because of the impact that GLP medications are starting to have for people. If you take insulin or sofony ureas, you are at risk for your blood sugar going too low. You need a safety net when it matters most, be ready with G vo hypo pen. My daughter carries gevok hypopen everywhere she goes, because it's a ready to use rescue pen for treating very low blood sugar in people with diabetes ages two and above that. I trust low blood sugar emergencies can happen unexpectedly and they demand quick action. Luckily, GEVO kypopen can be administered in two simple steps, even by yourself in certain situations. Show those around you where you store GEVO kypo pen and how to use it. They need to know how to use GEVO kypopen before an emergency situation happens. Learn more about why GEVO kypopen is in Arden's diabetes toolkit@gevoqglukagon.com toolkit at gvoke, glucagon.com/juicebox, gvoke shouldn't be used if you have a tumor in the gland on the top of your kidneys called a pheochromocytoma, or if you have a tumor in your pancreas called an insulinoma, visit gvoke. Glucagon.com/risk, for safety information. How many times have you thought it's time to change my CGM? I just changed it. And then you look and realize, my God, it's been 14 days already. A week, week and a half, feels like I just did this. Well, you'll never feel like that with the Eversense CGM, because Eversense is the only long term CGM with six months of real time glucose readings, giving you more convenience, confidence and flexibility. So if you're one of those people who has that thought that I just did this, didn't I, why don't they do this again? Right now? If you don't like that feeling, give Eversense a try, because with Eversense, you'll replace the sensor. Just. Once every six months via a simple in office. Visit Eversense, cgm.com/juicebox, to learn more and get started. Today. Would you like to take a break? Take a shower. You can with Eversense without wasting a sensor. Don't want anybody to know for your big day, take it off. No one has to know. Have your sensors been failing before 10 or 14 days? That won't happen with ever since? Have you ever had a sensor get torn off while you're pulling off your shirt? That won't happen with ever since? So no sensor to get knocked off. It's as discrete as you want it to be. It's incredibly accurate, and you only have to change it once every six months, ever since cgm.com/juice, box, which could be, yeah, yeah, because I think the GLP hits the inflammation and impacts the resistance hormonal issue, right? And, and, except, and, you know, I know this is about PCOS, so we're going to go back to, you know, going through the three hallmarks of it. But if I ask, how does a GLP impact PCOS? It says GLP is an incretin hormone that plays a crucial role in glucose, met metabolic why can I say the word? Why can't I say the words? I can say metabolism and has various effects on the body, which can impact PCOS in several ways. The ways are by reducing insulin or insulin sensitivity, weight management, hormonal regulation and impacting inflammation. And I've told this like brief story on the podcast a number of times since you know, glps have become more prevalent. But there is a Facebook group full of women who couldn't get pregnant their whole lives that went on GLP medications and were getting pregnant because they were so positive they were never going to have a baby that they didn't do any kind of birth control. Birth control, yeah, so, so kind of a ping pong back to it, irregular menstrual periods. That's such a kind way to say what happens. You know what I mean, right? Instead of saying irregular menstrual periods, shouldn't it sound say Mike Tyson hit me for seven days and I bled a lot while it was happening. You know what I mean? Because that's, I think, what it feels like infrequent, irregular or prolonged menstrual cycles are common, great, yeah. And then what happens then too, is you end up with low iron, low ferritin, you know, absolutely. And there's a cascading issue, I

Jennifer Smith, CDE 12:30
think it, it highlights how much just one little thing can get off in the body. Let's say it is the hormone production that's incorrect, coming from the ovaries, right? And you mentioned something before androgen, right? Androgens are, they're, you know, kind of a kind of hormone that's usually a lot higher for men, but are found in smaller amounts in women. And so an imbalance of that creates an imbalance in the cycle, which then it just, it's like, again, a ball at the top of a hill that you keep rolling, and it just keeps gathering more, right? And it impacts everything then. And I think the problem is that there's not, there aren't enough specialists to this particular condition, much like really knowledgeable type one clinicians, right? And so you really have to find a specialist who can take the time to sit down. What have your symptoms been? How long have you navigated this? You know? I mean, the other typical things are, again, as I said, sort of body being often heavier metabolic issue is beyond, you know, diabetes or whatever, acne or really significant skin breakout problems,

Scott Benner 13:50
body hair, right body hair, facial hair, like,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 13:53
from a woman's standpoint, should not be and has a lot of relevance to that androgen management In the body. So the right clinician is going to sit down and take a note of all of these and say, Okay, we've got more testing to do. We can test these hormones, blah, blah, blah, but as you said, it's typically just a way. You just have heavy periods and they're irregular, and there's no way to make them more regular. Well, why don't we try birth control? Birth control is going to regulate it all for you. And that's it's like a band aid, yeah, don't give me a band aid. Yeah,

Scott Benner 14:23
I don't. I don't go down that road because I'm, first of all, I'm not a woman, and I don't understand it enough to talk about it the birth control piece. But I have heard enough. I've heard a lot of women raise a red flag and say, Look, birth control really screwed me up. So, you know, I guess the, I guess the easy comparison is, you know, pharma companies figured out how to give men erections, but they can't seem to help women do these things. And right, this one falls heavy on me, because my, I think my daughter's impacted by this. And, you know, and at the same time, no one's looking into it, and we took her to a good. Doctor, and even that doctor is like, I don't know how to help you with this. You know, they just don't have any but anyway, I'm not saying glps are not, um, they're not a cure all, but I think that we're, yeah, right, but I believe we're in the the early days of understanding the things they are going to impact. I'm just started hearing conversations recently about how it might be helping people with arthritis. I don't even understand how that could be, but the inflammation piece, there's some people are using it for pain management. People live with pain for years, like for my entire lifetime, people have been running around yelling, inflammation. We got to get rid of inflammation. And it doesn't seem crazy to me that inflammation has to be at one of the hearts of how you end up with type one diabetes, and that I see a lot of women with type one diabetes talking about PCOS, like it just, it seems like there's a connection, kind

Jennifer Smith, CDE 15:54
of, what goes along with it is, what is, if you read anything, even in the simplest literature, about inflam inflammation, what's one of the biggest things that impacts it?

Scott Benner 16:05
Sugar, yeah, then you're feeding it on top of it, yeah,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 16:09
you're feeding it right. And then with PCOS, you have sort of a metabolic, poorly regulated glucose use, poorly regulated insulin sensitivity. And so you've got these changes in your blood sugar level that are just keeping inflammation high. And until you learn how to navigate the inflammation, which will help the insulin resistance, which will, I mean, again, it's a ball that, once it gets rolling in the right direction with the right information and or the right treatments or plans, you can really make a very big difference.

Scott Benner 16:44
I don't think you can really understand as a type one how screwed up it is that your body's not making insulin. Stick with me for a second, till you look at a CGM on a person whose body is making it and watch that their blood sugars really don't really rise very much at all, you know? And then you realize that if you don't pre bolus at the exact right time, your blood sugar is going to go from 85 to 150 in, you know, two revolutions of your Dexcom. And

Jennifer Smith, CDE 17:10
I think the other thing there too is watching when it does rise, how quickly the rise gets taken care of. On a the CGM of a person who doesn't have diabetes goes up, and it's like clockwork. You can almost time it to the point of the beta cells knowing exactly what they're doing, how to time everything, how much needed to go out like that's the piece that we can't as as much as we have with intelligent systems now and putting the right information in, we cannot mimic what the body was meant to do on its own. And then the the landing point, right? It controls that rise. You see it turn on a CGM, and it it's like a beautiful landing of a plane that you didn't think. You're like, this is gonna crash, and it doesn't crash. You

Scott Benner 17:56
have good insulin, insulin sensitivity. You're not type one, and your blood sugar just it doesn't get low, like, you know, it's and that is the point. Like insulin sensitivity is the way you think about it, because your type one is different. But what I'm talking about is, like a person who doesn't have diabetes, it sees the need, and it puts insulin in immediately. It quells the spike immediately, and it shuts it off immediately. And you know that stuff is it's just not happening for type ones and type twos as well. But listen, I'm just gonna go like, GLP has an anti inflammatory property. Chronic low grade inflammation is often associated with PCOS and can worsen symptoms by reducing inflammation, GLP can potentially alleviate some PCOS symptoms. So a GLP medications not the cure for PCOS, but right it is going to it's going to impact inflammation, hopefully also by improving insulin sensitivity and reducing hyperinsulinemia, high insulin left. Did I do it? GLP can help in lowering androgen levels. High levels of insulin can lead to an increase in androgen production, which is responsible for symptoms such as hirsutism, which means hairy and acne in PCOS. If GLP impacts weight management, it does it by slowing gastric emptying, include increases your satiety and reduces appetite, which can lead to weight loss. Weight Management is a key component in managing PCOS symptoms, because obesity can exasperate insulin resistance and other symptoms of PCOS. And then, of course, GLP one enhances insulin secretion in response to food intake and improves insulin sensitivity. Since insulin resistance is common in PCOS, GLP one could help in managing blood glucose levels more effectively. I think that's for a person who doesn't have type one,

Jennifer Smith, CDE 19:52
and it's also kind of the hallmark reason the resistance piece of that whole PCOS is a. Reason that the main medication that's long term been prescribed for it is Metformin. Metformin, right? Yeah. I mean, that's been used for years and years and years, and has gained footage in even type one and type one with PCOS. But I think it's a baseline for some people, it does a really great job. For other people, they may need something more impactful, something like a GLP, one, which, again, is your body doesn't technically make Metformin. Your body actually does make a GLP, right? It is something that is secreted in the body. It's just not happening the right way in some people. And

Scott Benner 20:40
I think we're done here. But I'm going to end with in case someone's listening from Lily or novo, or any of the other companies who are going to come along, and they're all going to come along, you got to look at these other things that glps are helping with, and find different dosing strategies for people who are being helped for other things. Because, like, I've shared with Jenny privately, like it's helping my daughter with so many issues, but it's quelling her appetite. Too much, too much. Yeah, she needs less of the medication, and they come pre dosed. So, you know, it's a

Jennifer Smith, CDE 21:11
one pop that's actually, as another side note to these companies, there are many people who really hate the way that is dosed in the one, it's like a spring loaded like, pop it in. And I can tell you that there are a lot of people that don't

Scott Benner 21:28
like that. Here's mine for later. So there you go, that I take for, for just weight management. There are times I pick the right spot and I'm like, Oh, a little pressure. That's not bad. It's over. And there are some times that after I do it, I go, God damn, it's like, because it feels like, you know, sometimes it can feel like you got shot. Yeah, listen, I know what they're doing. I understand why it's happening the way it's happening. It's money, but, of course, yeah, but let's get to the point where we're realizing I'm tired of it just being, you know, doctors on YouTube going, Hey, I'm using this now for my patients, for this and this and this and this, like, let them, because you're not fooling anybody. No, I'm going to tell you that the the YouTube is full of videos with hundreds of 1000s of views about how to take the medication out of this and microdose it. So just, why don't you just make it safe for people, for God's sakes, okay, that was it. I didn't know how that happened. Realize that was gonna happen. Sorry, that's all right. Little side note. I didn't know I was gonna get bitchy at the end. But there you

Jennifer Smith, CDE 22:26
go, PCOS, and a note to Yeah, you know, and

Scott Benner 22:29
a note to pharma, like, why don't you? There you go, make something that'll help people with more than just the diabetes and the weight loss, yeah. Give people options. How hard is that really? Oh, want to thank the Eversense CGM for sponsoring this episode of The juicebox podcast, and invite you to go to Eversense cgm.com/juicebox to learn more about this terrific device, you can head over now and just absorb everything that the website has to offer. And that way you'll know if Eversense feels right for you. Eversense cgm.com/juicebox, a huge thank you to one of today's sponsors, gvoke glucagon. Find out more about gvoke hypopen at gvoke glucagon.com, forward slash juice box. You spell that, G, V, O, k, e, g, l, U, C, A, G, o, n.com, forward slash juice box. A diabetes diagnosis comes with a lot of new terms, and you're not going to understand most of them. That's why we made defining diabetes. Go to juicebox podcast.com, up into the menu and click on defining diabetes to find the series that will tell you what all of those words mean, short, fun and informative that's defining diabetes. Lots of people with autoimmune seem to have trouble with their thyroid, and that's why I've made the defining thyroid series, juicebox podcast.com. Click on defining thyroid the menu to find out more. If you're looking for community around type one diabetes, check out the juicebox podcast. Private, Facebook group juicebox podcast, type one diabetes, but everybody is welcome. Type one, type two gestational loved ones. It doesn't matter to me if you're impacted by diabetes and you're looking for support, comfort or community, check out juicebox podcast. Type one diabetes on Facebook. 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. The episode you just heard was professionally edited by wrong way recording, wrongwayrecording.com. You.

#1311 Strange Brew

Kim's children inspired her to go on an insulin pump.

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Scott Benner 0:00
OmniPod, Hello friends and welcome back to another episode of The juicebox podcast.

Kimberly is from Calgary. She's had type one diabetes since she was two and a half years old, and today she's 44 Kim's children inspired her to go on a pump, and today we're going to talk to her about her life, her diabetes and her family. 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, don't forget to save 40% off of your entire order@cozyearth.com All you have to do is use the offer code juicebox at checkout. That's juicebox at checkout to save 40 percent@cozyearth.com and if you have type one diabetes, are the caregiver of someone with type one and you live in the United States, that's either or, but that one for sure. Go to T 1d exchange.org/juice, box and complete the survey. I don't even know if that was clear. You have to have type one be the caregiver for someone with type one also live in the US. T 1d exchange.org/juice, box. Help propel type one diabetes research forward by answering a few questions in their survey, T, 1d, exchange.org/juicebox,

this episode of The juicebox podcast is sponsored by us Med, usmed.com/juice, box, or call 888-721-1514, get your supplies the same way we do from us. Med. This show is sponsored today by the glucagon that my daughter carries, gvoke hypopen. Find out more at gvoke glucagon.com, forward slash juicebox. I was looking for a way that we could all get nice and tanned and meet each other and spend some time talking about diabetes. How are we going to do that on a juice cruise, juice cruise 2025 departs Galveston, Texas on Monday, June 23 2025 it's a five night trip through the Western Caribbean, visiting, of course, Galveston, Costa, Maya and cozmel. So if you're looking for a nice adult or family vacation, you want to meet your favorite podcast host, but you can't figure out where Jason Bateman lives, so you'll settle for me. If you want to talk about diabetes or you know what, maybe you want to meet some people living with type one, or just get a tan with a bunch of cool people. You can do that on juice cruise 2025, space is limited. Head now to juicebox podcast.com and click on that banner, you can find out all about the different cabins that are available to you. And register today. Links the show notes. Links at juicebox podcast.com I hope to see you on board.

Kimberly 2:57
My name's Kimberly Gray, and I'm from air drill, Alberta, Canada. I'm married to Darcy for 24 years this year. And we have two girls, Mackenzie, who's 21 and Courtney, who's 17.

Scott Benner 3:11
Wow. How old are you? Kim Kimberly? How old are you?

Kimberly 3:14
4444 Wow. You've

Scott Benner 3:17
been, you've been going hard from the beginning.

Kimberly 3:22
There's something. People say that, yeah,

Scott Benner 3:25
you sound as Canadian as anyone has ever sounded to me in their entire life. I just want you to know that.

Kimberly 3:29
Well, that's a good thing. I

Scott Benner 3:31
guess I am absolutely, absolutely is.

Kimberly 3:34
So we're like 20 minutes out out of Calgary. So I know you know where Calgary is because of the flames, so we're about 20 minutes north of there.

Scott Benner 3:43
You think I know where, where Calgary is, that's sweet. I've

Kimberly 3:47
heard you say that on a podcast a couple weeks ago.

Scott Benner 3:51
So here's the problem. I only know things in short bursts, and then I forget a lot of them. My wife says like so we played this game last night. We got my wife and I got in bed, we did not play the game. You're thinking we played a different game where we brought up she brought up a television show that we watch religiously together, and she's like, go ahead and tell me the characters names. And I'm like, well, there's the little Spanish girl. And she goes, what's her name? And I'm like, I don't know. And then I'm like, and there's the girl with the wide hips, and she goes, and her name is and I'm like, no idea. She goes, What about the lead guy? And I was like, I'm not sure. I don't I've been watching this show for six years. I don't know the character's names at all. It's meaningless to me. I don't. I don't know how to explain that to you about me. So we drilled down, and I did start coming up with a couple of names. And I was like, is that one Tim? And she goes very good. And I was like, What's his last name? Like, oh my God, his last name. How am I supposed to know that? That was my answer. I was like, how am I supposed to know. That, what makes you come on the podcast? What? What made you interested?

Kimberly 5:03
I started listening to it last year, and I just got hooked on it right away. I'm up to episode three.

Scott Benner 5:10
Oh, Kimberly, are you listening just straight through?

Kimberly 5:15
Very cool, yes, yes. And I love it. It's so it's so good the first one or the second, wherever the wherever the Everest one was it. It hooked me for right from there, it was so interesting and so cool. And yeah, and I just wanted to come on and share my experience. Cool.

Scott Benner 5:33
I appreciate that you talking about the mom who talked about her daughter's time on Mount Everest.

Kimberly 5:39
Yes, that one was fascinating. Okay, very

Scott Benner 5:42
nice. That was pretty early on. You know, the way the podcast started was weird, because before I actually could get up an episode, I got an interview, and I genuinely did not know what I was doing. I've never listened back to that one. Maybe I should that might be fun, but yeah, the first one that went up was with this guy that was at that time on American Idol, and had type one diabetes. And podcasts were such a new idea back then that I just sent him an email, and I was like, Hey, I have a diabetes podcast you want to be on. And he was like, Yeah, I didn't tell him. I'd never actually put up an episode before. So Adam laughs your test on me. And he was terrific, by the way, it was great. I remember that one too. It's a weird start to the show, though, because, like the next number of episodes are all like me talking about management by myself. Anyway, I just remembered as being very strange, like I was getting ready to pop this other episode, and suddenly I was interviewing somebody had never done it before. Nevertheless. Okay, so who's got diabetes in your little group over there?

Kimberly 6:48
Me, me, myself and I you do not,

Scott Benner 6:50
not the girls.

Kimberly 6:52
No, none of the girls. They both had the nut trial done, and they've both been negative so

far. Oh, you did trial net for both of them. Oh, yeah. Trial net, sorry, I

said net file, but yeah. Trial net,

Scott Benner 7:04
net, trial, trial net, I understood what you meant. Same thing. Yeah, don't worry about it. Well. So how long ago were you diagnosed? When I was two and a half? Oh my gosh, that's a while. 4042. Years ago. Yeah, two years ago when you were two and a half, did you have brothers and sisters?

Kimberly 7:21
I have a brother, yeah.

Scott Benner 7:22
Does he have any autoimmune stuff? No, he's good. He's clear. And if you're in Canada, 40 some years ago, what was your management like?

Kimberly 7:34
What I can remember of it was like a lot of the What's it? Called it the exchanges, where if you want to eat this, then you can't eat that, and if you want more of this, then you have to take that out. So I remember that part of it, and I remember I had, like, a brown, a big brown meter. I remember that from back then, okay, but that's about it, because I was so young, right?

Scott Benner 8:02
When's the first time you really start having, like, a conscious memory of you managing yourself?

Kimberly 8:09
I'd say likely, around 1989 after my second year of going to camp. Okay, how old were you? Then I would have been nine. Nine. Okay,

Scott Benner 8:19
yeah. Just just

Kimberly 8:21
not completely managing, but I've started to be able to do my own injections. They had this thing at the camp called an injectees that would hide the needle, because I'm definitely afraid of needles. I'm terrified of them really, yeah, so I don't use them. I wouldn't like, it's the syringe that I'm terrified of. So if it was, like, a pen, I was fine because it wasn't the syringe and, like, if I could hide it in the injectees, I was fine because I couldn't see the syringe. But

Scott Benner 8:52
the minute you see the metal that you're not okay with, no,

Kimberly 8:56
I'm not it. Just, it kind of creeps me out a lot.

Scott Benner 9:00
What happens to do you get weird inside? Like, do you feel nauseous or it's

Kimberly 9:04
just panic? My first time that I had to have blood drawn was extremely traumatic. I got post PTSD from it. So that kind of led down this path of being horribly afraid of needles. Since then. How

Scott Benner 9:21
old do you think you were when you had the bad experience with the blood draw? Oh, about six. Six ish, yeah, that's not a good age for that to happen. I had a blood draw the other day, and the girl was a genius, like she just slipped that thing in there. And I was like, Get out of here. That's it. Way to go, like you wanted to leave her, like, there should be a tip jar on phlebotomists desks.

Kimberly 9:45
Oh, that's a good idea. It's

Scott Benner 9:46
not a bad idea at all, although quickly they would learn who does well and who doesn't. Because I would have happily, like, given her $5 on the way out the door, like she just like, man, it was easy. So you had a bad experience, and it stuck with you, though. Yeah. Yeah, like

Kimberly 10:00
the chair. I can't sit in the chair. If I go to get blood drawn, I have to lie down because the chair just freaks me out. I can't even walk into a room where there's one of those chairs

Scott Benner 10:10
where you where you can put your arm on either side, on the flat little panel. Yeah, yeah, no, thank you to this day, yep, I have to lie down. Do you have any other odd, not odd, but any other, like, significant reactions to other things in your life that have hung on to you?

Kimberly 10:28
No, that's it. Just the terrible fear of needles and blood draws and that kind of stuff

Scott Benner 10:34
about that. It's really something. Arden does not like it either. It's the worst. Yeah, she's overcoming it, but she's not a fan,

Kimberly 10:42
and like my husband, literally has to hold my hand while I'm getting it done. Oh,

Scott Benner 10:47
it's nice. He's a good person. Is that like date night for you guys, you go get a blood draw.

Kimberly 10:54
Not really date night. It's date day. Date day.

Scott Benner 10:56
Let's go out for lunch and have and get my blood done. You can hold my hand. It's nice. How about your your girls? Do they have any problems with the needles? If you take insulin or so faunal ureas, you are at risk for your blood sugar going too low. You need a safety net when it matters most, be ready with G vo hypo pen. My daughter carries G vo hypo pen everywhere she goes because it's a ready to use rescue pen for treating very low blood sugar in people with diabetes ages two and above that. I trust low blood sugar emergencies can happen unexpectedly and they demand quick action. Luckily, jivo kypopen can be administered in two simple steps, even by yourself in certain situations. Show those around you where you store GEVO kypo pen and how to use it. They need to know how to use jivo kypo pen before an emergency situation happens. Learn more about why GEVO kypo Pen is in Arden's diabetes toolkit at gvoke glucagon.com/juicebox, gvoke shouldn't be used if you have a tumor in the gland on the top of your kidneys called a pheochromocytoma, or if you have a tumor in your pancreas called an insulinoma, visit gvoke, glucagon.com/risk, for safety information. Diabetes comes with a lot of things to remember, so it's nice when someone takes something off of your plate. Us. Med has done that for us. When it's time for Arden's supplies to be refreshed, we get an email rolls up and in your inbox says, Hi, Arden. This is your friendly reorder email from us med. You open up the email, it's a big button that says, Click here to reorder, and you're done. Finally, somebody taking away a responsibility instead of adding one. Us. Med has done that for us. An email arrives, we click on a link, and the next thing you know, your products are at the front door. That simple, US med.com/juice, box, or call 888-721-1514, I never have to wonder if Arden has enough supplies. I click on one link, I open up a box, I put this stuff in the drawer, and we're done. Us. Med carries everything from insulin pumps and diabetes testing supplies to the latest CGMS like the libre three and the Dexcom g7 they accept Medicare nationwide, over 800 private insurers, and all you have to do to get started is call 888-721-1514, or go to my link, us, med.com/juicebox, using that number or my link helps to support the production of the juicebox podcast.

Kimberly 13:40
Uh, no, actually, Mackenzie is a nurse. She's up in Stettler, which is two and a half hours away, and she's loving it up there. She, um, can do it pretty much everything. And Courtney's just finishing our last year of high school, so she's got no fear of anything. She can go get her blood drawn, and no problem, bother at all.

Scott Benner 14:01
Is Mackenzie named after that very famous Canadian movie? No,

Kimberly 14:05
Mackenzie's named after um Ruthie in um Seventh Heaven. Really, yes, because her, her real name is Mackenzie, and yeah, that's how she got her name. What

Scott Benner 14:18
movie Am I thinking of with Bob and Doug McKenzie, wait a minute. I have no Oh, my God, you don't know how much younger are you than me? Like eight, nine years. Hold on a second. Maybe this is upsetting because you're Canadian. Let's figure this out. It was about beer. It was a moot, yeah, what was it called? It was about beer. What was that called? I think it was an SCTV skit, and then it was a movie. Eventually, Bob and Doug Mackenzie, but then what was the movie called? And they would be, they were like, take off a and then like, What the hell was Why can't I find out what the hell the movie was called? This is for. Ridiculous. I have the internet in front of me. Hold on. Come on, internet. Strange brew. You don't know this movie. No, never heard of it. Rick Moranis, and who is the other guy? Dave Thomas, neither of these names strike a chord with

Kimberly 15:16
you. Rick Moranis, you know him from Ghostbusters, but yeah,

Scott Benner 15:20
at some point in this conversation, will you please say oh yeah at the end of one of your sentences,

Unknown Speaker 15:25
oh yeah, yeah. Thank

Scott Benner 15:26
you. Appreciate it. Wow, yeah. All right. Well, everybody, strange brew, probably not a good movie. Just I just the movie I remember, uh, from my childhood, I guess. Okay, fine. Look at me. My my references are getting too old. Towards the end of the episode, we'll talk about the Kardashian woman taking out her butt implants, and we'll modernize the whole thing so you have any other autoimmune stuff.

Kimberly 15:49
I have the markers for celiac, the blood markers, but they haven't done the scope yet so, but it's likely going to come back positive when they do it.

Scott Benner 15:59
Do you avoid any foods.

Kimberly 16:01
I try to eat gluten free as much as I can. But, you know, I ate gluten for God right up to last year, so it's still kind of hard. Like when we go out for dinner or something and the kids in Darcy wants a burger, it's like, yeah, let's just go to the burger joint. I'll have a burger, I'll be sick tonight. Well, whoop dee doo.

Lija Greenseid 16:22
What kind of sick? What are we talking about here? Stomach,

Kimberly 16:25
diarrhea. I get heartburn sometimes from it, and indigestion. So is the

burger that good? A Five Guys Burgers? Yes, okay.

I mean, totally worth it.

Scott Benner 16:38
Because when you're eating, are you thinking like I'm gonna have diarrhea later. No, oh, I would be thinking

Kimberly 16:43
this burger is awesome. Am I glad I took it and made it?

Scott Benner 16:50
How is your health generally? Do you have problems with nutrition like so, like your body absorbing nutrition or weight, or anything like that? No,

Kimberly 16:58
I'm pretty good with that. My doctor started me on a bit just to try and help control sugars a little bit. So I lost 50 pounds last year. Wow.

Scott Benner 17:07
Get out of here. I

Kimberly 17:08
was happy with it.

Scott Benner 17:09
I've lost 50 pounds with a GOP. That's my number two. Good for you, yeah. How did it impact your insulin needs?

Kimberly 17:17
They went down. They went down quite a bit.

Scott Benner 17:20
Yeah, I would imagine. So it's interesting because you're listening to the podcast from the beginning to the end, like it could take you a year or more to get to the part where I'm using ozempic or, um, I started with, we go V and I'm using zepbound now. But you'll also eventually hear episodes with other people who are having the same exact experience you did. Took a GLP, insulin needs went way down. It didn't change your digestion at all, though, with the bread, for example,

Kimberly 17:47
no, no, no, I don't eat bread as much, very much, because I I hate bread. I ate too much of it when I was younger. Okay, you're all breaded. I'll try and stately about

Scott Benner 17:56
it. I feel like it's upsetting to say you don't like bread, but are the other day I took up, all right, no, I took a piece of bread and I put a little butter on it, and some cease, like, some salt, like, just a sprinkle of, like, something like a pink salt. Perhaps it was as best part of my day. So tell me a little bit about,

Kimberly 18:13
sorry, I eat a lot of fruit and, like, vegetables and that kind of stuff, meat, I I love meat, and it's just the starchy stuff. I try, like, potatoes, a lot of potatoes, a lot of rice. If we make spaghetti, like, we'll make a pot of regular spaghetti for them, and then I'll make a little pot of gluten free spaghetti for myself, gluten free. Like, I'm not totally strict on it. Like, I'm not one of those people that, Oh no, my my tongs touch the regular spaghetti, and now they're touching the gluten free spaghetti. I don't freak out about it like that. It's we gotta live our lives too. So

Scott Benner 18:49
what would happen if you got to the doctor after this, and they give you the scope, right? And then they say to you, listen, you have like damage in there, and you gotta be gluten free from now on, and they're going to give you the talk about how eating gluten when you're you have celiac could lead to some kinds of cancer. They're going to get that whole talk. Like, would after that, would you be like, All right, fine, I won't do it anymore. Or do you think you'd be like, I might have a cheeseburger once in a while.

Kimberly 19:18
I think I'm going to be, I'm going to have a cheeseburger every now and then I've lived this long, if, like, it's not, I don't know. I don't know how to explain it really is

Scott Benner 19:27
this enough? Have you had enough of life?

Kimberly 19:31
God, it's just that if my kids want to go out and have a burger, I'm gonna go out and enjoy myself with

Lija Greenseid 19:36
them. Okay, you can't just take the bun off and eat it. No, gross.

Scott Benner 19:42
I gotcha, I

Kimberly 19:43
gotta eat a burger as a burger, like a burger is a burger. Listen,

Scott Benner 19:46
I'm not arguing with you. I'm just trying to get your own book. That's all. I can't do the grease anymore. Even five guys just it's all too much for me. I don't like grease. It's it's been my thing for the last couple of years. I cut out a lot of different oils and. And anymore. Kelly got fries the other day, and I took two of them, and as I was chewing them, I thought, Uh, why am I doing this? Like, all I could taste was like the grease that was in them. I don't know what happened to me. Yeah, I still love french fries. So maybe celiac coming? Definitely type one. Anything else?

Kimberly 20:18
No other than that, I'm

Scott Benner 20:19
good. Okay, no. Thyroid, nope, no.

Kimberly 20:23
It's good. Ray

Scott Benner 20:24
nods,

Unknown Speaker 20:26
uh, what?

Scott Benner 20:26
Your hands cold all the time. Your feet cold?

Kimberly 20:29
No, oh, that's good. I got a little bit of neuropathy in my feet, but for being 42 years and that's the worst thing, I'm okay with that too.

Scott Benner 20:40
Okay. But when did your did your management change? Like, because you said you started exchange diet 42 years ago, you might have been using animal insulin, right? Like beef and beef and pork and then, no,

Kimberly 20:51
I think it was NPH in Toronto. Okay,

Scott Benner 20:54
so you started with the mph. And when did you go to faster acting? When did you go to like, I don't know, Humalog or Lantis or something like that.

Kimberly 21:01
I don't think any of that until I was actually pregnant with Mackenzie, really. Yeah, I had the same like, I didn't have good doctors at all until I was about 15 years ago. They just, they didn't help with anything. My experiences at the hospital were horrible. Like, it was just Yeah, so and then sorry, go. I

Scott Benner 21:29
want to know about it, like, so, like you're because you're basically discussing, like, from two years old to 30 years old. Nobody was really helping. So and you were, you were just doing, were you still doing exchange up until then?

Kimberly 21:42
I don't know when the exchanges quit. I think I just started eating regular, like, just eating, and then I had a sliding scale. Yeah,

Scott Benner 21:54
yeah, that's something else. Wow. So what? What are some of the places looking back that you were let down by your doctors,

Kimberly 22:00
definitely management, definitely explaining, like, when I got old enough to understand, they still didn't explain anything. And, like, this was before the internet, so I just couldn't go on the internet and say, hey, yeah, please explain to me what's going on or anything, just like, that kind of stuff. Yeah, it was just bad experiences, and no one really looking after me. It was more looking after the numbers,

Scott Benner 22:29
right? You feel? Did you feel alone? Like? Where did that leave you?

Kimberly 22:33
I was very alone. My my childhood. I was alone. I had a hard time making friends. They thought I was weird. I was odd. There was something wrong with

Scott Benner 22:43
me because of the diabetes. Yep,

Kimberly 22:46
I can remember going to school one year, the very first day, one of the kids there said to me, Hey, Kimberly, do you still need to eat snacks all the time? And this is right in the middle of big group of kids. And they all started giggling and laughing. And, yeah, I had a rough childhood, because I was, like, the only one in the school district out here

Scott Benner 23:07
that had it. And then, and you'd get low. You get low. Sometimes have to eat something. And that's what they made fun of you for

Kimberly 23:13
snacks. Yeah, because they didn't, they didn't understand. They should have

Scott Benner 23:16
given us some of those snacks. I might have calmed them right down.

Kimberly 23:20
You know what I mean? For snacking and stuff during school, I would have to go down to the office. I couldn't just stay in the classroom and have my little juice box. I actually physically had to get up and go down to the

Scott Benner 23:30
office. Oh, okay, so it separated you from everybody, made you seem different, and then shuttled you off somewhere else. Yeah, yeah. But that sucks. Kids suck and like,

Kimberly 23:41
back then we didn't have the teacher's aides, like the 504, plans. Sure, I never heard of one of those until I started listening to you. So I had no teacher's aide, no school nurse. I was I was actually sent home in a snowstorm once so low that my mother found me in a snowbank around the corner, passed out. No, really, because the teachers had no idea I was trying to put my mittens on my feet. And it didn't clue into them that there was something wrong. They just sent me out the door so

Scott Benner 24:12
they saw a little girl putting mittens on her feet, and they kicked her out into the Canadian tundra. Yeah, my god, yeah.

Kimberly 24:20
And then the ambulance came and got me and took me to the hospital. And when the ambulance came back, the drivers actually went to school and gave the teacher. What for do you

Scott Benner 24:32
ever wonder how we made it this far? Because I do okay.

Kimberly 24:35
I do sometimes, yeah. I

Scott Benner 24:37
mean, as a population of like, how, how, how did someone see that and just go, ah, kids, probably not having a stroke. We'll just send her outside, like in the into a like a a significant storm, right?

Kimberly 24:52
If I was walking down the back alley or anything, I was walking down your egg, like I could walk into the middle of

Scott Benner 24:58
the street, you were just walking down the middle. Roll the street. Well, I could have been Yeah. They would

Kimberly 25:03
say, yeah, it was a main drag road. So I could have taken off into the middle of the street, and they would have never known.

Scott Benner 25:10
Well, that's crazy. So when you're say you're walking down the main drag, like, what am I imagining? Northern Exposure or No, not that rural. No, no,

Kimberly 25:23
not that rural. Close though, I would get just like a main street on your on your Boulevard, right, yeah,

Scott Benner 25:30
but like the kind of place where a moose could wander down through town, or no,

Kimberly 25:35
we have had moose here. So it could happen. That could happen. I was actually getting up to drive work the other day, and I drove down my back alley, and there's apartments at the end of the of the alleyway here, and there was a deer just wandering into the farmer's field behind the house here.

Scott Benner 25:56
You said farmer field. And I thought for sure you're gonna say pharmacy. I thought you were gonna say, since you were just wandered into the pharmacy. Well, well, yeah, I mean, listen, you like again? You you live on an ice shelf, I imagine, right? So, polar bears, that kind of stuff, not quite. I

Kimberly 26:12
don't have polar bears. Winnipeg has the polar bears. I'm Alberta. It's great. We have gophers, gophers

Scott Benner 26:20
that go through the snow sometimes, yeah, when it snows there in the winter time, what do you get a foot? No, well, what's a foot in centimeter? Like,

Kimberly 26:34
get 10 centimeters today,

Scott Benner 26:36
10 centimeters. 10 centimeters is only, like, basically a third of a foot. Oh, well, then, okay, it's not a lot of snow. Then,

Kimberly 26:45
No, not right now, no. Or it's this. It's a spring, spring snowstorm. Nothing serious.

Lija Greenseid 26:52
What about in this, in the in the heart of the winter, though, when you get hit, does it? Is it a lot? It could be

Kimberly 26:57
we can get up to 30 centimeters, like a

Scott Benner 27:01
foot, yeah, that's a foot, my god, yeah, yeah, all right, Jesus,

Kimberly 27:08
but we get the cool, cool temperatures, like we get the minus 40, minus 50, oh, my God.

Lija Greenseid 27:13
Are you serious, yeah, can I ask a sincere question?

Kimberly 27:18
Okay, why

Scott Benner 27:19
don't you move like, go somewhere else. It's just very cold,

Kimberly 27:23
because I've lived here all my life, and I'll never leave. It's

Scott Benner 27:27
not a thing you think of, like, when it's minus 40, which, I don't know what that is, Fahrenheit, like, I don't have time to figure it out. But like, when that happens, you're not like, oh my god, it's so cold outside, I'm gonna die. Or, like, I have to stay indoors for two months at a time. Or like, none of that happens. You just live your life.

Kimberly 27:47
Just go on living real plane, yeah, but just keep on keep on going. What can you do? It's part of this the seasons here. Has

Lija Greenseid 27:57
snot ever frozen to your face? I don't think so. No, have you ever seen snot frozen in a man's mustache or beard?

Kimberly 28:05
I think my husband's before, yes, and you

Lija Greenseid 28:09
don't even know it's there, right? They don't how cold it is. Do you ice fish or have you no? Do you know people who do? No, I don't think I do. You don't have a lake around there.

Kimberly 28:23
We have a couple, but none that freeze like for that kind of that

Scott Benner 28:29
kind of thing activity. No kidding, no, that's very interesting. I'm sorry. I'm mesmerized by that. I would leave immediately. I would tell everybody, I love you all. I'm moving somewhere south. You can come or you don't, doesn't matter to me, but I'm selling all this stuff, and I'm getting out of here. And then I would go somewhere where it would never be negative, anything ever again in my life. That's, oh, I God bless you. I don't even know how you do it. I would listen, I want to be clear, if it was minus 40, whether it's Fahrenheit or Celsius, I don't even care. And I had to go somewhere. I would bitch for about an hour and a half before I left, as soon as the door opened, you would hear me go, Oh, like that. That's the first noise I would make. And then I would go outside. I would complain the entire way I was outside. Oh, my God, you'd never hear the end of it.

Kimberly 29:13
Oh, the worst part is, is brushing the vehicles off when you have to go out or go to work, that's the worst part. How's

Scott Benner 29:20
that even gonna happen? It's so cold we probably can't even get it off.

Kimberly 29:23
Oh yeah, because we the scrapers will get it off. But it's down cold standing out there doing it. Yeah,

Scott Benner 29:30
no kidding, no. Again, I'd consider leaving, but you love it there. You think it's terrific, huh?

Kimberly 29:36
Oh, I love it here. I'll be here forever. Like I said, so amazing. It's a little city. I've grown up here.

Scott Benner 29:41
I'm amazed, don't I mean, like, in a nice way, like, I think it's nice. I just, you would hear me complaining, miles away, kilometers, I'm sorry, away. I'd be complete. You'd hear me. What's that noise? I think that's Scott bitching about how cold it is outside. God, quite possibly. Yeah. So when you get to 30 and you have a change in your management style, what precipitates that like, what makes you finally look for more information or shift or whatever? Wanting

Kimberly 30:11
to be around for my girls and start learning, and I don't want to hide anymore. I want to be able to be like, Yes, this is me. This is what I have. It doesn't make me a bad person, no, and I'm learning to accept

Lija Greenseid 30:30
it. You felt that way for a long time, though. Yeah, I'm sorry. Are you? Are you crying? No, I

Kimberly 30:39
just have a cold nose because I'm sitting in the cold car.

Scott Benner 30:42
Oh, oh yeah, because your husband's sleeping and you're afraid if you talk, the dogs will bark and wake up your husband Exactly. Yeah, I appreciate this. How cold is it right now? Where you are zero. Wait, it's April. It's still that. I know it was 78 degrees here yesterday. I don't know how to tell you how warm that is. Hold on a second. 78 degrees Fahrenheit, in Celsius, 25.5 yesterday. I swear to God, you gotta leave. Does it get humid there in the summertime? Yes, it can. Yeah. Oh, my God, then what's the benefit of living there, muggy, muggy. Oh, yes, You're upsetting me. I gotta deal with sub temperatures, and it's going to be humid in the wind, in the in the summer. Yes, and a moose might walk down the street, quite possibly, yes, oh my God,

Kimberly 31:42
and the coyotes might jump the fence from the farmer's field and attack your dog.

Scott Benner 31:48
What the hell no, no. What is this? An episode of The Walking Dead. What do you what do you have going on there? Oh my gosh. Okay, all

Kimberly 31:56
right, we back right onto a farmer's field, and you can hear the coyotes howling in the night.

Scott Benner 32:02
Yeah, that, yeah, but you have a car, right? Yes, yeah. You should try driving south till it warms up. I'm telling you, you know, I want to dig more into this idea about like, being around for your kids. So do you mean to tell me that for the first 28 years of ex, about time of your life with diabetes, you felt so badly about yourself, likely because of the way you grew up with it, that you couldn't bring yourself to tell people you had diabetes or even ask for help. And then it occurred to you one day, I'm not going to live a long healthy life if I don't do something. Yes,

Kimberly 32:35
and that's when I went on a pump. Is then that

Scott Benner 32:40
got you doing insulin pump? Okay? Yeah, I would

Kimberly 32:43
always tell the doctor, because she would ask me, Do you want to go on a pump? Do you want to go on a pump? And I'm like, No, I don't. I want you to give them to the kids, like, in general, the kids, so they don't have to live the life that I live. Like Kimberly,

Scott Benner 32:58
did you think there was a limited amount of insulin pumps available. I didn't know they'll make enough. Remember,

Kimberly 33:04
I wasn't educated very well. Why

Scott Benner 33:07
were you not educated very well? Because you were constantly at the office about the slides

Kimberly 33:13
and diabetes. I never, oh, I wasn't very educated.

Scott Benner 33:17
But the doctor never said to you, Kimberly, honey, I got enough for everybody. Are you sure you really wanted the kids to have it, or you just were looking for an excuse not to do something new?

Kimberly 33:26
I wanted to be sure that they were looked after and they got an opportunity to have it. And like, I'm not talking my kids, they don't need it, but like, just the kids in general, in the world, that it was more important for them to have and live a better life than what I had, then for me to have it.

Scott Benner 33:46
Yeah? I mean, it's upsetting that a doctor wouldn't tell you it doesn't work that way. You can have one and they can have one. Yeah, you know, and, and same doctor for all those years, this

Kimberly 33:57
was like, just my GP general doctor, okay,

Scott Benner 34:01
oh, that's so you weren't even seeing somebody specifically for diabetes. No,

Kimberly 34:09
I had not seen an endocrinologist until about 22,008 was the first time I saw an endocrinologist, really.

Lija Greenseid 34:18
Why do you think that happened? Just the

Kimberly 34:23
communication got broke down, I'm guessing, um, I

Scott Benner 34:28
didn't know any better. Interesting. And did you feel like you were doing well, or did you actually think you weren't doing well, but you just didn't pay attention to that part of it.

Kimberly 34:38
I think I was doing okay, like I wasn't perfect by any means. My endocrinologist I have now went back to, I think it was 2008 and pulled up my a one C's, and they ranged

Scott Benner 34:52
from 8.0

Kimberly 34:57
down to right now, which is a 5.9 mm. Hmm, so it wasn't horrible, like, I wasn't in double digits by any means. But,

Scott Benner 35:04
no, no, no. But was there a lot of variability? Was there up and down with your blood sugars? Yes, there was.

Kimberly 35:10
I was quite brittle. I guess you could say, like they couldn't use a lot of Toronto insulin on me, or I would drop very, very quickly.

Lija Greenseid 35:20
Okay, what about nowadays? What? What's your management style now? What are you using?

Kimberly 35:25
I have a tandem pump. Sorry, OmniPod, but it's okay. I did have an OmniPod for 10 years, the upgrades and the renewal and the that kind of stuff, like the OmniPod five, we couldn't get get it here for years still, like, it just got approved this year, yeah. And the technology in the tandem was more what I was looking for than okay. And the dash, like, I got a dash, and I just, I just not like it at all. For some reason it just, I, I didn't like it.

Scott Benner 35:57
Listen, you don't have to apologize for finding whatever works for you, that's fantastic. You know, if you've got something that you like, that's great. Are you using, like, control? IQ,

Kimberly 36:06
yes. And I gotta see GM, yeah.

Scott Benner 36:09
So you have a g6 or do you or Libra? G6 No, g6 Okay,

Kimberly 36:13
I did the libre. I didn't like the libre either. It wasn't, wasn't what I wanted. So

Lija Greenseid 36:19
why? What's the difference for you between the Dexcom and the libre. The

Kimberly 36:23
Dexcom, at least brings the numbers up right away. Libre, you have to scan it.

Scott Benner 36:27
Oh, so you had libre back when it had to be scanned. Yeah, I don't think it's like that anymore. Oh, maybe not. You'll never know. How are they gonna like, that's right, no one's gonna tell you in Calgary now you're using an algorithm. Do you still think of yourself as like, difficult to manage with insulin? Or is that all become more stable? More

Kimberly 36:50
stable, but I still have kinks to work out every now and then, and just like everybody, and I can't be perfect. I I know I try to be perfect, but I cannot be. I tend to have number anxiety when I see numbers that I don't think are right. I kind of like, get it down. Get it down. Yeah, my educator kind of told me that I had to up my high alert because it was too low. She's She said to me, Why in the world do you have it that low? I'm like, so I can catch it faster. Yeah.

Scott Benner 37:25
Where was it set at?

Kimberly 37:27
It was set at a 7.7

Lija Greenseid 37:30
why? Well, I don't actually do move it. Or did you tell her I'm having good luck? Why would you ask me to change this?

Kimberly 37:35
I moved it up to an 8.5 which is a 154 for you guys.

Scott Benner 37:41
Why did you do that? Like, did you have a problem with it?

Kimberly 37:45
I didn't have a problem with it, but I was getting to the point that I was getting too focused on the numbers, and it was taking away from family time and stuff like that. So she said it would be a very good idea for me mentally, to move it up a

Scott Benner 38:03
little bit. Okay, has it helped?

Kimberly 38:07
Yeah, she wanted me to move it up to a 10. And I was like, No, that's too far. So I moved to 10.5

Lija Greenseid 38:14
what is wrong with what All right? Is this an endocrinologist?

Kimberly 38:19
No, it's just my educator.

Scott Benner 38:21
Oh, Jesus. Okay, so you,

Unknown Speaker 38:23
you have a, oh, no, no. She's

Kimberly 38:24
really amazing. She's very amazing. Okay,

Lija Greenseid 38:29
I mean, what? What was your a 1c before that,

Kimberly 38:35
the last one that I just got was a 5.9

Lija Greenseid 38:39
is it rising now that you changed the alarms?

Kimberly 38:43
I don't know. I don't go till May to get my next one done.

Scott Benner 38:47
Oh, you don't have you have a g6 Do you have clarity set up? It would tell you what? Oh, yeah. It, wait a minute,

Kimberly 38:56
you sound very cool a little bit, but I've got it down again by

Scott Benner 39:00
paying more attention to it. Yeah, do you see what I'm saying? Yes, no, no, okay, it doesn't. Are you a people pleaser?

Kimberly 39:07
I try to be. Oh, you

Scott Benner 39:09
try to be a people pleaser.

Kimberly 39:11
I was a sock up in high school. So, yeah, maybe, wait, wait, wait, you

Scott Benner 39:14
were a sock a, what a suck up like

Kimberly 39:17
a teacher's pet in high school.

Scott Benner 39:19
I I thought for sure. She didn't say, suck up. I thought I misheard you. You were happy with where your alarm was set. The doctor told you to move it because it would help you to not pay as close attention to your diabetes, which is not helping you with that, because you are still paying closer attention to diabetes to get your number back to where you wanted it. So why would you not put the alarm back to where you wanted it?

Kimberly 39:44
I might get there eventually.

Scott Benner 39:46
What's stopping you not wanting to make Chelsea mad? Is Chelsea your educator? Yes. Is she listening? She could be. She said

Kimberly 39:57
she was going to listen to my episode. Oh. Chelsea,

Scott Benner 40:00
listen, this is what we got going on here. Kimberly is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Okay? She wants a low, stable, a 1c she doesn't want to be burned out. And at the same time, if you put up her alarm, she's just going to think about it anyway, right? Yeah, so wouldn't it be wouldn't it make sense to spend the time together figuring out how to stop that alarm from beeping instead of just pushing it up so that it beeps later and then makes you go crazy, because the blood sugar's more like 180 or whatever.

Kimberly 40:30
That's the thing. If you don't catch it fast enough, it ends up going sky high.

Scott Benner 40:35
Where did you learn that? Where did I learn that from you? Yeah, okay, so, so let's figure out. Why are you seeing excursions that are going up? Are you pre bolusing your meals? Are you like, what do you think is causing that?

Kimberly 40:52
I think sometimes it's just the carb counts aren't dead on. Okay?

Scott Benner 40:58
And then do you wait for the algorithm to bring it down, or do you bolus again?

Kimberly 41:01
If I see that it's going up too much, I'll do it. I'll bolus it again.

Scott Benner 41:08
Otherwise, you're happy to let the algorithm work. If it's like, maybe more like 140 or something like that,

Kimberly 41:15
like, right now I'm at a 10.3 so I'll hit that and bring it down here when we're done, okay?

Scott Benner 41:23
Because it's it's

Kimberly 41:25
going up too. But I think that's likely going up because of adrenaline, nervous and adrenaline and all that kind of stuff, right?

Scott Benner 41:33
Plus fight or flight, because you're freezing to death in your car. Are you at least? Are you in a garage?

Kimberly 41:38
No, I'm out in the open air. No

Scott Benner 41:40
wait, you're in so, oh my god, Kimberly, I can't be responsible for your death. So you're telling me that, although, if you I don't want to say that, but if somebody was the dialog I was recording with them, I do think it would become a very popular episode, but I don't want that to happen to you. You're saying to me that you're it's zero degrees outside right now? Yep, and you're inside of a car that is not running, no, so they make background noise so that your dog won't wake up your husband. Yes. Kimberly, do you have the keys to the car with you? Yeah, do you want to startle up and warm up the car a little bit while we're talking? No, I'm okay. You're okay, okay, I had it on before

Kimberly 42:24
we started, so the seats are nice and warm, and I just put my hands under the blanket. I'm good. All right, listen,

Scott Benner 42:30
if you start putting your mittens on your feet, tell me okay, because I'll make sure we do something mittens on your feet. And they still sent you outside. Then no one was like, hey, that kid might be like, have an aneurysm or something. Maybe we should check on that. How old were you? Do you think

Kimberly 42:46
I was in grade three, so likely around what nine or 10 ish

Scott Benner 42:51
is the answer old enough to know not to put your mittens on your feet? Well, yeah, yeah, you've been let down by a lot of different people. Okay, um, do your kids know much about your diabetes? Yes,

Kimberly 43:06
they do. They learn. They know um. Courtney knows how to do a gunshot if she has to. She knows how to do everything um. And of course, Mackenzie knows how to do stuff when she's home. And she actually, actually, both of them follow my

Lija Greenseid 43:23
Dexcom. Oh, that's lovely. Did they ever help you, like mom? Are you okay? You ever get texts? Yes,

Kimberly 43:30
I get texts from Courtney all the time when she's in school. And I get um, from Mackenzie. I get told, hi, mom, the nurse is a mirror laughing at you because your numbers are going crazy. Wait, why should? Why is she shares it with the nurses up there? Why

Lija Greenseid 43:46
is she with the nurses? Because she is a nurse. Oh, that's right. Okay,

Kimberly 43:50
yeah. Sorry. When they're bored on overnight, like the overnight shift, they'll sit and they'll look at my numbers, and sometimes they'll play bingo with it, and

Scott Benner 44:00
while they're waiting for injuries to come in off the oil rigs. Am I right? Mostly

Kimberly 44:03
not oil rigs, but more of the telephone line people. There's a lot of linesman up there.

Lija Greenseid 44:10
Oh, no kidding, and they fall. Yeah,

Kimberly 44:13
they can, yeah.

Scott Benner 44:15
Hold on a second. I'm going to try to remember that the next time I complain about my job to somebody. You could be a linesman. I actually found myself the other day saying I had to record that podcast three times today. But I I've never fallen from a poll, so I guess maybe I'm okay. What about just burning out? Have you gone through that?

Kimberly 44:38
Oh yeah, I went through that hardcore tell me when I was about 1616, 1718, I started with the burnout. I wanted to be like my friends. I wanted to drink what they were drinking. I wanted to eat what they were eating. I didn't want to be different anymore. It lasted a long. Long time, actually likely, until I was pregnant with Mackenzie, it was I was still riding the burnout train.

Lija Greenseid 45:07
What did that look like, day to day? Were you not using insulin as much as you should have, or what were you doing? No,

Kimberly 45:13
I still did all of that. It was more what I was eating and like, I still did my testing, I did my insulin, I did all that kind of stuff, but it was more I was eating the chocolate I was eating or drinking regular drinks. I was just eating whatever. But then I would use my sliding scale and bring things back down to where they should be, right.

Scott Benner 45:35
Let me say something where I'm going to sound like a leftist, communist hippie. Okay, I was in a restaurant last week with Kelly. We do a thing on Saturdays. Since the kids have gotten older, we go to lunch on Saturdays together. Because, you know, we just work a lot, so we want to make sure that we do something together once a week. So we're having lunch, and I look over at the table next to me a couple, and their two kids. And the kids are like, four and six, maybe, right? And the waitress comes along and says, like, what do you want to drink? And everybody orders their drinks. And for the kid, she goes, Do you want chocolate milk or coke? And I'm like, water. Could get a little little water, maybe, and, like, I don't know, something that doesn't have a, like, 48 grams of sugar in it, maybe, like, no, like, just chocolate milk or coke. And I have to tell you, like I had a visceral reaction when the kid ordered a coke. I was like, why are we letting a four year old drink that? I don't understand that. But I guess everybody my I says to my wife, this is this, is this, in case you want to know what it was like to be at lunch with me. Then I was like, I don't understand this. Like, what people give their kids soda, like this, like, sugary soda. And she's like, Yeah, everybody drinks soda. I was like, I don't know, man. Like, I don't that doesn't make sense to me. Like, I don't know. No, we never let our kids drink that I don't know. I'm not saying I'm right or wrong. It just It strikes me very strangely,

Kimberly 47:03
I didn't get any sweet serve any sort while I was growing up. Well,

Scott Benner 47:08
yeah, they didn't know what to do with you because they would have had to start exchanging things off your diet.

Kimberly 47:12
Oh, exactly. I do remember that once, like, I got up early Easter morning and I snuck out and ate all of my brother's Easter chocolate. Nice. I got in trouble for that one.

Scott Benner 47:25
Was he pissed?

Kimberly 47:26
I think the parents were pissed more than he was.

Lija Greenseid 47:28
Did they give Oh, and you didn't have Wait. Did he get Easter chocolate and you didn't? Yeah, oh, I don't think he can do that, though that's tough.

Kimberly 47:38
And then, like, I grabbed the bag of Oreos once, and I snuck and ate them under the bed in my parents room. Under the bed Oreos, I ate the Oreos under the bed in my parents room.

Scott Benner 47:51
How old were you?

Kimberly 47:53
Maybe five or six. Okay,

Scott Benner 47:56
do you think these are all responses to diabetes?

Kimberly 47:59
Yes, definitely. And being treated differently, and being treated

Scott Benner 48:03
differently by your family or by others, or by both, even,

Kimberly 48:09
even by my family, because my brother would get the chocolate, but I wouldn't. And, yeah, yeah.

Scott Benner 48:14
So your your family treated differently because at school did, when you're getting ready to have a baby, you decide to do a little better for your for the baby, right? Or was this even a thing that you thought or did the doctor tell you

Kimberly 48:27
when I got pregnant with Mackenzie, they had told me to wait, and I didn't understand why, because nobody ever explained to me a 1c or numbers or anything like that. And being young and dumb and stupid Darcy and I were like, No, we're ready. Let's get the show on the road. So I got pregnant before I had my appointment with my Pregnancy Clinic type thing here, and the doctor there actually told me that I have to abort. McKenzie, wait, because you and I was like, wait, no, I am not doing that. Oh, hold

Scott Benner 49:05
on, Kimberly, let's pick through that. How pregnant are you? You didn't get pregnant on purpose, I imagine. Oh no, I did. Oh, you did. I did. Okay, so

Kimberly 49:13
you did. I was ready. I didn't want to wait for the doctor's appointments because they were going to be months. Apparently, when you get pregnant, when you're diabetic, you're supposed to have these great numbers, which nobody informed me of.

Scott Benner 49:24
And so you get there, and the doctor's like, you're gonna have to have these great numbers. But you didn't think, did you think you could do it? I

Kimberly 49:31
was really kind of in shock, and didn't really know, but I worked my ass off to do it, and the doctor actually told me twice that I should abort my baby.

Scott Benner 49:41
What was your a 1c at, when he, I mean, I guess it was a guy, right? Yes,

Kimberly 49:46
he was a guy, and I still remember his name, and he was an awful, awful

Scott Benner 49:51
doctor. Was his name? Dr Demento? No, no, it wasn't.

Kimberly 49:55
Anyways, I kept Mackenzie and she turned. Note like she was 10 two, when she was born, and she was three weeks early. And then for Courtney, we did it the right way. We got the A 1c down where it was supposed to be, did all the planning work, and she was nine, nine, and she was four weeks early. So

Scott Benner 50:21
what was your a 1c when the doctor's like, you have to have an abortion, I couldn't

Kimberly 50:25
tell you. I'm assuming it was up in the eighth. I'm guessing, because that's as far back as my current endo could go. She couldn't pull she couldn't pull up my numbers, likely because we didn't have computers back then for it. We it was all paper charting back then.

Scott Benner 50:42
Okay, so when you say, No, I can handle this. I'll make it like, where did you get your a 1c down to during your first pregnancy?

Kimberly 50:49
I couldn't tell you. I don't think they ever told me. They might have told me, but I don't remember it. Yeah, it's

Scott Benner 50:55
fine. I couldn't tell you. What does work harder? Mean, then? Like, what did you do that? Like, I don't know, changed your outcomes.

Kimberly 51:02
The biggest thing was, at that point, I changed to pens, and I started doing the four injections a day. Okay? Because before that, I was still on only two injections. Still, at that time in my life, I was still on only two injections a day. Obviously, you

Scott Benner 51:19
don't like needles. So was this a lot about you just didn't want to be doing more injections, and so you just looked at higher blood sugars. Or were you not testing like, did you not know what they were? You just counting carbs and putting it in? Yeah,

Kimberly 51:34
I didn't know any better. Wow, that's really something. I just I did not know. The communication got screwed up somewhere. I didn't get put through to the right people. And

Scott Benner 51:45
so Kim, after you, after, after you're told this about the pregnancy, and you're, I mean, you're trying harder, but you don't really know what that means. But what point do you really take control of it and say, I'm going to find out everything I need to know, and I'm going to do the things I need to know, and I'm going to follow through and see if it works like At what age did that happen for you? 26

Kimberly 52:03
likely for my second pregnancy, when I got my together, started to make sure I was going to be good for for this pregnancy, and then after the kids were born, it was likely 2008 where I really put things into play and started seeing my endo that I have now regularly. And how

Lija Greenseid 52:28
did seeing an endo help? If it did?

Kimberly 52:32
Oh, she's absolutely amazing. She helped me get numbers figured out. I can text her whenever I need to, I can call her home if I need to. I had my wisdom teeth out, all four of them at once, and I was sedated for it. She told Darcy that he used to call her every hour with my blood sugar, and he actually missed one hour calling her and she she was calling us to make sure everything was okay. Oh, she's amazing. I yeah, I don't want to say her name, because I don't know if she'd be okay with that, but she'll know who she is if she ever listens to it, because I can't say enough good things about her.

Scott Benner 53:16
You see what a difference it makes to find somebody who's engaged with you, cares, focused, understands what they're doing, and is communicative and good at communicating, oh,

Kimberly 53:26
like, I will send her Christmas pictures of the family, birthday pictures of all of us. Like, each time there's a big event, I send her the pictures, and she writes back and like, she's She's everything I wish I would have had earlier. Yeah, tell

Scott Benner 53:44
me why that's so like, like, why that level of intimacy? Like, sending pictures of your family. Like, what do you feel like she's done for you?

Kimberly 53:52
She's made it so I can be around with them, so I'll hopefully be here longer. And she's, she looks after me like, I don't know how to explain it, she's just

Scott Benner 54:04
a special person, amazing. Yeah, she she's

Kimberly 54:06
a very special person. And like, for five or six years, Mackenzie and I would do interviews with her students, because she's also a teacher at the university out here. And every time we would do the interviews, I would tell the students, I said, make sure you that you turn out like her, like be be there for your patience. Listen to them, understand what they're going through, and not just make snap judgments just because they say one thing wrong or whatever. Yeah, like, we're all learning.

Scott Benner 54:41
That's good advice. And

Kimberly 54:42
I'm I'm still learning, like every day, I learn something new listening to you.

Scott Benner 54:47
Oh, I'm glad. Oh, that's wonderful. I really do. I love the idea that you're listening from the beginning, that you're you're so many years behind where the podcast is right now. Wish I had that experience to have over again. I don't even know. Oh, it's funny. You're listening to stuff. I probably couldn't even remember that I did at this point. I just

Kimberly 55:04
started year 2020, so I'm waiting to see what you're going to do when all the covid stuff comes up. Oh,

Scott Benner 55:11
yeah, we talk about covid for a little bit, huh? I wonder how wrong we got that in the beginning.

Kimberly 55:16
I don't know. I'm waiting to see. And I just listened to the one where you read the story of the Grinch, How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Scott Benner 55:24
That became a favorite. I've done that a couple of times since then. Oh, really, good. I can't wait. I think there's other Christmas poems in there along the way. On Christmas, I wanted to stop doing it, and I got chastised into doing it again this year. And I was like, I said, I said, I don't think people care. And

Kimberly 55:42
oh, yes, yes, we do. Oh, okay. Like, it made my day. Driving home from work, it made my day. Oh,

Scott Benner 55:48
I'm glad. Okay, well, I'll keep doing it. Then for you, Kimberly, if nobody else, oh, thank you, of course.

Kimberly 55:54
Because, like, I'm a nursing attendant in a long term care facility, and sometimes that listening to that kind of a thing, it just made my day so much better coming home, because it was a rough day at work that day.

Lija Greenseid 56:07
Oh, it's so nice. Thank you. Is that tough helping people who are older? It

Kimberly 56:11
can be when they don't know what they're doing and they're hitting you and they're spitting at you and they're biting you. And it can be, it can be very hard, but then you just have to think like they don't know what they're doing.

Lija Greenseid 56:27
It gets to that point they really just aren't they have no idea. Yeah, happens at all different ages. Yeah, yeah.

Kimberly 56:37
We have some really good, really good ones, and we have some that are just nasty. Why don't

Scott Benner 56:43
you put them on one of those moose and just slap the moose in the butt and just let them go.

Kimberly 56:49
It's not legal.

Scott Benner 56:51
Legal. What is legal? Legal? Smeagol, right? You're in Canada, the wild west of Iceland. You can do whatever you want, actually, which which one is that Iceland is warm in Greenland is cold, or is it vice versa? I don't know. Don't ask me. Yeah, I should learn more stuff before I talk on the podcast, but it'd be a lot of work. So I'm just gonna keep getting you should come to Canada, Canada. I gotta come to Canada so little kids make fun of me about my snacks. You know that's gonna happen

Kimberly 57:24
on a minus 50 day. You should come to Canada, step off the plane in your T shirt and

Scott Benner 57:31
listen, you're on the west coast of Canada. Am I right? Yes, yeah, I am not flying out there for anything. I don't even know. I don't even know what you'd have to tell me was at the end of that flight for me to get on the plane. That's not nice. No, I don't I'm just telling you I don't care. I don't care. That's that very well may be. I don't want to travel like that. That's my problem. Actually, I think I'm currently ignoring a diabetes association that asked me to come out the Western cap. I think, I think I owe them an email, but my email is gonna say so far away. Seriously, there'd have

Kimberly 58:07
to be. I tried to get, I tried to get Chelsea, to get you to come out here.

Scott Benner 58:11
Maybe this is who I'm ignoring. I don't know. Like it's so far. It really is. It's the distance that bothers me, not the Canada part. I would love to see Canada one day. I mean, I'm fine with it, seeing it or not seeing it, but if I see it, I'd be happy about it. I just I'm saying it's the distance thing. I don't want to be on a plane for five hours. Uh, oi,

Kimberly 58:31
that's horrible. Not five hours.

Scott Benner 58:34
Oh, my God, doesn't this sound terrible? Are you being sarcastic with me because I was agreeing with you. It's horrible. I was being a little sarcastic. I mean, I need a first class ticket. First of all, I don't want to. I can't be, uh, like, squished for five hours. You see, I'm already upset thinking about it. And then, like, even somebody said to me one time, like, Wouldn't you love to go to Hawaii? I'm like, Oh, my God, so far away. I gotta get on a plane. I gotta fly to California. That's five hours. Now get on another plane and fly again to another place, far away. For who? For what Ricky waters once said after the Philadelphia Eagles gave him a lot of money and he didn't try to catch ball, that's a bizarre statement for me, but anybody who lived through it, the eagles were a bad football team, and they finally spent some money on a running back. They got this guy named Ricky waters, and in his first game, think they were losing. In fairness, had he caught the ball or not caught the ball, I don't believe anything would have changed. And this past is sent to him. It's a little out of his reach, but if he just would have reached out, maybe laid out for it, he could have caught it, and he didn't. He just watched it go by like and then afterwards, the media asked him, you didn't make much of an effort for that ball, and he goes for who for what. And I was like, Oh, I feel very good about the money we just spent on him, for who for what.

Kimberly 59:50
He's very happy with it. How about

Scott Benner 59:51
for everybody watching the game and for all the money we gave you? And I know I didn't give it to him, but it felt like I did when he said he wasn't going to try that hard. You. Again, this has nothing to do with you, but I can't I mean, Hawaii would have to be Hawaii. Plus, I don't know what else you could offer me at this point, but it would need to be something, a lot of money, money, sex. I'd have to come back with a perfect hand. You'd have to promise it to me all the things that people love, like, there'd have to be a free car there when I got there, that would be back at my house when I got home. It's just so fcking far. I don't know, I hate it. I did a talk once in Oklahoma, where the wind comes right behind the rain, you might know the place, and I had to fly into Texas and then drive, like, I don't know, an hour to where I gave the talk, and the whole time I was in the car, I was like, Oh, why is the airport not closer to where I'm going?

Kimberly 1:00:57
I had to fly into LA in November. Okay? And this is another thing, like one of my fears with being diabetic and everything, I was absolutely terrified to go through customs and security and all that stuff, right, okay, and Darcy

knew this beforehand, so him

being the jerk face that he can be sometimes that I love. I'll just put that in there. He would watch border security and how all these people get caught taking stuff across the border. And I'm like, Darcy, this is not doing very good for me, and I have to cross the border in a week. Do

Scott Benner 1:01:39
you ever call him Mr. Darcy? No, I don't. From the movie. No, what movie do I mean? It's the one with the British people.

Kimberly 1:01:49
Oh, I have no idea, but I never call him Mr. Darcy. Isn't that, um, love, actually, or is it the other one?

Scott Benner 1:01:57
My reference for things today is off. I couldn't remember strange brew. Wonder what's isn't it? My Fair Lady with Mr. Darcy. I don't know. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, hold on a second. I

Kimberly 1:02:12
have no idea. Oh, now you're pulling it up. It's Pride

Scott Benner 1:02:15
and Prejudice. Oh, but Well, well,

Kimberly 1:02:19
he does not fit into that era at all. So no,

Scott Benner 1:02:25
that's well, that's why it might be funnier. Consider it, if you would think about it, you don't have to do it, but get back to me if you do it.

Kimberly 1:02:35
Yeah, I'll go in and wake him up and say, Mr. Darcy, it's time to get up.

Scott Benner 1:02:39
He'll be like, he'll be like, listen, Jane Austen, would you like flip out if, if you said that to your husband, he's like, I know that's from that Jane Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice. And I,

Kimberly 1:02:50
I would be very shocked if he knew what that was. Beyond shocked if he knew that that reference,

Scott Benner 1:02:57
like there was a Mr. Darcy film in 2023 does not look like it was good for popular Yeah? Sorry, this IMDb makes everything seem the same. This is like something somebody made on their phone. I think you guys have phones there, right? Yeah.

Kimberly 1:03:14
While we have, like, we have cell phones, we don't have a landline. We don't want one. What do

Scott Benner 1:03:19
you got, like, the iPhone two or something like that? No,

Unknown Speaker 1:03:23
14.

Kimberly 1:03:23
Judgy, judgy, a bit there. Fancy.

Scott Benner 1:03:30
How do they do in the cold, though, don't they, like, shut off when they get real cold? Oh, they

Kimberly 1:03:34
could. I haven't. Mine hasn't yet. So,

Scott Benner 1:03:38
Kim Burley, you are lovely. We are at the end of our time. Have I made all your dreams come true? Because at the beginning, you said you were having a fan girl situation, and I didn't let you talk about that. Yes, you have. Why? Why? How is that possible? I don't know. It just

Kimberly 1:03:57
seems like you're like, big and famous and exciting to talk to and I got to talk to

Scott Benner 1:04:01
you. Was that true? Was I exciting to talk to him?

Kimberly 1:04:04
You were everything that he thought you would be. How's that? Well, I

Scott Benner 1:04:08
didn't let you down. That's what I'm here. And

Kimberly 1:04:12
I knew you were going to pick on Canada, so I knew that going in. So I was like,

Scott Benner 1:04:15
Okay, listen, I'm like those kids and the snacks. I see an easy target and I go for it. I can't, by the way, I'm so sorry that I know it's such a long time ago, but it's horrible. You know what I mean? Like just kids, just looking for anything that's different and picking at you about it. Because it really does sound like it stuck with you for a long time.

Kimberly 1:04:37
It did. It was mental, mental abuse in a way? Yes, no,

Scott Benner 1:04:42
of course. No, it sucks. It really does. You don't have that problem anymore, though, in your adult life, right? No, I

Kimberly 1:04:50
got good friends. My family's amazing now, and, yeah,

Scott Benner 1:04:54
that's good. Oh, I'm glad. I'm glad for you. What's the the best advantage? Spent in diabetes that you've seen in your lifetime, definitely

Kimberly 1:05:02
say um, CGM, followed by pump.

Scott Benner 1:05:06
Okay, yeah. How does the CGM change things for you? Oh, no

Kimberly 1:05:10
more finger prokes, hello. My poor fingers have been able to heal,

Scott Benner 1:05:15
but not about the numbers. It's more about the the respite for your fingers,

Kimberly 1:05:20
well and the numbers, but you got to think of it both ways here, like my poor fingers. After seven, eight times a day of being poked, 365, times a year, they just hurt. They were they were in pretty bad shape.

Scott Benner 1:05:36
How long did it take for them to kind of rebound?

Kimberly 1:05:40
I don't know they look nice now. I'm looking at them right now, and they're looking pretty good. No little black holes in them. And

Scott Benner 1:05:46
how nice? How long were you? How long have you been on a CGM? Well,

Kimberly 1:05:49
I went Dexcom, then libre, and then back to Dexcom, so I'd say about seven years likely.

Scott Benner 1:05:56
Okay, and your fingers are nice now, no black you have those black dots you can get in those eventually, huh? Yeah,

Kimberly 1:06:03
that's crazy, but there's no more of them, and it's, it's awesome to see numbers as they as they come up, right? Like, yeah, unless you're me and who has number anxiety, then it's not so good, but, but

Scott Benner 1:06:18
it's better than not knowing, right? Definitely

Kimberly 1:06:21
better than not knowing Good, good, and especially when, like, I'm way down in southwest Calgary, where I work, Mackenzie's two and a half hours away from home, like it's good for them to be able to see what's going on. And like,

Scott Benner 1:06:38
Darcy's what

Kimberly 1:06:41
when he's at work, he's only 20 minutes away from me, so it's good for them all to know what's going on and how to help and where to help and who to call, and yeah,

Scott Benner 1:06:53
for safety, if nothing else. Okay, so are we going to call this one strange brew or Mrs. Darcy? Let's think about it, because you are technically Mrs. Darcy. So, boy, strange brew might be good. I don't know. I'll figure it out later. Don't worry about it. We got plenty of

Kimberly 1:07:12
time, like, least, about six months.

Scott Benner 1:07:15
Oh yeah, about six months. I've got plenty of time. I'll literally hear myself six months from now say this, and I'll be like, Hmm, I wonder what we are gonna call it, and then I'll decide then. But this is very nice. I appreciate you doing this. Very much. Kimberly, sincerely. Can you hold on a second for me? Yeah, thank you.

Us. Med sponsored this episode of The juicebox podcast. Check them out at usmed.com/juicebox, or by calling 888-721-1514, get your free benefits check and get started today with us Med, a huge thank you to one of today's sponsors, gvoke glucagon. Find out more about gvoke hypopen at gvoke glucagon.com, forward slash juice box. You spell that, G, V, O, k, e, g, l, U, C, A, G, o, n.com, forward slash juice box pricing for juice cruise 2025, is still as it was when we launched it for a few more weeks, but then after a certain date, in October, it's mid October, sometime, the price could fluctuate. So if you've been thinking about coming, now is the perfect time to put down your deposit, because after the mid point, I should, I should know the day, but I don't. But after the midpoint in October, I can't guarantee that the price you're seeing now will be the price that you'll pay. Juice cruise 2025 like I said, there's links at juicebox podcast.com and then right down there in the show notes of your podcast player. Come along. Have a great vacation. Meet a bunch of wonderful people. Juicebox podcast.com a diabetes diagnosis comes with a lot of new terms, and you're not going to understand most of them. That's why we made defining diabetes. Go to juicebox podcast.com up into the menu and click on defining diabetes to find the series that will tell you what all of those words mean, short, fun and informative. That's defining diabetes. Hey, kids, listen up. You've made it to the end of the podcast. You must have enjoyed it. You know? What else you might enjoy? The private Facebook group for the juicebox podcast. I know you're thinking, uh, Facebook, Scott, please. But no. Beautiful group, wonderful people, a fantastic community, juicebox podcast, type one diabetes on Facebook, of course, if you have type two, are you touched by diabetes in any way? You're absolutely welcome. It's a private group, so you'll have to answer a couple of questions before you come in, but make sure you're not a bot or an evildoer. Then you're on your way. 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. The episode you just heard was professionally edited by wrong way recording. Wrongwayrecording.com. If you have a podcast or you're getting ready to drop an album and you need someone to you know, do that magic stuff that you don't understand, go find Rob.