Scott Benner 12/13/24 Scott Benner 12/13/24

#1383 I'm Not Calm

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

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Scott Benner 0:00
Here we are back together again, friends for another episode of The Juicebox Podcast.

Tess is the mother of four children, one of them who has type one diabetes. Her kids play a ton of travel sports, and her son's diagnosis was missed by their pediatrician.

Please don't forget that nothing you hear on the Juicebox Podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan or becoming bold with insulin. 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. 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 juice box at checkout. That's Juicebox at checkout to save 40% at cozy earth.com. Don't forget, if you're a US resident who has type one, or is the caregiver of someone with type one, visit T 1d exchange.org/juice box right now and complete that survey. It will take you 10 minutes to complete the survey, and that effort alone will help to move type one diabetes research forward. It will cost you nothing to help. Today's podcast is sponsored by us Med, US med.com/juicebox 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 show is sponsored today by the glucagon that my daughter carries. G, voke hypo pen. Find out more at G, VO, glucagon.com. Forward slash, juice box. I'm having an on body vibe alert. This episode of the juice box podcast is sponsored by ever since 365 the only one year where CGM that's one insertion and one CGM a year, one CGM one year, not every 10 or 14 days ever since cgm.com/juicebox

Tess 2:27
My name is Tess, and I have four children. I have a 15 year old, a 13 year old, an 11 year old, who is my type, one diabetic, and

Scott Benner 2:39
an eight year old. How'd you mess up the spacing on the last one? What do you mean? I messed it up. They're all two years apart until the third, right? Until the one's three years apart, right? Well, to get tired a lot.

Tess 2:53
Yeah, three's a lot, actually. When I told my parents, who helped us that out a lot, it's the only reason we have four kids. When I told them I was pregnant with the last they were just silent, and I had to tell them, You're supposed to say congratulations.

Scott Benner 3:05
They were like, but we're never gonna stop watching your children. I think, right. Well, I just figured you were considering getting divorced. Now you decided not to. That's where the extra year came from.

Tess 3:19
Nope. We always wanted four. Actually, my husband would have way more if I let him, but kids are expensive, so

Scott Benner 3:25
really, your husband would like more children. Yes, he loves kids. Can I ask? Is he one of those people who loves kids but it's not that involved? Or is he really super involved?

Tess 3:34
No, he's really involved. He's their coach. Half my kids coaches for all their sports and and he loves babies, kids. He just loves kids. I do too, but not like him wreak havoc on your body. So I was done after four.

Scott Benner 3:49
This is like, I can't do this again. That's enough. Was he in for another one? Yeah, oh yeah, he would be. He said something like, he was like, Hey, do you think we should have five kids? Yeah. Oh, you say Get away from me. And then you struck him with a bat. Is that correct? Correct? And now that bat is now leaning on your side table of your bed, exactly. It's over for you, buddy. Get back. That's amazing. Well, congratulations on I mean, I'll do what your parents wouldn't do. Congratulations on your four kids. Like, was there any indication that type one might be in your life? Is it, you know, in an extended family, or anything like that? Nope, no indication at all. We have no one in the family with it, no one. No one just hey, congratulations. Here it is. Gotcha. What about other stuff? Meaning, celiac, hypothyroidism, anything like that,

Tess 4:43
nothing. I don't know. Does eczema count? Yeah, two of my kids have kind of dry skin like, that's about it.

Scott Benner 4:50
I count eczema. It's not a big one, but, yeah, sure, right, then, that's it, gotcha, that's it. Don't be damn All right. Well, lucky you. Yeah, right. How did. How did it happen? What was the first sign? Because if you if you weren't looking for it, you don't know about it. I'm interested in how you figured it out.

Tess 5:06
Yeah, his story is kind of interesting. So in June, 2020 he was six years old, almost seven, and he wet the bed one night. And I was like, well, that's strange. You know, he never wets the bed. So the next night, Hey, buddy, you gotta go to the bathroom before you go to bed. And he did, but he wet the bed again, like, all right, this is weird. So the next night, all right, you're not drinking anything after 6pm and he did not wet the bed that night. But for the next few weeks, he was wetting the bed like three to four times a week. And I was like, This is strange. Like, this is this kid, once he was potty trained, that was it. He hasn't went to bed, you know, really, ever. Maybe the first couple moms said he was potty trained at three. So I decided to call the pediatrician, and I made an appointment. And at this point, I had checked with Dr Google, and of course, Dr Google will tell you that bed wetting is a sign of type one diabetes. I had a friend whose teenage son had been diagnosed about six months ago, so I did call her up and just ask. And she said, Well, it's, you know, it's very simple. The pediatrician will have you, you know, pee in a cup, and if there's any sugar in his urine, they'll they'll probably send you right to the hospital. I made the appointment. I packed a hospital bag because I really thought it might be that I didn't tell my son. I didn't want to scare him, so I put it in the back of my husband's car. I sent my husband because he is much better with doctors and hospitals and needles and all that stuff than me. And I was waiting for his call, and he called me up. I was out on a walk with my other son, who was three at that time, my husband called and said, Doctor says he looks great. Urine is fine. Vitals are good, you know? And I remember just bursting into tears of joy, like so happy that it wasn't diabetes. I did say, though, why is he wetting the bed? And the pediatrician had told my husband, well, you know, COVID had just shut down the whole world a few months ago in March, and this was beginning of June. And so the pediatrician had just said, you know, the kids, all their schedules are off, everything, their whole worlds have been rocked. You know, school shut down, everything shut down. He's probably just wetting the bed because of that so, well, great. You know, I don't have a kid who's a type one diabetic. That's wonderful.

Scott Benner 7:27
He's just peeing in his bed. And he's a little too old for that, but, okay, right? But

Tess 7:32
he just, you know, diabetes, COVID, yeah, that was like, in the middle of the week. And then that weekend, we went to the beach for just a little little getaway couple days, and my son was walking towards the water, like in his bathing suit, away from me, and I could see every rib in his back. And I thought, he's a skinny kid. All my kids are thin, but I'd never seen his ribs from the back before. Yeah. And actually turned to my friend and I said, Gosh, like, you know, just something doesn't seem right. He just doesn't seem well to me. But that pediatrician checked him out, said he was fine. So what do I know? I'm not a doctor. I

Scott Benner 8:09
have a friend who's a pediatrician who would tell you he's not a doctor, he's a pediatrician. But go ahead, interesting. Here's how he here's how he told me, one day he goes, my father's not a doctor, he's a dentist. I'm not a doctor, I'm a pediatrician. And I don't know if that's like a professional joke or not, but anyway, go. I apologize. You're talking to your friend on the beach. Your kid looks very thin. What'd you figure

Tess 8:30
out? Yeah, well, so we go home and he's still, you know, he's kind of wetting the bed, but that was really the only symptom at the time. You know, he did, he wasn't, didn't have the extreme thirst yet? Well, obviously, me seeing the ribs in his back indicated he was losing weight, but he was, he was skinny anyways, so I didn't notice it, you know, a drastic change. So we get home, my gut just said, just, he's not well. And so I called the pediatrician again. I called like the nurse line, just left a message. It had been one week, and I said, you know, he was checked out in the office last week, but I just some he just doesn't seem that well. By now, he was asking to take naps, which was very strange for him. He hadn't nap since he gave them up at two years old, so he was really tired. The nurse called me back and she said, Hey, I talked with the doctor, the pediatrician, if you will. And he said that, you know, everything was fine, but since you're still worried, he'll go ahead and order some blood work just to make you feel better. So she sent the orders over that Friday afternoon, and I went online to make an appointment. And again, like diabetes was out of my mind now because, you know, the doctor said it wasn't that so what was in your mind at that point? I really didn't know. Okay, I really wasn't sure, but I knew, like, something is very wrong with him. And so I went to make the blood work appointment. And it was Friday afternoon. I was gonna wait till Monday, and something in my gut said, don't wait till Monday. See if. There's appointments tomorrow morning, Saturday morning. So I checked and there was an appointment. So I booked it online. Saturday morning comes. I send my husband, because, again, I don't, I don't do that stuff. You know, he's, he's more calm than me with you

Scott Benner 10:13
wanted all these kids go to the blood work exactly.

Tess 10:18
That's his job and this relationship. And so my husband took him and my little, my little six year old going off to get blood work. He was scared, but he was so brave. And so my husband called me when he's done, he said, Oh, he was he was so brave. He did such a good job. I'm going to take him to 711 to get a Slurpee to celebrate how brave he was so perfect. You can imagine what, what a Slurpee does that night, my son got very sick. I ended up sleeping with him in his bed, and he was like smacking his lips like and his lips were all dry. Looking back now, he was severely dehydrated, and he was waking up to urinate every hour and a half. And I laid there and listened to him peeing, and I could not believe how much urine was coming out of that little body. I thought, how, how can he be producing this much urine? Yeah, he's tiny, and he just peed an hour and a half ago, and then he was going to the sink and just gulping water. And I knew, I knew he was so sick, but again, I what diabetes was out the doctor said. But I laid there that night thinking, I should, I should get up and take him to the hospital now. But again, I don't. I don't like hospital. So to been my, my husband's job, and he's not a middle of the night person. So I said, oh, we'll wait. We'll wait till the morning. No one gets

Scott Benner 11:33
sick at night here, we don't let that right? You can't, you can't. You know, I've had people on the podcast who discussed one person was diagnosed as, like a baby, and their family found them drinking out of

Tess 11:44
the toilet. Oh, I remember that. Yeah, that's, that's the

Scott Benner 11:47
draw. And then you were restricting his his liquid there for a little walk. Imagine how like, thirsty he was and how compliant he was to listen to that's really, yeah, okay, I'm sorry. Go ahead, poor kid. Yeah, look at you. No, I'm just kidding.

Tess 12:03
Why'd I have a fourth after that? Now it's Sunday morning, and now my son's vomiting. I call the pediatricians, obviously close, but I call the on call doctor. It's a large practice, so there's many pediatricians there. I leave a message. I explained, you know, he was just seen. It had been exactly 10 days since I had had him in the office. He was just seen. He checked out, but he's really sick now. I explained, what's going on. I explained that he had just gotten blood work yesterday morning, but I didn't know if blood work, you know, came in on Sundays or whatever. Right left the message. Got a call back within 10 minutes, and it was a different pediatrician than the one I had seen 10 days prior. And she said, I just saw his blood work. His blood sugar is extremely high. You've got to get him to a hospital right away. And she said, and I looked back at his urine sample from 10 days ago, and I'm not sure how my colleague missed it, but there was glucose in his urine back then, oh, we've got

Scott Benner 13:01
Yeah. So we got somebody who put their glasses on before they look at your stuff. That's nice, good. Did you say yeah? 10 days ago, I tried to tell you all this, nobody listened to me. Yeah. I'll wait to hear what happens next. Does it have something to do with you? Throwing something because I can't wait. I'm excited. Go ahead. No,

Tess 13:17
no. So, of course, I say it's also COVID, so only one parent is allowed to go right to the hospital. So guess who goes? Because, yeah, like hospitals, and I wanted to go to the local one, like, you know, the county one, because it's just closer. And the on call pediatrician said, Oh no, you need to go downtown, where there's a, you know, to a big university that has a pediatric endocrinologist, you know, on staff at all times. So she gave me a couple of options. We have some world renowned hospitals right in our area, here on the East Coast. And so I picked the one that I had heard of the most, and sent my husband off. And they got there and they said he was a few hours away from the ICU. He did not need to go into the ICU, but I suspect it may be because it's such a big hospital. They have an entire pediatric endocrinology floor alone, and so I'm thinking maybe they were just better equipped to handle it because he was so sick he was in DKA,

Scott Benner 14:20
yeah, maybe his blood gasses were on the right side of horrifying that they were able to manage it somewhere else. Who knows? They didn't tell you, right? Yeah,

Tess 14:28
no, they didn't tell me.

Scott Benner 14:30
Can Can I stop you for a second? Sure, nobody likes hospitals. Why do you extra not like them?

Tess 14:36
I'm not calm, like my husband has a very calm demeanor. I get very anxious, and I was afraid, like my son would pick up on that, and wouldn't, I wouldn't be calm for him and my husband has the more calming presence when it comes to, like, scary stuff like that, like hospitals and stuff. Do you think

Scott Benner 14:54
people come on the podcast intent on naming their episodes because I'm not calm? Is a strong contour. Under for you, like a wonderfully declarative statement, because you're very You seem very calm now, and you're like, I'm not calm. And I'm like, oh, okay, so you were worried that you'd freak the kid out.

Tess 15:12
Yes, exactly okay. And I'm more calm now, Scott, because after my son's diagnosis and being completely on edge for about six months, I had to, had to go on a little medicine to help me be a little calmer. Oh, you're calmer now, yes, because every blood sugar alarm had me, you know, quaking and so do you

Scott Benner 15:31
get that adrenaline kick when you hear it?

Tess 15:33
Yes? And like, scared, yeah, in the beginning, yeah. Would

Scott Benner 15:37
it not go away? Then

Tess 15:38
it depended how bad the low blood sugar was. We had some scary lows in the beginning. I

Scott Benner 15:44
say, Okay, we'll hear about that later. Okay, sorry, back to the hospital. You and that guy that wanted all these babies are yes, you know, you split up the duties. You've got the three sleep. Did you have only three kids at that point? Or do you have four at that

Tess 15:57
point even? No, I had four. The fourth one was about three years old. Okay, so you're

Scott Benner 16:01
at home with your the other he's at the hospital. They move him and what do they what happens? Because I feel like something's about to happen.

Tess 16:10
Yeah, this, this is the, this is the punch line, I guess. So, the next day, Monday, my husband gets a call from the pediatrician who had missed the sugar, the glucose in his urine, and he apologized profusely. He did not make any excuses. My husband said he was very sincere. He said, You know, there's no excuse. I simply missed it.

Scott Benner 16:33
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Tess 17:37
and I'm so sorry. I was devastated when I heard that you guys were in the hospital with this, and here's the kicker, he said, and I should have known, because I'm a type one diabetic myself, and I was diagnosed around six years old when I started wetting the bed.

Scott Benner 17:52
I don't know why. I didn't think of it, right? That sounds so familiar. No, no, no, I think he's fine, right? Did your husband laugh at him?

Tess 18:04
I think my husband was more pleasant than I would have been to me. That's even worse, like, you know this disease,

Scott Benner 18:10
I know for certain, my response would have been, get the out of here. Look, that's exactly what I would have said if you said that to me. Oh, my God. Well, that's crazy, but okay, yeah, and it was nice of him to be so direct, because I think in a litigious world, people don't usually admit that they don't do anything, right? So that was, that was kind of him. You guys were accepting of his apology, or did you go toilet paper his house later? So

Tess 18:34
we actually had, you know, I knew from here on out, you know, he's my son would be seeing a pediatric endocrinologist quarterly. So we still needed a pediatrician for the minor illnesses throughout his life, and I didn't want to see that man ever again. And my husband said, well, don't you want our son's pediatrician to have the same disease that he has and really understand it? And I said, Oh, you have a point there. I'll tell

Scott Benner 18:59
you what I would have thought, I would have thought he's in our debt now he's going to try extra hard for us. That's how I would have thought of it.

Tess 19:08
That's true. I didn't think of it like that, but I my husband. I was like, alright, you have a point.

Scott Benner 19:14
Who won this little battle. So we did stay with

Tess 19:17
him. He was he was older. He was in his like, 60s, I think. And so about a year and a half after this is interesting, he announced his retirement. He wanted to spend more time with his wife and kids, and we my son was pretty healthy, other than the diabetes, so we didn't have to see him a lot, but he was kind of interesting at the practice. He was didn't have the best bedside manner, but all my friends whose kids went to this practice. We called him the MacGyver of doctors, because he was the guy who could figure out the most obscure things, like he was really good at that stuff. I had a friend whose son was sick, and he figured out, I want to say, f pies. Have you heard of this f pies? Yeah, I. Gets like an allergy to the protein and meat. I don't know I I could be wrong every maybe you need to Google it. Scott, it was something strange, and he figured it out when, like no one else could, he couldn't figure out the his own disease that he had when it was staring him in the

Scott Benner 20:18
face. But maybe his blood sugar was low while I'm just looking at it. Well,

Tess 20:21
I figured if he was in his 60s, he was he had diabetes for over 50 years, so I can't imagine the, you know, the changes he saw over his lifetime.

Scott Benner 20:30
No, I see he saw a lot of changes. And now you would wonder, did he go with them or not? Because sometimes people don't.

Tess 20:36
He did show my son. Our first meeting with him was like a zoom call, I think, after the diagnosis, and because it was still COVID, and he did show my son, I think he had the tandem pump, okay, yeah. But after he announced his retirement, and two months later, he was in a single car accident and was killed, oh my god, yeah. And to this day I wonder, like, was it a blood sugar issue? You know? Horrible. Yeah, Jesus,

Scott Benner 21:05
I came out of nowhere. Jesus, right, if I told you what I was what thought I was pushing out of my head when you told me that poor man was killed in a car accident, I can't even tell you now because it's too inappropriate. I'm going to tell you when we're done recording. Remind me, hold on a second. I literally can't, because I don't know how other people's brains work, but while you're talking and pausing, my brain fills in what I think you're gonna say, and I start writing around that. But once in a while, like the humorous part of me fills in stupid instead, instead of like, conversation, thank you. No, that's lovely. Except you were, like, we were on a zoom call, and he was, he showed my son, he showed my son his and you kind of like, and I just kept thinking, Do you know what I was thinking? I'd let it go, like, oh my god, this really went off the rails, because that happened a lot during zoom. Guys were like, not sure their cameras were on. You know what? I mean? Oh, yeah. Also, what are guys doing while they're working? That's another story. There were one too many of those, like news stories

Tess 22:11
during COVID. Yeah, I heard a few after the first

Scott Benner 22:14
one came out. I was like, All right, now we're all being extra careful now, right? No, no. Okay. Anyway, I wasn't thinking that we'll move on. The poor man died in a car accident. That's horrible. Did you just tell me that to shock me, or does that advance the story somehow?

Tess 22:29
No, that was it like it was just, it was a wild diagnosis story, for sure. And that was, like the culminating event that was like, Wow. You know, he just retired to spend he had sent a letter to all his patients. You know, I'm gonna spend time with my more time with my wife and kids. And

Scott Benner 22:45
could happen so fast. I had a small accident recently while we were on vacation, of all things, and it was a split second, like, just nobody's fault, craziest, little weird thing, like, you know, it was, like, kind of a low speed accident. Nobody was hurt or anything like that. But as I've, I've as I've looked back over like, 1000 times in my head, I'm like, like, my god, like, that's it felt like I was like, walking, and I stepped off a cliff, like it came out of nowhere. And as it was happening, I'm like, Oh, it's too late now, whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen, and that's that, you know, so just really, I mean life, I don't wanna say life is fragile, but it is, and, like, the fragility of it is it shouldn't be lost. Like, I'm gonna go home and spend time, like, imagine he was able to retire in his early 60s. He was probably so excited.

Tess 23:38
Maybe he was older than that? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, 60s or 70s definitely had all white hair, but, um, yeah, it was sad. And I wanted to ask some of the other pediatricians there, but that was their co worker and colleague, and I didn't want to ask, what happened? Hey, like, what do you know? What? Okay. I mean, I found the article online, and I just know it was like a single vehicle. So it made me think, gosh, did it? Was it related to, like, a blood sugar or something? Somebody

Scott Benner 24:04
I work with passed away recently. There's part of you that's like, I wonder what happened. And then there's like, the common sense party is like, do not ask. It's none of your business. You know what I

Tess 24:13
mean, right? I'm always curious, though. I always want to know that the details like that,

Scott Benner 24:17
Tess, you're kind of a party. I can tell in the first 20 minutes here, I think you're I think you're the mom at the ball field who is a bit of a problem. Am I wrong? This episode of The Juicebox Podcast is sponsored by the ever since 365 get 365 days of comfortable wear without having to change a sensor. When you think of a continuous glucose monitor, you think of a CGM that lasts 10 or 14 days, but the ever since 365 it lives up to its name, lasting 365 days. That's one year without having to change your CGM with the ever since 365 you can count on comfort and. Inconsistency, 365, days a year, because the ever since, silicon based adhesive is designed for your skin to be gentle and to allow you to take the transmitter on and off, to enjoy your shower, a trip to the pool or an activity where you don't want your CGM on your body, if you're looking for comfort, accuracy, and a one year where you are looking for ever since 365 go to Eversense cgm.com/juicebox, to learn more. If you take insulin or so faucinyas, you are at risk for your blood sugar going too low. You need a safety net when it matters most, be ready with GE voc hypo pen. My daughter carries GE voc 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 kypo pen can be administered in two simple steps, even by yourself in certain situations. Show those around you where you store jivo 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 insulin Oma. Visit gevoic glucagon.com/risk, for safety information. No,

Tess 26:43
not me. No, no, I'm on the straight and narrow. Okay,

Scott Benner 26:47
I think you have punch with you during late games, but your son's diagnosed. He was six at the time, right?

Tess 26:56
Okay, he was let out. He was diagnosed on Father's Day. My poor husband, I sent him off to the hospital on father's day, June 21 2020

Scott Benner 27:05
Wow, to go pick up your kid. Yep, to go and

Tess 27:08
and then my son turns seven, a little like a like, about two weeks later, did

Scott Benner 27:14
he have to stay by himself at times in the hospital because of COVID? Or were you able because somebody was with Arden? We were there for five days, and Kelly was always with her. And then, if not, it was me, but were you not able to do that?

Tess 27:28
Yeah, someone was with him at all times. But actually they wouldn't discharge him until they watched both parents, like, give him an injection. So I had to come to the hospital one day. You know, every time the the diabetes educators came in, I would have to get on Zoom, and my husband would get me on his phone and not zoom, but like FaceTime, and my husband would be and he'd like angle the phone at the diabetes educator so I could be in on the education. But I did have to go to the hospital the one day, and I remember, like the security guard at the bottom, like, you know, she could see, she was like, there's already an adult up there. And I said, Well, I have to be up there. And they're like, only one adult allowed, you know? And I had to explain, like, no, no, I like, I have to go up there because they have to watch me give my son an injection before they will discharge him. Yeah,

Scott Benner 28:19
I know this isn't your fault, but you're making this worse. Please, let me go upstairs, right? Yeah, those COVID rules were fun. Are you? Is your I was gonna say your glitchy nature, but I don't know where that came from exactly. Did it not allow you to help with the diabetes? This end up falling more to your husband? Oh,

Tess 28:37
no, I That's when I found you. I I'm gonna research. I'm gonna I dived in head first. Dove in, I should say. But I didn't love giving the the injections, so when my husband was home, I'd have him do that. I didn't change a Dexcom deck. I hated the noise that the g6 made, and so I did not change the Dexcom for probably the first year my husband did that, but it was COVID. So my son was home with us for an entire year like I didn't have to worry about, you know, sending him off to school, like we had an entire year where he never left us. Was that about to learn about it? Yes, absolutely. A silver lining for us of COVID Was he was with us for a year straight.

Scott Benner 29:20
For me, my silver lining of COVID was not going to restaurants save so much money. I was like, Oh, my God, how much are we spending at restaurants? Exactly, right. But no, I like that idea of not being rushed back to work and everybody kind of being able to be around and but do you have like, were you anxious before this? Yes,

Tess 29:40
like, on and off, it's not terrible, but when it comes to health and medical things, that's where I get

Scott Benner 29:48
pretty anxious about for you and your husband, or more about the kids. It

Tess 29:52
definitely got worse when I had kids. Yeah, I don't care as much about him or I, but you know, you have these little kids and, like, they're your life. Test.

Scott Benner 30:00
Why couldn't you just say I don't care that much about him, and then not say where I because it would have been hilarious.

Tess 30:05
I was just trying to be diplomatic. I don't

Scott Benner 30:07
really care about him. I mean, me a little more so. But um, have you stopped and thought, what if something happens in one of these other ones? I'm not gonna be able

Tess 30:17
to manage? I think now we could manage because we're four years in I have had it on my radar to do the trial net. I actually said something to my oldest, who's 15, almost 16, my daughter, and I said, you know, I think I want to get the rest of you tested. And she got very upset and said, I don't want to know. Oh, and I thought, Well, I see that side too. Would you want to know you're gonna eventually get some life altering disease. I don't know. I mean, I think

Scott Benner 30:44
we can make the argument that that doctor would have liked to have known if he was having an accident, right? Yeah, but she's old enough to decide. Also, I mean, I guess you could do the blood work and not tell her, that would be weird, yes, yeah. Also, if you want to know where I'm going to get notes from woke people there. It is going to be right there. It is my duty to let you know that children are autonomous. I'm like, I know. I'm just, I'm just telling you, the woman could get a blood test for her kid and not tell her the alchemist she wanted to. It's completely,

Tess 31:11
I was actually thinking of it, because she just had her like, 15 year well, visit, and they ordered just routine blood work. And I thought, well, contact, try on that and just say hey. And, you know, take a little more blood and send some of it off, or try on that some blood over,

Scott Benner 31:26
of course you did, because it's a thing you want to know. Is that, right? Yeah,

Tess 31:30
well, and I listened to some of your episodes about T Z, o, t Z, yes. And so that seemed very promising. I just don't love that it's an infusion right now, I keep thinking maybe it'll eventually be a pill or something easier for kids to take, but

Scott Benner 31:49
I just interviewed somebody who did it recently. They had nothing but good things to say about the process. But in fairness, they had to relocate to a hotel for like, 14 days, go in every day and get the infusion. Now the mom said, she said one of this episode's not out yet, but she said one of the Silver Linings for her was, she's like, my kid is older. I was never going to spend two weeks with him the way we did, like playing games and like hanging out and stuff. And she's like, it was kind of nice. So, you know, you can find a silver lining a lot of things, right? Right? But I have to tell you, if my I'm gonna sound like a hypocrite now, but if my 15 year old told me I don't want to know, I'd say, Okay, well, then we're not gonna look you wanna respect that? Yeah, as much as it's fun for me to play both sides of the of the coin when we're talking here, I would, I would respect what they said for sure.

Tess 32:37
The other side is like, if there's something out there that could delay the onset and eventually, could it? Could you keep getting the tea sealed and it will keep delaying it eventually, like that, you never get it. Like if I could do something to prevent another one of my children from getting this terrible disease, then you would, right? Yeah. So yeah, it's

Scott Benner 32:59
yeah, be a tough lesson to learn in hindsight, that's for sure, right? Exactly, especially if you're only 15. So then go back to my old argument of, what else would you let a 15 year old decide about, right? Yeah, nothing. Right, yeah. So what if you told the kid like, look, we'll test, and I promise not to tell you, you know the answer of the test. Of course, if there's nothing wrong, you'll never know. But that, even that doesn't make sense, because if there is something wrong, you are going to bring it up. So it's not like you're going to find out that they're, you know, in stage one, type one diabetes, and not say anything, right? Yeah, so her, her argument doesn't hold a lot of water, does it? No.

Tess 33:40
And then I thought, well, I should just take all of the all the other kids, like everyone has to go. I believe they will test parents as well, right? Of type one diabetics? Maybe, yeah, trial net. So I'm like, just make it a family affair, and everyone's got to go give blood for this. Also

Scott Benner 33:57
that new sponsor screen for type one. I think that if you go to screen for type one.org, is that what it is? Yeah, you think right now, they're like, Oh, good, real happy. We bought that ad from you. I'm like, Well, I'm like, I think it's this sorry screen for type one. Give me a second. That cracks me up for some reason. Let me find it real quickly. They're probably like, wow, money, well spent. This guy, this guy finally brings it up in a casual conversation. Can't remember the link. Yeah, I take their point if that's what they're thinking right now, screen for type one.com, there's links in the show notes to it, so you can learn more about it there. I agree with you, because if she's gonna get it, she's gonna get it. Now, what she's saying is, if I'm gonna get it when I'm 27 I don't want to know when I'm 15, right? Which I get? Yeah, what you're thinking is, if you're gonna get it next year, and we could do something about that, why don't we do that and make it take two years? Maybe you know something, right? She didn't like that argument. We

Tess 34:55
didn't really delve into that. She was, she kind of shut it down. I would. I would, I would want to know, yeah, I think for any of my kids. But again, I've been thinking about it for two years. I still haven't done it for any of them. Well,

Scott Benner 35:07
you went on the anti anxiety medication. Now, if you went off that, you'd get it done tomorrow, right? You're

Tess 35:12
onto something. Scott, what'd they give you there? Well, Bucha, no, I don't even know what it is. It's just a, I think it's an antidepressant

Scott Benner 35:20
test. The amount of people who say to me, Oh, I take a thing. I don't know what it's called, floors me. It really does, like, you really don't know what it's called.

Tess 35:27
It's a it's a law. It's hard for it to pronounce, slight syllable. Scott, yeah, come on. Did

Scott Benner 35:34
it have any other like effects that you didn't want, or did you just see a benefit from it? Nope.

Tess 35:40
I just noticed, like, if my son was having, like, a low blood sugar, I, like, I could feel my heart wanting to start racing, me wanting to get so worried. But, like, it couldn't, like, it was blocking that, like, flight or fight response.

Scott Benner 35:53
We didn't help. I mean, did you try anything else? No, no, that was the first thing you tried. Okay, yeah, that worked, huh? All right. Like, well, right on. I'm glad you found something that helps. There's times when Arden's like, alarm will go off overnight, and my wife is like, Arden is Arden, okay? And I'm like, wow, hold on, I'm not even awake yet. Let me figure it out. And then I'll look and I'll say, oh, you know what? It's just a compression low and, you know, don't worry about it. And, like, I go back to sleep in 15 minutes later. I'm like, what is that light? That light is Kelly on her phone because she can't go back to sleep. And I'm like, Hey, we already looked and she's good, go back to sleep. She goes, it's not that easy. And I'm like, oh, okay, so

Tess 36:30
I'm with Kelly, yeah, I'm gonna stay up and watch it, make sure it's a compression low for at least 20 minutes before I'm gonna go back to sleep. It

Scott Benner 36:38
ruins the next two hours for her. She's just like, she's like, my heart, my heart is pounding, so I feel her, yeah, I think it's that thing, like, whatever happens the first time the kid comes out of the hoo ha whole like, it definitely throws you guys off. Yeah, it does, really. It turns everything into, like, high intensity that keep the baby alive. Like, guys have it too, but we like it comes and goes. You know what? I mean?

Tess 37:03
Yes, yeah, yeah, my husband's much more calm with that type of stuff. I'm the one. If there's something small, I immediately think it's big. And he's like, No, it's not a big deal now. Now, when my son was diagnosed, he was still saying the day I was packing him off to the hospital. He was saying, I think it's just a stomach bug. And I said, No, we're

Scott Benner 37:24
also boys, so you can't He probably just like fell. So, right? Listen, I have that thing. Somebody last last night, I did a late night ask me anything in the Facebook group. You guys should all be in the private Facebook group if

Tess 37:39
you're not. I saw that, right? I was gonna write to you and say, Are you gonna make me nervous tomorrow when I record with you? That's not

Scott Benner 37:45
my fault. That's you. Oh, we already figured that out earlier. And so what did somebody say to me? They asked me, I forget what they asked me, but I ended up admitting if I let people down, it really bothers me. An example that would be like, kind of commiserate to how you or Kelly might feel in the situations you're describing. It's gonna sound silly, but Arden was leaving for college last week on Friday, and we had tickets Thursday night to see, like, the 15th anniversary showing of Coraline in the movie theater, which is, like my wife's favorite movie. And it was gonna be me and Arden and Kelly and one of Arden's friends. Why did Cole not go? I shouldn't say here, because he's an adult, but he saw it when he was young, and it scared the hell out of him, and he still doesn't want to see the freaking movie. So he's like, No, thank you. And I'm like, Okay. I'm like, you know, I'm like, you know, you're 24 now. And he goes, I don't care. I don't want to see this movie. So it's like one of those phantom events, things like, you know, like, it's not really through the movie theater, it's like a third party that sets it up. I bought these tickets months ago for Kelly, like, I saw that they were on sale. I bought them right away, and I knew she'd be super excited. And then it ended up being like, this weird thing where now we have to go the night before Arden's leaving for college, like, it just landed on a bad day, but whatever. And earlier in the day, Kelly's like, hey, what time's that showing again? I said, Oh, it's 730 I pulled out my phone. It's right there in my calendar. I touch the calendar thing, it launches the email shows the code. I'm like, Ah, I'm all set. This is perfect. We get to the theater, and I go back into my calendar, and I touch the link, and it launches the email, and the email won't open, and now I can't scan it to get in. So I'm outside, I'm calling my son. I'm like, Hey, can you go on my computer? Like, that's not working. The woman at the front's like, if you don't have this email, you can't come in. I'm like, but I have the reference number. She just doesn't matter. So I'm outside, I'm on the phone, and my daughter's friend, who I've known for since she was a little girl, like she picked a flower off a bush and she like, touched it to my neck. And Arden said, I thought you were gonna punch her like she came up behind me and touched me. She's like you reacted so harshly, and then I looked at you, and she goes, Dad, you. Face was purple, and I was like, was it? And she goes, dude, you looked like you could have run through a wall. And I And she's like, why were you so upset? I said I wasn't upset. And she goes, No, you were really, really upset. And I said I wasn't upset. I was sad. And she goes, what I said, I felt like I let everybody down. And she goes to go to a movie, and I'm like, Yeah, I probably have problems, but I felt like I let everyone down. And I I knew I could get us into that theater, but my wife was standing there and looking at me, and I knew I had to deal with it the way she wanted me to deal with it, because the woman at the front said, you can't get in without that email. And my wife's like a rule follower. So now that's the new rule we're doing. And I would have just gone and found the manager and been like, Listen, man, we bought these four seats. I have them right here in my calendar. We'll go sit in them. If somebody else shows up, just sit on them. Fair enough. I'll get up. But that's not going to happen, because I bought these seats. I would have talked my way into that in three seconds, right? So anyway, so I pulled myself like, I felt myself overreact to being touched on the neck. And I was like, Oh my God. Like, you're not okay. Like, so I, like, kind of took a deep breath. I went back to the woman at the front. I was like, Look, I have this reservation number. And she goes, Well, I can't get you into that. I was like, well, can someone else? And she goes, Oh yeah, probably the manager. I was like, Oh, do you think I could speak to him, please? So anyway, he gets us into 20 seconds with the, you know, the number, and as we're standing there waiting, somebody's in the bathroom, Arden goes, you okay? And I was like, Yeah, I'm absolutely fine. I know you think I'm upset, but I'm not. I'm not upset. I'm not angry. I was just, I just, I felt like I let everybody down. And she's like, No man, we're good. And I was like, okay, she goes, you know, we could have just bought four more seats and gone in. It wasn't sold out. Anyway, I don't that's the closest I can come to understanding what you're talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, it's a long story that ends with people listening, going, Oh, wow, his parents did get divorced. I really do think it's like a I think it's a side effect of that, to be perfectly honest, yeah, yeah. But nevertheless, at least, you know, I'm not going to let you down if I'm with

Tess 42:22
you. I know Scott, you probably don't remember this. This was something else I wanted to mention. But a year after my son was diagnosed, we were at the beach again, and it was late. He his blood sugar. He was in the 40s, and we had pumped him full of so much sugar, and he was like, physically sick. Could not eat any more sugar. And I appealed in your Facebook group. Just what do I do my son, you know, he won't even take any more sugar. And I get message from you from Juicebox Podcast, and it just has this long number, and I write back, and I say phone number question mark, and I said, I'm on the East Coast too. Like you, Scott. I know it's late. It was like, two in the morning. I was like, did you want me to call you tomorrow? And you wrote now,

Scott Benner 43:08
oh, that was I do. Go ahead. Keep telling the story, yeah, because I think I come off like a hero in this Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah,

Tess 43:15
like, 2am and and I was like, oh my god, Scott. Scott Benner wants me to call him. And I had gotten my by now, like, my son's asleep, his blood sugar was, like, steady, at least in like, the high 50s. And I was like, Oh my God, you let me call you and help me walk through it. And I remember joking. We were joking, if my husband came out, he'd be like, Who are you talking to? And I would have to say Scott from Juicebox. And it sounds like that's Jake from State Farm,

Scott Benner 43:45
exactly. It's that State Farm commercial, like, Who are you talking, right? And my husband say,

Tess 43:50
well, he sounds hideous. I don't know if you remember that commercial, but it was so funny. I remember

Scott Benner 43:55
very I guess, too well, actually. And why did they get away from that? Just to give Patrick my homes all that money, I guess. But it was a great commercial. Hey, I don't want to die. I don't want to go too far into the State Farm commercial thing. But I was personally embarrassed for Andy Reid when they made him say nuggies in a State Farm commercial. I just want to say that that was horrible. I agree. Anyway, we're on the phone. What did I did I say anything helpful? Or did I just act like a sounding board so you could relax.

Tess 44:22
You were like a sounding board by then, and like his blood sugar. And you were like, Well, what did he eat? And I was like, wow, you know, or at the beach, he had pizza and I went for ice cream. And you were like, you don't go on vacation anymore. That just messes everything.

Scott Benner 44:37
Rock solid information for me,

Tess 44:39
right? But no, I think, you know, it was just all the physical activity, like on the beach and stuff, was just we needed to way adjust his, you know, his car ratio and and things.

Scott Benner 44:51
You don't realize that the first time, you know, like, you're seeing all that food, and you're like, I'm gonna, I know how to Bolus for this. I'm gonna do it. And. Don't take into account the running around and the heat and the swimming and that late and low thing that happens at two o'clock in the morning for some reason, and you know, all that other stuff, you figure it out that. Mean, have you figured it out now you go to the beach now without trouble? Yeah.

Tess 45:14
But you know, he my son, he's always been very sensitive to insulin, so it just, I just still don't feel like we have a, like, tight control, like it's just, it's so unpredictable with him. He's a he's a big athlete. He plays travel baseball and travel ice hockey with his sports and activities. He's a very active kid. It just affects his insulin needs, but it's just so unpredictable. So, you know, I hear a lot of your guests, and after they've been listening to you, you know, their a one, Cs are awesome in the fives or sixes, and like, we cannot get him, he's right around seven. And I cannot one one time about a year ago, dropped to 6.9 but I just, I want better for him.

Scott Benner 45:57
What's the management style that you use,

Tess 46:00
he's on the Omnipod five, and that that has helped a lot. He was on the arrows at first, where it wasn't talking to the Dexcom, and we struggled a lot. Still, the Omnipod five has helped, but it doesn't seem to be able to keep up with his highs and his lows as well as we'd like. And it's interesting, when we talk to his pediatric endocrinologist, we actually see an NP who is in the diabetes clinic there at the big hospital. And she's always like, no, he's doing great. And I'm always like, I don't think I mean, he's doing good enough. And I imagine she sees so many kids who probably are doing a lot worse. So in the grand scheme of things, for her, he's doing pretty well. But

Scott Benner 46:48
yeah, he's doing well the Juicebox world.

Tess 46:50
I feel like we can do better, like so many,

Scott Benner 46:55
in a common sense world, like I think you're right too, because I listen, I just interviewed a woman the other day. She's an adult now, but she said from 13 to like 26 she was in double digit, a one CS, and for a couple years, had a 14, right? And if you're the doctor who sees that a lot, every day, you see a seven, and you're like, lady, I don't know what your business perfect, you know? And I get that perspective, but you're saying, you know, is there a way for you to help me get just into the sixes, even, like, so I would ask you, what do you think is happening? Is it excursions at meals? Is it highs two or three hours after he eats? Is he getting low and then you're correcting, and then it's popping up or like, where do you think you're like, where you want to trim from when you think of that a one say he tends

Tess 47:45
to go high at night, and the pump can't seem to like, bring him down. And we've adjusted, you know, he has practice between all his sports almost every night of the week. So he eats like a meal, you know, before practice. But when he gets home at eight or nine at night, he's eating again, yeah, but the highs happen hours after eating, which makes you think, Oh, is it a basal thing? But that's not something you really adjust on the five you should it should be adjusting. It

Scott Benner 48:12
makes me think that if he's eating late at night, then he goes to bed, your digestion slows down. That food sits in his stomach longer, and it's pushing his blood sugar up. That's what it makes me think. That

Tess 48:22
makes think. That makes sense because, because if we give him all of it, like up front, usually it's low, he will go low, and then he treats and then he goes to sleep and goes high. So wonder if we should, like, maybe how high between 202

Scott Benner 48:37
50, and how much insulin would fix it. That's the thing.

Tess 48:42
It's so unpredictable. One day one unit brings them down 150 and the next time it won't touch it. Does that have

Scott Benner 48:51
anything to do? Do you think with the density or the fat content of the food he's eating? Do you see what I'm saying? Like, if one day a unit works and one day units too much. Is that the difference between a cheeseburger after practice and a ham sandwich after practice, you know what I mean, like, like, is it just a grease and protein thing? Maybe I don't think so. We're,

Tess 49:14
you know, we, we tend to take that into account when we're dosing him. What

Scott Benner 49:19
about activity at practice? Is there any way to track if, if, like, are you talking about baseball or hockey right now both

Tess 49:25
he Yeah, he both is going on right now. Yeah, it's fall season for travel baseball and hockey season just lasts forever.

Scott Benner 49:31
How tall is he? He's short. Oh, I'm gonna try that hard. A lot of it's about how tall you are once you get to college. So don't tell him that now to crush him. But if I told my kid that when he was your son's age, he would have been like, it doesn't matter. And I would have been like, oh, but it's going to my first thought was, why don't you try to do I know it's on the pod five, so you can't do an extended Bolus, but why don't you do like a two Bolus thing, like Bolus enough to stop a spike when he eats that late night meal? Go and then wait 90 minutes and Bolus the rest of it and see if you can get ahead of that latent high. That's that's sticky with a with that. I mean, that might work. Yeah, yeah. We can try that. Yeah. I think you just have to spread the insulin out a little bit. Because, you know, with the algorithm, you tell it, it's 30 carbs. It goes in. The algorithm doesn't think, Oh, two hours from now, if you have like, a fat or protein rise, I'm gonna, like, treat that like it's just gonna, it's gonna do what it does, right? It's, it does this. This micro Bolus is the but they call it non, they pod five, right? There's those little micro boluses. And, I mean, really, that's really just a pushing up of the basal, which is not going to cut into, like, a significant impact. If there is one there

Tess 50:45
exactly, I find myself overriding the pump a lot and needing to give, like, a big Bolus, but like that defeats the purpose, like we should be able to get it.

Scott Benner 50:55
Yeah, now you're awake, so maybe, maybe that's it, like, spread the carbs out over a longer timeline. Maybe that'll help it. Yeah, we'll try that with the shot. Also, if anyone's listening, I don't know if that's actually gonna work or not. I'm just saying, like, it's what I think it's what I would do if I was in your situation. Yeah, thanks. We'll try that. Yeah, why not? Right? Did your husband just make all these kids to try to get one of them to play a college sport? Is that? What's really going

Tess 51:21
on here? Maybe but the amount of money we're shelling out, all four of my kids play two travel sports a piece, so the amount of money we're shelling out, I think, is going to end up being the equivalent of the cost of college. Holy

Scott Benner 51:32
hell. What do you guys have, like an AI startup over there? You're making a bunch of money. What's going on? No

Tess 51:38
report. So I had to borrow my neighbors these Apple headphones somewhere, and had to borrow them from my from my

Scott Benner 51:43
name. They don't know that you said that before we started recording. That's right, yeah, I will tell you my my son said to us once in college, like, because he got a fair amount of money in college, right? And he's like, and I saved this much money going to college because I played baseball. And I was like, Dude, you don't think we spent that money when you were like, younger, like, what do you think a trip to like, you know, Florida costs, you know, what do you think? What do you think? Like, travel ball costs like, I remember travel balls being like, $3,000 a season. And, yeah, I'm sure it's

Tess 52:16
qualified for a tournament in Canada.

Scott Benner 52:19
Oh, last year we can't come. That's what you would have heard from me. We're busy. To

Tess 52:23
Canada. Where'd you go? Sarnia, right up past Detroit.

Scott Benner 52:29
I feel like you're making that up. Isn't that a book where people live in a closet? Narnia, oh, that's probably the same thing. Yeah. No, I would have been like, we're busy that day. Sorry, I can't do that. I eventually figured out, and I would say this to anybody that's listening, the right travel team for your kid is one where they play, and it's not expensive. It doesn't need to be expensive. They just need to play. And you know, if you're on a great team and you're only playing half the innings or you're not a starter, it's, you'd rather be on a half ass team and play every day. It's about playing more.

Tess 53:06
So, right? Yeah, and I think just keeping them busy, they're busy with sports, they're hopefully less likely to get into meth trouble or other things.

Scott Benner 53:15
Yes, by the way, I bring that up because I was interviewing a woman the other day who was describing her life, her hell scape. I think it's it's out now. And she says, you know, at some point her parents get divorced. Her sister was, like, four years older than her, so she went to her sister for advice, who didn't live at home anymore. And you know what, her sister gave her meth. I was like, Oh, okay. Sometimes I think I said it to her. I was like, do you hear how crazy this is? Because I think sometimes people are in situations they don't even they don't hear it anymore, you know, right? It's so funny. Like, I loved the time that my kids played sports, and they they loved it too, and when they stopped loving it, we didn't like when Arden was like, I don't want to play anymore. We're like, Well, fine, don't you know? Like, I my feelings weren't hurt or anything like that. It's absolutely fine. There's no way to know at this age what it feels like when it ends and it just it ends so abruptly. It's horrifying, like you won't be ready for it.

Tess 54:15
No, that's why you keep having more and then always be another one in sports.

Scott Benner 54:20
What a plan pass. I didn't think of it that way. If I just made 17 kids, I'd always be at a baseball game, right? Have I ever talked on the podcast about my son's last college game? Not that I remember, oh my god, he came up the bat in like, the seventh inning of a double header, and he was hitting well in the game, and you could see him, like, you know, how baseball works, like, first he got it, you know, he walked, and then he's, like, in a single, like, you could feel it coming, you know, and in the seventh inning, and he leads off the inning, and it's college baseball. I'm talking about, like, dead center. It's 400 feet dead center, like, right? Like, it's a, you're. You're playing in a professional size baseball stadium. And first pitch, he hit that ball dead center, and the and the kid in center field caught it with his back up against the wall and his hand up in the air, like he just he missed, he missed the lead off first pitch, home run by three feet. It was such a good ball. And I remember thinking, man, his next at bat. I can't wait to see his next at bat. And then they lost that game, so the second game of the double header was inconsequential. So the coach sat the starters and let everybody else play. Oh, that's tough. And I sat there like thinking, like the wait that was it, like, it's over, you know? Like, he was just like, right? He just like, he's so close, like, today, and like, he just needs one more, like, one more at bat. He's gonna, he's gonna go crazy. And as I'm feeling that, and then I'm like, oh my god, it's not over today. It's over, over like, there's no next week, there's no next year. There's no reason to, like, we could throw his baseball glove away right now. That kind of over, oh, that's so sad. Oh, Tess it. That's not the sad part. The sad part is that when I looked for him, like, once, I gathered myself, like to make eye contact with him to see if he was okay. I couldn't find him. He wasn't in the dugout, he wasn't on the field. It was in between games. He had probably just heard he wasn't playing in the second game. And I couldn't visual I couldn't locate him, and so I started walking around, and he was maybe 75 yards from the field, sitting in a piece of grass by himself, like, just sitting there. That's heartbreaking. And he's like, grown now, you know what I mean? Like, he's six, six feet tall, he's 210, pounds, like he's a he's a grown ass man, like, and he's sitting there like he's four, and he couldn't find us in the mall, you know, and, oh, you're gonna

Tess 57:01
make me cry, Scott, that that's so sad. I have the image in my head.

Scott Benner 57:05
Oh, you should have it's that exact image. So now I'm looking at him, I'm 75 yards from him, and I'm going, I should go hug him, and then I'm like, I should leave him alone. And I didn't know what to do. And so would you do? I got out of his eye line, and I just watched him to make sure he was okay. Oh, and then I cried a little bit, and I wondered if he was crying, but he was too far away for me to know he wasn't. By the way, I know him better now i don't i He might not cry if he got shot, which is so weird because I'm crying now. Yeah, I'm close. And so he sat there 20 minutes, and then he just stood up and, like, kind of straightened up his uniform and fixed his hat and went back and sat in the dugout for the second game. Wow. And I was like, and I sat there and I watched that second game, but it was just the it was the craziest thing. So then we have to leave him like he's in college, like he's not coming home with us. So he went back to school. We went home, and I woke up incredibly early the next morning. I got my car and I drove and I don't know where I was going, but I ended up at his little league baseball field, and I sat in the stands and cried like a baby for like 20 minutes, and then I pulled myself together and got my car and left. And I have never been back to that field. Well, that's a lie. They asked me to come back and announce a game last year. I did it for the girls, but it was the first time I had been back there in years. I came home, I couldn't go inside, so I just started, like, pulling weeds outside, like, just doing the most random things outdoors. And my wife came out, and I couldn't make eye contact with her. I was just like, don't like, I can't like, not now, like, I just can't. So I was just really, and it's because you do this thing over and over again year after year, it feels like your life, right? No, it is, yeah. A couple years later, I don't think about it anymore. It's really interesting. Wow, I just all

Tess 59:07
four of mine play, um, oh, the girls play softball, and the boys play baseball. So we are at the ball fields constantly.

Scott Benner 59:14
Yeah, no, I have, like, freckles on my cheeks from sun like that I didn't have when I was younger. You know, like, it's I spent a lot of my life standing there, sitting there, walking back and forth from driving to I have one thing, like, on my desktop, I have the video of his last home run in college. Every once in a while, I'll just, like, click on it, let it run for 20 seconds, and then I just shut off. And that's it. I probably shouldn't. He should never know I do that. But

Tess 59:47
does he listen? I

Scott Benner 59:49
can't imagine. And he'll never know. My wife doesn't. I'm like, I'm like, did you hear that thing today? She goes where I'm like, on the pocket. She goes, I listen to your podcast. And I go, Okay, I. She's like, I get enough of you here. I was like, All right, what have we not talked about that we should have? I think that's about it. Yeah, yeah. How close are you to me? Close,

Tess 1:00:11
yeah, like, outside, outside of Baltimore. Oh, okay, yeah. In fact, we're in New Jersey all the time for baseball tournaments. You guys have a lot of baseball up there. We

Scott Benner 1:00:23
do. I tell I'll tell people a secret. During COVID. New Jersey ran college baseball for like, basically disenfranchised college players, because everybody got sent home. And oh, my son later told me he goes that summer. I played during COVID. He goes college, not college, anywhere else he goes. That's the base best baseball I ever played. And he didn't mean him, he meant the competition. Because what happened was, is all the players got sent home from college, but the kids who were really good didn't stop playing, and they all got together in this one league, and it was legit, like my son played on a team that year where he was in the outfield with three center fielders, one from Penn, one from Duke, one from his school, one from the next school. Like their starting pitcher was like, I think from North Carolina. They had a kid that was throwing for Duke out of the pen, like they were a d1 baseball team. They were crazy. It was like an all star team, and then you show up and play another all star team. It

Tess 1:01:27
was awesome. Wow, yeah, yeah, there's some great facilities up by you, for sure. It was the

Scott Benner 1:01:31
best baseball I ever saw, too, and everybody got better. It was pretty awesome. But he actually remarked he went back to college, and he was like, this is not nearly as good as that. Basically thrown together league I played in in um, during COVID. So, wow, it was weird. We all sat very far from each other. Even though we were outside, we didn't realize at that point that being outside kind of fixed it so. But anyway, this is really cool. What are your other kids play? Three of mine play ice hockey, which so expensive, isn't it? Yeah,

Tess 1:02:05
although my one daughter, who the only one who doesn't play ice hockey, found the sport that turns out to be more expensive than ice hockey. What is it? It is competitive, hip hop dance. What the hell

Scott Benner 1:02:21
not real. Is that real? It's real.

Tess 1:02:23
She doesn't like the other styles of dance, but she's really good at hip hop, which is funny, because my husband, I have no rhythm at all, not sure where she came from, but

Scott Benner 1:02:33
that's awesome. She's good at it travel. Why? What makes that expensive?

Tess 1:02:39
Choreography fees, costume fees, the traveling on the weekend, the competition, competition fees, the monthly fee of going to the classes, you know, four hours of class each week. Wow, it's pretty amazing. Older, congratulations, she did it.

Scott Benner 1:02:56
Yay. Is that a thing she can get into college for? I don't

Tess 1:02:59
know. I don't know much. We're two years into the dance world. It's a new world for me. Yeah, do

Scott Benner 1:03:05
you think any of your kids will play in college? Have you noticed it on them, like the 15 year olds, old enough that you could smell it on them a little bit now, right?

Tess 1:03:13
She she's a really good softball player. She plays ice hockey. I'm not sure about college. I don't know that she even wants to my, my 11 year old son, the type one diabetic. He's a really strong athlete, but he has not hit his growth spurt yet. So I'm hoping you know he's smaller. So he's got kids on his baseball team that have 3040, pounds on him, and they can, they could crush the ball. I mean, he for his size, he can hit, yeah, I'm waiting for him to get, get go through puberty, so that I can see what, we can see what he really does. Do you

Scott Benner 1:03:45
have his thyroid tested? Yeah, they test that, actually, I wrote it down. They test that, like once a year. They do blood work on them once a year. What's this? TSH, is that, is that? What would say, thyroid? Yeah, I don't give access to oh two, yeah, it's good. He's good. Yeah. I only asked because when Arden's thyroid was managed, well, she got I've said this before, but Arden was probably the smallest person in her school, and now she's five seven, wow, yeah, but that all came after her thyroid medication.

Tess 1:04:17
I wonder if kids like, if my son, I don't know how to explain it. Like, was his growth stunted, or his like, when he went undiagnosed for who knows how long, and now he's just behind, but eventually, like, maybe he'll catch up.

Scott Benner 1:04:31
Yeah, I don't know. Like, I don't know like, if art and his thyroid was always an issue and we just finally figured it out, or if it was an issue around the time she was going to grow, and then it kind of slowed her down. And then when we got it straight, she, you know, picked speed up speed again. I don't know,

Tess 1:04:48
yeah, although my husband, he's like, six three now, but he was always the shortest in his class, he said, through middle school, and then he grew like, three or four inches, like in one summer. But. Before he started his freshman year of high school. So maybe my son will just be later like him, yeah, but my other son's taller. He's almost as tall as my the eight year old's almost as tall as the 11 year

Scott Benner 1:05:10
old. How tall are you? I'm 43 Wait, you're 43 Yeah. How tall are you? Five, four on a good day. Okay? Because you I said, How tall are you? And you told me you were 43 and I was like, I don't understand. Is that metric? She went to Canada one time, and she's using the metric system now. I thought you said, How old are you? No, I recognize like, why is doing how old I am? I just want to say this. I had to drive through Baltimore two weekends ago during that horrible rainstorm, and I almost died. I'm not even kidding. We had to go get Arden stuff. I'll leave you with this. This seems to be a story episode, so I don't know if I said this on the podcast directly or not. Arden is not going to the Savannah College of Art and Design anymore, and so she came home after her sophomore year, and she said there are a number of reasons why, but I do not want to go back there at the top of her list were very poor teaching. That was her biggest complaint. She went into one of her core classes this year, and on the first day, the teacher said, I've never taught this before. I've never done it professionally. If you have questions, do not ask me. And then gave them a YouTube blank. So that didn't go well for her and many other people. And even though she ended up with a good grade, and like, figured her way through the grade, she did not, she doesn't have the skill. And she said, if I go back there without that skill, I will tumble behind very quickly. And she's like, and this is not like, an isolated problem. This one teacher, this place, is like, I've never seen something go downhill as quickly as I've seen this. I'm gonna leave. I'm gonna go back to my other option coming out of high school, and she's now, at the moment, like, signed up as a psychology major, but she's looking very closely at pre law and being an attorney someday. Okay, so she's off at a university doing that now, but she made that decision after she came home from Savannah, and her stuff was still in Savannah, so we hustled around. She got accepted to a couple of schools. We figured out which one that she wanted to go to, got her all set up in a very short amount of time over the summer, this was not easy, and then my father in law got sick and passed away right as we were going on our first family vacation in six years. And we had two weeks during that time to retrieve art and stuff out of her place where they were going to trash it, because we only had the place to a certain day. So we went on the vacation, buried my father in law came home, Arden got sick. She got strep throat. We doctored her up as best as we could, and then she and I drove down to Savannah and got her stuff. We drove Savannah and back, 1400 miles in about 48 hours. And so, gosh, and then we got home, and then we had four days to take her to the next school. So we're coming home from Savannah after all this, pretty exhausted, and though the skies just open up and we're about through DC, which is the worst, yep, you know, but, but we're, we're, we're in that gap there. We're coming up in the Baltimore DC thing. And as we're going through Baltimore and all that construction, you just can't see. And so I'm in the left lane at times. I One way I drove was there were light poles overhead on the left side. I think I was in like, the express lane, yes, and I couldn't see the curb or the or the lines or anything on the left like so I just, I lined the corner of my car up with the lights over my head, and I kept them on the corner of the car. And there was a ton of pressure, because Arden was behind me in a different car, driving. Oh, it's so, like, scary. She's just like, I crashed. She's following me because she doesn't know what. She can't see shit either, right? This goes on for hours, and then it finally stops, or it slows down enough and we're like, oh my god, I can't believe we're alive. Like, we stopped and, like, regrouped, and we were like, I can't believe we didn't crash. We were doing like, putting down our sun visors to limit our field of view so our eyes wouldn't get distracted by the rain, as much like we were using all these little like, internet tricks, staring at the road like it was really insane. Wow. And we drove about an hour or so, and it was all good. Then we got to the Delaware, which is that Delaware Memorial Bridge maybe, yeah, yep, and it's just crystal clear, as we're like, two miles off the bridge. And I called her, and I was like, hey, looks good. Like, let's speed back up and get home, because it was getting late, you know, I swear to God, as I hung up the phone, the sky opened up again, and by the time we were on the bridge, there was air. The wind was blowing. Everything was going sideways. The cars were getting pushed. We were going 15 miles an hour. There were standing. Water. People were giving up and pulling over. You could not see anything going over the bridge. But I called her, and I was like, Do you want to stop? And she goes, just keep going. Then I was like, Okay. I said, Can you see anything? She goes, I can see you. And I was like, Oh, great. So this is on me. And so, like, so we're going over the bridge. And she goes, whoa. And I'm like, what? She goes, I thought the car was gonna blow off the bridge. I was like, Okay, great. This went on for like, 45 minutes. It was insane. And you could, you couldn't see but just as I said to her the second time, I'm like, there's an exit coming up, like we got over the bridge. I'm like, do you want to get off the road? And she goes, I don't think this is ever going to stop. I think we should keep going. So we kept crawling along and crawling along. And then it just it ended. It was just over. And I called her back and I said, Is this gonna sound counterintuitive how I usually talk to you? I'm like, But drive as fast as you can. I was like, because I said, this is on our it's to the west of us. And I was like, and I think we have to beat it, or this is going to happen again. I actually think we're better off driving insanely fast than letting this rain get to us again. So then we raced the rain for like, the last hour back through New Jersey. It was really crazy. Sounds like a fun trip? It wasn't. I thought I literally, like, it was the first time in a while. I was like, Oh, this is it. This is I'm gonna die, and it's gonna be my fault that art and follows me right along into a concrete wall or something like that. Anyway, people are like, you could have pulled over. I was like, yeah, maybe Tess, thank you. I appreciate it. I like that you shared your story. I'm glad you found something that helps you. I didn't ask you if the podcast helped you with the kid, but it sounds like it did. So I didn't want to sound like a, you know, like I was like, fishing for a compliment. No,

Tess 1:11:43
it definitely did

Scott Benner 1:11:44
good. I'm glad. Can you say for like, was it bold beginnings? Was it Pro Tip series? Was it just hearing conversations like, quickly? What was the best for you?

Tess 1:11:55
Definitely the the bold beginnings and the Pro Tip series, just in the very beginning, just learning it all and just being like, No, I'm not going to be okay with a $300 I mean, 300 300 blood sugar. You know, Scott says if the blood sugar is high, it means you need more insulin. You know, we were given the typical, you know, don't give any corrections. You might stack the insulin. And it was time to just say, No, we're gonna I know enough now to take matters into my own hands, from what I learned from the podcast, to try and get a little bit better. You know, control over his diabetes,

Scott Benner 1:12:31
that really is the big deal is having the confidence to make adjustments, right? I think, like I think, that when it boils down to it, once you have the confidence to make adjustments, whether it's the settings or to blood sugars, that's kind of the beginning of your path of you know, like getting there. I'm glad it helped. I really am. Okay. Well, thank you so much. Can you hold on for one second? For me, Sure, thank you.

The conversation you just enjoyed was brought to you by us. Med, us. Med.com/juice, box, or call 888-721-1514, get started today and get your supplies from us. Med, are you tired of getting a rash from your CGM adhesive? Give the ever since 365 a try ever since. Cgm.com/juicebox beautiful silicone that they use. It changes every day, keeps it fresh. Not only that, you only have to change the sensor once a year. So, I mean, that's better. A huge thank you to one of today's sponsors, gevok, glucagon. Find out more about G vo hypo pen at G folk, 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. 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. I can't thank you enough for listening. Please make sure you're subscribed or following in your audio app. I'll be back tomorrow with another episode of The Juicebox Podcast. The episode you just heard was professionally edited by wrong way recording, wrong way recording.com, you.

#1382 Meditations

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

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Benner 7:28
from the very beginning, your kids mean everything to you. That means you do anything for them, especially if they're at risk. So when it comes to type one diabetes screen, it like you mean it. Now up to 90% of type one diagnosis have no family history, but if you have a family history, you are up to 15 times more likely to develop type one screen it like you mean it, because type one diabetes can develop at any age, and once you get results, you can get prepared for your child's future. So screen it like you mean it type one starts long before there are symptoms, but one blood test could help you spot it early before they need insulin, and could lower the risk of serious complications like diabetic ketoacidosis or DKA. Talk to your doctor about how to screen for type one diabetes, because the more you know, the more you can do. So don't wait, tap now or visit screen for type one.com to learn more. Again, that's screen for type one com, and screen it like you mean it contour next.com/juicebox that's the link you'll use to find out more about the contour next gen blood glucose meter. When you get there, there's a little bit at the top. You can click right on blood glucose monitoring. I'll do it with you. Go to meters, click on any of the meters. I'll click on the Next Gen, and you're going to get more information. It's easy to use and highly accurate. Smart light provides a simple understanding of your blood glucose levels. And of course, with Second Chance sampling technology, you can save money with fewer wasted test strips. As if all that wasn't enough, the contour next gen also has a compatible app for an easy way to share and see your blood glucose results. Contour next.com/juicebox and if you scroll down at that link, you're going to see things like a Buy Now button. You could register your meter after you purchase it. Or what is this? Download a coupon. Oh, receive a free contour, next gen blood glucose meter. Do tell contour, next.com/juice box. Head over there now get the same accurate and reliable meter that we use,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Benner 20:53
episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by the ever since 365 get 365 days of comfortable wear without having to change a sensor. When you think of a continuous glucose monitor, you think of a CGM that lasts 10 or 14 days, but the ever since 365 it lives up to its name, lasting 365 days. That's one year without having to change your CGM. With the ever since 365 you can count on comfort and consistency 365 days a year, because the ever since, silicon based adhesive is designed for your skin to be gentle and to allow you to take the transmitter on and off, to enjoy your shower, a trip to the pool, or an activity where you don't want your CGM on your body, if you're looking for comfort, accuracy, and a one year where you are looking for ever since 365 go to Eversense cgm.com/juicebox to learn more. I still find that to be close in my approximation, though, I think if we went and found a bunch of people who don't have any auto immune stuff, like none, and I think it would be harder for you to find a connection in their family. And this is me again, doing what everybody else is doing. I'm just guessing based on the things I've heard. I don't actually know anything. We have

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unknown Speaker 52:13
It's called meditations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unknown Speaker 1:03:49
long. Stopped for

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

today's episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by the ever since 365 the one year where CGM that's one insertion a year. That's it. And here's a little bonus for you. How about there's no limit on how many friends and family you can share your data with with the ever since now, app no limits. Ever since, Arden started using a contour meter because of its accuracy, but she continues to use it because it's durable and trustworthy. If you have diabetes, you want the contour next gen blood glucose meter. There's already so many decisions. Let me take this one off your plate. Contour, next.com/juicebox Did you know if just one person in your family has type one diabetes, you're up to 15 times more likely to get it too. So screen it like you mean it one blood test can spot type one diabetes early. Tap now talk to a doctor or visit screened for type one.com for more info. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back soon with another episode of The Juicebox podcast. The episode you just heard was professionally edited by wrong way recording. Wrong way recording.com. You.

#1381 There’s No Such Thing as Free

Kathryn works at Integrated Diabetes Services as an exercise physiologist and diabetes care specialist.

+ Click for EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Scott Benner 0:00
Here we are back together again, friends for another episode of The Juicebox podcast.

Catherine is an exercise physiologist and a diabetes care specialist. She works with Jenny. She also has type one diabetes. She was diagnosed when she was 12. We're going to talk all about her life. Get some pretty deep details about some stuff that happened to her when she was younger, and what else here? Oh, she loops, and she's delightful. Nothing you hear on the Juicebox podcast should be considered advice medical or otherwise, always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan. Don't forget, if you're a US resident who has type one or is the caregiver of someone with type one, visit T 1d exchange.org/juicebox right now and complete that survey. It will take you 10 minutes to complete the survey, and that effort alone will help to move type one diabetes research forward. It will cost you nothing to help 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% at cozy earth.com if you're looking for community around type one diabetes. Check out the Juicebox podcast. Private Facebook group Juicebox podcast type one diabetes. This episode of The Juicebox podcast is sponsored by Omnipod five, and you can learn more right now at my special link, omnipod.com/juicebox you the episode you're about to enjoy was brought to you by Dexcom, the Dexcom g7 the same CGM that my daughter wears. You can learn more and get started today at my link, dexcom.com/juice, box. I start every day with a delicious drink of Ag, one, you could as well drink ag one.com/juicebox

Catherine Alvarez 2:05
Hello. I'm Catherine Alvarez, and I am an exercise physiologist and Diabetes Care and Education Specialist, and I also personally live with type one diabetes. I was diagnosed at 12 years old, and I utilize DIY loop for my personal management right now. But of course, I try everything out. So just recently on trio and wearing all the things nice you are. How old now I am 2727

Scott Benner 2:33
so 15 years with diabetes? You got it? Yep. Diagnosed 12. Any other people to type one in your life for your family? Yeah.

Catherine Alvarez 2:40
So my mom also has diabetes, and it's a crazy thing, you know, you would think like she would be really involved. It would be kind of a story where we enjoyed memories, or, you know, like helped each other through diabetes. Unfortunately, she just kind of ignores her personal diabetes diagnosis. She likes to pretend as much as she can that it's not there. There's no

Scott Benner 3:09
camaraderie between you because you handle things so differently, or because she doesn't talk about it at all,

Catherine Alvarez 3:15
right? She, I mean, she really doesn't talk about it, and we never had that shooting of in relation to living life with diabetes as I was growing up. How old

Scott Benner 3:25
was she when she was diagnosed?

Catherine Alvarez 3:26
She was like, 42 Wait, did

Scott Benner 3:30
you get it first?

Catherine Alvarez 3:31
No, she did. She was diagnosed during pregnancy, actually, with you, my brother, with

Scott Benner 3:37
your brother. Okay, so she was gestational or just and then type one or just type one diagnosis during the pregnancy.

Catherine Alvarez 3:43
Well, they thought it was gestational and then they realized post pregnancy that was actually a type one diagnosis, okay, and he

Scott Benner 3:53
your brother is older than you, yes, okay, so she's got diabetes for a few years before you were diagnosed. Yep, okay, she's 42 when she's diagnosed, pregnant, but you weren't born.

Catherine Alvarez 4:07
How much later? 18 months later, I

Scott Benner 4:09
see that was the part that threw me off. You didn't say, what do they call that? Irish twins? Yeah, no, not twins. No, no, you've never heard Irish. You're so young so far, for people who know, like, who don't know, Catherine held up a cable that had an audio plug on the end of it for headphones. And she's like, I don't recognize this connector. That's how she because it was like, like a round plug, like everybody listening would remember sticking in the top of their Walkman or their iPod or something like that. Anyway, so Irish twins is a, like, a euphemism for, you know, a Catholic person who has babies back to back. Oh, okay,

Unknown Speaker 4:47
never heard that. No. Super

Catherine Alvarez 4:48
interesting. I'm Catholic, so who knew? Yeah,

Scott Benner 4:50
I know, but now, now you do. Yeah, I think it's pejorative, in case you're wondering. But I think it's colloquial enough that we can get away with saying it. She had you right after. And then 12 years later, when she's 54 ish, you're diagnosed, yep, okay, all right. Is there any other autoimmune in the family?

Catherine Alvarez 5:09
There's quite a bit. Okay, yeah, all the autoimmunity in the family. What

Scott Benner 5:16
else do you have? Personally,

Catherine Alvarez 5:19
I don't have any other autoimmune diseases. I potentially, like, I had a test done that potentially rheumatoid arthritis, but at this point, I'm not doing anything to treat it. You

Scott Benner 5:31
had creaky wrists and knees and stuff like that. I have a very crooked

Catherine Alvarez 5:35
elbow, like, it looks like my arm is broken. It's kind of weird, like, a lump on your elbow. No, like, it's, it's literally not straight. Like, if I put out my arm as I'm trying to straighten it, it goes, like, off into a curve. And they

Scott Benner 5:50
think that might be Ra, yeah, interesting. But no pain. Oh,

Catherine Alvarez 5:54
yeah, lots of pain. Oh,

Scott Benner 5:55
you're like, oh, no, wait, did I? I didn't mean to say that. No, there's tons of pain where, like, all your joints, or certain ones?

Catherine Alvarez 6:03
No, it's all. It's just in that elbow. Just

Scott Benner 6:06
in that elbow. Yep, interesting. That sucks. Do they do anything for it? They shoot a cortisol. Nothing. I got cortisone

Catherine Alvarez 6:13
once, and I just it wasn't worth it. That shot is painful. Blood Sugar stuff,

Scott Benner 6:20
yeah, they say the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Have you ever heard that one?

Catherine Alvarez 6:24
I've never heard that, but I would agree with it. You and I are

Scott Benner 6:27
gonna have fun. I can tell Okay, what else like? You don't have to tell me the members. But like, what other like, are we looking at thyroid, celiac? What's going on?

Catherine Alvarez 6:35
Yep, yeah. So sorry, Hashimotos. And actually, nobody has celiac but my aunt. I have an aunt with rheumatoid arthritis

Scott Benner 6:46
and lupus, mostly on your mom's side or your dad's side.

Catherine Alvarez 6:50
Yeah, all on my mom's side, my dad's side is like the picture of health that you're just all live these long, healthy lives. Nothing wrong, nothing

Scott Benner 6:59
wrong with them? Yep. Let's try to understand a little bit what's happening. You're 12 and you're diagnosed, and you've lived your whole life with your mom. Would you say hiding it? Like not? Yeah, just don't see it.

Catherine Alvarez 7:13
Yeah, don't see it. She doesn't check her blood sugar. She does injections, but not, you know, to the point that she should be

Scott Benner 7:22
okay. Do you have any context now as an adult, what her care was like as far as outcomes?

Catherine Alvarez 7:27
Yeah, it was, I mean, it was horrible. She now is legally blind. Unfortunately, she's had a heart attack multiple strokes. Did

Scott Benner 7:36
you become a CD? C? Is that right? CD, CES, why did they change it?

Catherine Alvarez 7:41
Yeah, yeah.

Scott Benner 7:43
All the letters, did you become that to help yourself or to help other people because you couldn't help your mom? Have you talked to a therapist? You know why you did this? Yet

Catherine Alvarez 7:51
for other people? So my mom, I when I was actually, when I was diagnosed, I told her, this is a good thing, like, I'm going to be able to help you, because I'm going to learn about this and you're going to start to do better. And then I did just kind of figure it out. Since I was 12, I always did all my own management. Nobody ever helped me growing up and then why I became a CDC, yes, was actually because of my boss. He hates when I say this, but it's the truth. I read, think like a pancreas in undergrad and and just answered so many questions that I always had, and I was like, you know, everyone needs to know this information. Nobody ever told me this stuff like I've had all these questions. Couldn't find the answer until I read the book. So that's when I decided I want to be just like him and meet with as many people as I can to help educate them and provide these answers to why things are the way they are?

Scott Benner 8:50
So you in college read Gary's book, yep, and then became a CDE back then, well, it

Catherine Alvarez 8:59
was CDEs. Remember

Scott Benner 9:01
you just did this.

Catherine Alvarez 9:03
I mean, it was, what, like, three or four years ago. Oh,

Scott Benner 9:06
so you so when did you take the like, when did you become a CDC, yes, two years ago. Okay, so, did you work for Gary prior to that?

Catherine Alvarez 9:14
Yep, yeah, I got my hours and everything working with Gary. Oh, that's

Scott Benner 9:18
awesome. No kidding, when you told your mom, 12 year old, you Mommy, I'm gonna figure this all out, and we're both gonna be okay, uh huh. And then you figured it out, she is like, never mind.

Catherine Alvarez 9:33
Well, she, she's come a long way. I mean, she finally wears a CGM, which is huge, and she'll talk to me about, you know, like, some blood sugar stuff, why things happen the way they do. But

Scott Benner 9:45
you haven't put her on a on loop, for example, no,

Catherine Alvarez 9:49
not on loop. She, you know, with, with the vision. And so I live in Florida, she's in Pennsylvania, and my dad has to, like, change your CGMS. And. And stuff. It just would be dangerous for her to be on a pump because she wouldn't change it out.

Scott Benner 10:04
So do you have any hindsight on why she ignored everything so much? I guess it's

Catherine Alvarez 10:09
kind of her personality. You know, she did the same with kind of other health related things. I think pretending it's not there is her coping mechanism.

Scott Benner 10:18
Did she understand the ramifications of ignoring it, or did she just think it wasn't going to happen to her? Do you have any idea what her expectation was when she wasn't paying attention to it? My daughter is 20 years old. I can't even believe it. She was diagnosed with type one diabetes when she was two, and she put her first insulin pump on when she was four. That insulin pump was an Omnipod, and it's been an Omnipod every day since then. That's 16 straight years of wearing Omnipod. It's been a friend to us, and I believe it could be a friend to you. Omnipod.com/juicebox whether you get the Omnipod dash or the automation that's available with the Omnipod five, you are going to enjoy tubeless insulin pumping. You're going to be able to jump into a shower or a pool or a bathtub without taking off your pump. That's right, you will not have to disconnect to bathe with an Omnipod. You also won't have to disconnect to play a sport or to do anything where a regular tube pump has to come off. Arden has been wearing an Omnipod for 16 years. She knows other people that wear different pumps, and she has never once asked the question, should I be trying a different pump? Never once omnipod.com/juicebox, get a pump that you'll be happy with forever? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 11:37
I think, I think she was so scared of it happening that it put her in a point of not even being able to deal with it. If that makes sense. Like, I know that, like, rationally it doesn't, but you know, kind of going through it, I think she just, like, didn't want it to happen so bad that she made it happen.

Scott Benner 11:55
I'm just not going to look. And then there, if I don't look in the closet, the guy with the AX won't jump out. Exactly, feeling. Okay, all right, exercise physiology, that's what you got out of college, right? Yep. Okay, then you go find Gary. Sounds like you lived in Pennsylvania for a while. Gary's in Pennsylvania. You go find Gary. You get a job. What are you doing for him? At that point,

Catherine Alvarez 12:15
I was so as a little intern, I was mostly running the social media. And then I was also helping get people scheduled and sitting in on a lot of appointments.

Scott Benner 12:25
Okay, so through sitting in on the appointments, you gather your hours that way. Yes.

Catherine Alvarez 12:30
And then I also began, so I had to also teach people in getting those hours as well. So I did like exercise programming. We did a class at a local hospital, so I was able to actually help teach that class.

Scott Benner 12:46
Okay, so then you gather enough hours to take the test. Is that how it works? Yep, you think the podcast counts as hours. It doesn't. And I've never looked into it, but I'm assuming it doesn't. I don't know there's

Catherine Alvarez 13:01
this, like, unique pathway. So, like, I think you can, like, run your own business, and, like, as long as a diabetes education, I don't know if you can make your argument. I feel like anything's possible, interesting.

Scott Benner 13:11
I don't want to be a CDE because they changed the CD CES, which did no one say it out loud before they changed it. It's hard to say, right? Your brain gets lost in it. You're like, CD C. Wait what

Catherine Alvarez 13:25
nobody is that. It's not a CDC asking, CDC, yes, that's just

Scott Benner 13:29
no. Also, it doesn't flow like there's no rhythmic loveliness to it. Do you see I'm saying, Yeah, CDE, bang, bang, bang, lovely. Yes, like that. Yeah, everyone knew what you meant. No,

Catherine Alvarez 13:38
it's okay. Thanks. Yeah. No, just, I just say I'm a diabetes educator.

Scott Benner 13:42
Yeah, you know, they change it back, if they could, I bet, I bet there's four people in a room. There's like, what do we do there?

Catherine Alvarez 13:47
Yeah, I feel like JDRF is probably feeling the same way. Oh, you

Scott Benner 13:52
think we're breakthrough? T, 1d,

Catherine Alvarez 13:54
yeah, great. This just not taken. Everyone's still saying JDRF just

Scott Benner 14:00
floats. It floats off the tongue. Hard to change the name. It's, it's, you know, you can't even change like the color in Facebook. People have a

Catherine Alvarez 14:07
stroke. So exactly, people don't like that change. I

Scott Benner 14:10
don't mean to go back to your mom for a second, yeah, do it. But as she's having poor outcomes, and you're diagnosed, and she's not interested in helping you. Do you have, like, a, like, a personal separation from her that happened over that? Like, did your relationship go differently? No,

Catherine Alvarez 14:30
it was more like, I wanted to take it all on. I didn't want anyone else to be involved. So she, like, I remember the first week, like she was doing my shots for me. Very faintly remember that, but I remember the way she did it was painful. And then our good friend was a dentist, and he did it, and he just kind of jabbed it into me, and I realized, like, all right, well, The Way She Does It is just slow and painful and traumatizing. So I. I mean, I think that if she had to, she would have done it for me. I think I just realized very quickly that I would be happier if I did it myself. Was

Scott Benner 15:09
it I'd be happier if I if I was in control? Or was it like she doesn't seem to know what she's doing?

Catherine Alvarez 15:16
I don't know. I guess it was like a combination, like the way she did it was painful, more painful than what I realized it had to be. And also, you know, at 12, you don't want to stand out. You're trying to do everything you can to fit in. Yeah, if I had control over it, I can. It's a lot easier for me to be

Scott Benner 15:33
able to you can manipulate how people see you, if you're in control of everything exactly, yeah. So it wasn't you cognitively saying, like, I don't think the lady knows what she's doing right now.

Unknown Speaker 15:43
Yeah, right.

Scott Benner 15:44
What age do you realize that that's true? Probably 12. Okay, same year. Like, you would handle a meal differently than she would. She'd have problems afterwards. You wouldn't like that kind of stuff, right?

Catherine Alvarez 15:58
And then, you know, I wasn't perfect either, but like, I was this crazy 12 year old. I had my little car book. I looked everything up, I wrote everything down, and, you know, figured out how to make things work. Plus,

Scott Benner 16:10
you're right in that age when kids start thinking, like, I think dummy and what's your name over there? Don't know what's going on, like that, which is the thing that happens, wait, do you have a give any kids? Not yet? Well, you get one one day, and then wait like, 1015, years, and then it'll look at you one day and go, I think you're an idiot. Like, Oh, okay.

Catherine Alvarez 16:27
None of us really know what that we're doing. Then

Scott Benner 16:31
you have to make that decision. By the way, do you double down on pretending your way through life? Or do you just look and go, Look kid? I gotta be honest with you, there are days I'm stunned. We have a roof over our heads. I don't not know what's going on. I'm trying my hardest. You're working with Gary. You're doing your thing. You get your hours, then you have to go take a test, right? Like an actual Yep, yeah. How many times you have to take it to win? Just once, look at you. Show off, yeah. All right. And so now you become a newly minted diabetes educator, and you start working for Gary in like you cut, you do what Jenny does, right? Yep, yeah. So you see patients, yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 17:09
virtually, yeah. And Jenny and Gary were really they mentored me through it, her and Alicia. In addition, I sat in spent so much time with them, just learning talk about

Scott Benner 17:20
that a little bit like when you sit in a room, just use Jenny as an example, because people know her, although I know a lot of great things about Alicia, but like, there's Jenny. She's got away, she talks to people. What is it you learn? Like, is it how she asks questions to get to what's going on? Is it like, what do you take from it that you think, okay, that's the piece of Jenny that I'm going to move into who I am. Well,

Catherine Alvarez 17:41
Jenny just has an incredible way of connecting with people, and I think she's very empathetic and just really good at forming relationships with people. So I think just from Jenny, one of the biggest things that I took away was I always want people to feel that they're incredibly cared for, because that's definitely what Jenny gives like she makes everyone feel like they are important, and she's there for them, and she wants to see them succeed, as

Scott Benner 18:16
much as I think that comes across when I'm recording with her. I've had private conversations with her, and her desire to be helpful to the to people is so much stronger and deeper than you would even imagine, right? Yeah, she's really driven incredible to be valuable to other people with diabetes, yeah, yeah.

Catherine Alvarez 18:36
She's a very special person.

Scott Benner 18:38
I know everyone's different, but when you meet a new person, how long, just general, these are generally, you know, generalized numbers. But how long does it take you before you go, Oh, I know what's going on here. Do people fit into boxes? Like, like, how do you virtually help somebody be you're not with them, like you. And I talked before we started, and I said, you know, I've been talking to somebody online, and the person's just lost, and I'm basically right now just asking them a lot of questions. I'm half trying to see if I can figure out what's going on from the questions, and I'm half hoping that the questions make them think of something that they haven't considered yet. But at what point do you think, Oh, I know which way to take this or I know how to attack this problem, and how often does that actually even work? 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 smart watch, 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. Dexcom.com/juicebox, links in the show notes. Links at Juicebox podcast.com and when you use my link to learn about Dexcom. You're supporting the podcast before. Ag one, I didn't have a comprehensive idea about how to support my gut health, but now that I drink ag one, I do my goals for 2025 are simple, stay on this path drink ag one, every morning, and keep things moving, and I mean that figuratively and literally in the right direction. So this year, try ag one for yourself. It's the perfect time to start a new healthy habit, and that's why I've been partnering with ag one for so long. Ag one is offering new subscribers a free $76 What is this? Offering new subscribers a free $76 gift. When you sign up, get out of here. You're going to get a welcome kit, a bottle of d3, k2, and five free travel packs in your first box. So make sure to check out drink AG, one.com/juicebox For more information, check it out.

Catherine Alvarez 21:19
Well, we before we even meet with people, we have them fill out a very intensive assessment packet. So oftentimes, just from that alone, you can identify some of the important points for education, just from all the questions that are asked in there. You know, we're asking things like for their data so we can look at all of their patterns and blood sugars and insulin delivery. We're asking them about like the glycemic index, and, you know, asking us, asking them to explain these different things to us to see, you know what their starting point knowledge basis is. That's really helpful. I would say we really just start with, like, the educational points in conversation. You just eventually are identifying these things that are coming up, and we have their blood work and everything as well. So

Scott Benner 22:14
yeah, so there's other outliers, like untreated thyroid or something like that. You can see that as well, right? Okay. And so then how much of the conversation that you have with them is about continuing to mine information, and how much of it is just, you like, tearing the whole thing down, starting over at basics and building them back up again?

Catherine Alvarez 22:36
Oh, yeah. It really depends from, you know, the person that everyone is kind of coming in at a different point. So some people, and they come in and they they know their stuff, like they have done so much self education, you know, just kind of clarifying pieces, and then really teaching some of them, just like that. How do you analyze your data and know what adjustments need to be made, or helping them pick, like, what system might work better for them based on their goals, what other people they need? Like, you got to cover every educational piece with them, because they're kind of starting from up spot of

Scott Benner 23:19
and it doesn't matter how long they've had diabetes, right? You can see a person who's like, I'm lost. I don't know what I'm doing. I've only been doing this for six months a year, but you could meet somebody who's been doing it for 10 or 15 years, and they could be in the same position, yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 23:32
exactly. Because a lot of times what happens is these people that have been living with it for so stinking long, I mean, they get a little burnt out, and they they don't follow up with the latest stuff anymore, where these people that were just diagnosed, especially if they have a little one like, they just pour themselves into everything that they can find. Yeah,

Scott Benner 23:50
yeah, no, I know there's this thing like that. I'm always trying to figure out, like, at what point that a person's had type one for a really long time, do they just end up going, like, I don't know, like, I can't impact this. It is what it is. I'm just gonna live as long as I can. Like, you know what I mean? Like, and and what happened to them that got them so off kilter? Like, Is it as simple as someone didn't explain basics to them, and therefore they're having all these responses to insulin and food that they can't make sense of and and then they just get to that point where they're like, Oh, I guess this is what this is. Or is it a burnout thing, where you're just like, I can't put any more effort into this. Or does it, do you get burned out because you're putting so much effort in, but you're putting it in the wrong places because you don't know any better, and that's what causes burnout. Does that all make sense?

Catherine Alvarez 24:42
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think everyone's reason for getting to the point of burnout is different. I think some people are just doing too much and having like, their life revolves around diabetes. Some people, you know, just the fact that they have to do so many extra things. Every single day just gets to a point of it just not feeling fair, and they don't want to do it anymore. So I definitely think it comes from a different from different places.

Scott Benner 25:10
I always find it the saddest when a doctor misreads that. You know, when someone's is putting in a bunch of effort, but they're learning so quickly and having such great, you know, these great outcomes, and they're really putting all the pieces together. And just as it starts to make sense to them, by the way, just as they get to the point where I think they're actually not going to have to put as much effort into a day to day, because they really kind of got it down a little bit, a doctor will sometimes step in and say, oh, you know, you're going to, you're going to make yourself crazy. You got to stop. But I want to see your a 1c go up next time. Yeah, that really beats people up when that happens too.

Catherine Alvarez 25:45
Yeah, it really does. I mean, it almost makes some people, like, some distrust, I guess in the end, though, because they feel like, you know, they're doing so well, and the end is like, well, now you're doing too good. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've said similar things before, if you're not sleeping because you're just panicking about your kid all the time, and you're dosing them every five minutes because you're scared when their blood sugar gets to 120 that they're going to die. I mean, those are unrealistic. It's

Scott Benner 26:14
a different problem. Yeah, yeah.

Catherine Alvarez 26:17
So there is times where I mean that commentary is true. They are over obsessing over diabetes. And, I mean, it is true that that will likely lead to burnout or a heart attack for that parent from not sleeping. Yeah, they're just in a constant state of stress. Yeah,

Scott Benner 26:35
I'm always hopeful that they can transcend that moment and that, you know, after some time of, you know, like you said, Bolus, single 120 blood sugar, you know, like that, they can start saying, oh, you know, what, if I would have done this in the past, then we wouldn't have got to this 120 or like, same thing with a low like, you know, if you're always stopping lows, you can start looking back at your meal and saying, you know, maybe if I would have used the insulin differently at the meal, we wouldn't be low here. But I do take your point, and I do believe, from what I've seen, is that as many people as can transcend that moment and move forward, making better decisions earlier, stopping problems from happening more frequently. There's also the same number of people probably who get stuck in that moment, aren't and are treating that that number forever and ever and ever, until, like you said, they can't sleep anymore and they go crazy.

Catherine Alvarez 27:24
Yeah, well, and, I mean, in some ways, the technology is is almost hurtful, because it's so in our face. So, like, we almost feel like we should always be responding. We see it, and so naturally we want to do something. But so

Scott Benner 27:39
interesting how the different personalities react differently. Like, there's some people who like, Oh, thank God, this thing beeped. I can do something about it. You know, a different person would be like, This thing keeps beeping. I hate this, and I don't want this to happen anymore. There's so many different variables about who you might be in this scenario. Like, that's why I think seeing a person one on one should be helpful, if you can get somebody to actually focus on you. So why are you able to Why is Jenny? Why is like when somebody basically pays a concierge person to help them? What's the difference between that and a doctor's appointment? Because people want to say it's time, and I know the time is limited with a doctor, but do you not think it's more than that? I think it's more than just the time doctors have to give.

Catherine Alvarez 28:25
I think a big difference is just the compassion of it. You know, all of us personally, we live it, we experience it, and we want everyone to thrive like we don't want anyone to be held back. We want to see people happy and healthy just that point of living with it. I think we're so much more motivated to stay up to date on all the latest technology and

Scott Benner 28:55
and to ask bigger picture questions too, right? I mean, I'm in a weird position, whereas I don't normally speak to a person like face to face, you said something really kind before we started recording about like, you know, you talk to a lot of people who listen to the podcast and they like the podcast. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it helps them. Is that about, right? Yeah. Okay. So how do you help people without knowing any of their details. You know, that's why I think over and over again, I just, I stick to the basics. I think that that has the best chance of helping the most people. Like, I don't think it's going to help everybody. I don't think everybody's going to have the same response. You know, for every person who's like, oh my god, this saved my life. I'm sure there's somebody who's like, I listen to what you said, and I gotta be honest with you, my life's no different. I know that that's the case, but it's all I have, right? Like, it's, it's, it's the best that I can do. I just said, look like here are the things that I figured out on my own that seemed to help my daughter, and I hope they help you too. Or maybe you can cherry pick. On it and take some of the stuff that helps or doesn't help. You know, it isn't until, like, I meet Jenny, and we start talking to each other. Like, my first thought about Jenny when she came on the podcast the first time as well, she and I think about diabetes so similarly, like, it's, really is, like, it's, it's awesome. Like, you know, like, it's crazy. How, like, like, lock step we are like when somebody says something, our responses are so similar. I realized later, because I don't really know at that point, this is going to sound crazy to people, but I've never read Gary's book, and I think I've only met Gary one time, and it was in passing where someone was like, Scott, that's Gary. He wrote, think like a pancreas. And I go, Hey, how are you? And someone goes, Scott writes a blog. And then I think we walked past each other. I've spoken to him on the phone once, and that was only more recently, like in the last six, six months, and that was maybe for 15 minutes, and had nothing to do with diabetes. Yeah. So I'd never read his book. I don't know any of the like conclusions he's come to, or the things he talks about. But then when I meet Jenny, and I realize Jenny works for him, she's probably working off of, like, some ideas that he, at the very least, like that. He's, you know, talked about, and I thought it's crazy, that book and this podcast are incredibly similar to each other. And then I meet one time I speak with Dr ponder, and he starts talking about how he thinks about diabetes, and I think, but that's how I think about it. And then you realize, like the people listen to Dr ponder have a lot of success, and the people that read Gary's book, Gary's book seem to have a lot of success, and the people listen to the podcast seem to have a lot of success, overwhelmingly, not everybody. And you go, oh, there's got to be building blocks basics within this that lead a lot of people to an understanding that helps them continue on and to have better outcomes. And it's interesting, isn't it, that three people saw it in their lives differently, like a doctor, and you know, I mean, who has type one, Gary, who has type one, and myself, who, like, you know, just raised somebody with him, is just looking at it from from an outsider's perspective. But in the end, we all came up with similar, like, touch points, right? It's really interesting. You know what I mean? Anyway, I don't know why I said all that, other than to say, like, I think, I mean, it's

Catherine Alvarez 32:09
like, the fundamentals. You just, you know, that's you find these fundamental things and, yeah, kind of take off with it.

Scott Benner 32:15
Thank you. That's my point. My point is that those fundamentals are so important to learn and then to try to adapt them and apply them is, is the part that I can't be helpful with. The book's not going to help you with, like, none of that's going to help you. Like, you learn this part, and then you say, Okay, how does that apply to what I just ate, how I just ran around, how I live my life, how blood sugars act in me, like all that other stuff. It's not like they're not hard and fast. Rules that if everybody just does them, it's just all gonna work out great every time it's it's not that. How long have you been doing this now, where you're actually sitting down one on one with a person trying to help them figure out the problems they're having? How long you've been doing that? A few

Catherine Alvarez 32:55
years. Yeah, I guess I'm, uh, like five years now, okay, it's a

Scott Benner 32:58
fairly long time. If I asked you, what are the fundamentals? What are they from your perspective? Well,

Catherine Alvarez 33:05
a big one is gonna I mean, it really depends on what system they're using, in a way too. But basal testing is huge, knowing what we need just kind of in a steady state, from a background, insulin standpoint, and how to do that type of testing, how to test your insulin to carb ratio, what factors in lifestyle are important to note and because they're going to have an impact. So just kind of like, you know, learning about stress impact and sick day management, growth hormone, those kinds of things that you see a huge impact on blood sugar with

Scott Benner 33:43
when you see people struggle, is there a is there a generalization to make? Like if I said, do you finish this sentence, most people struggle with what pops into your head?

Catherine Alvarez 33:54
Definitely different, but most people struggle, I would really depends on the population. I think most parents struggle with the unpredictableness of their child. And really that growth hormone is a big one, where adults, they struggle with food. Food is a huge thing. Yeah,

Scott Benner 34:14
consistency with Bolus,

Catherine Alvarez 34:18
yeah, that timing of the doughs, and then, I mean, protein, fat really gets people. That's a big one. Yeah?

Scott Benner 34:25
No, I know. Until we started talking about that on the podcast, I didn't even realize how many people were like, wait, what?

Catherine Alvarez 34:31
Right? Yeah,

Scott Benner 34:34
carb, carb, yeah. They're just counting carbs, right? And they're and they're not really thinking about the I mean, for me, making the podcast over the years, like, the impact that timing of digestion has on diabetes. I mean, now seems like an obvious thing to me, but back then, like, when I first started, I didn't think about it, and it wasn't. It's interesting how it all builds, like, right? Like, until someone said. Said, you know, fat slows down digestion. I was like, wait. And then the carbs are in there impacting longer, right? And they're like, Yeah. And I'm like, oh, that's what happens with pizza, yeah. And then you start applying it to other things in your life. You're like, Oh, my God. And then it just all starts to come together. You're like, oh, that's what happened when I had a cheeseburger and exactly, ice cream. Like, it really wasn't until, like, one time, I think when Jenny, like, said to me, like, you know, pizza isn't pizza. It's bread and sauce and cheese and, like, it's four things, you know, and maybe there's meat on it too, like, there's a protein to hit, like, and what about more cheese or less cheese? And, like, no one looks at their pizza and says, Oh, that's a thick cheese. My spike is gonna come later. You know what I mean? Or like, this is a hand tossed Neapolitan pizza that just has a couple of pieces of mozzarella put over it. Like, this isn't gonna hit me as hard and it's but now I think about all of that when I look at food, you know, again, like when people are so stuck counting carbs, like cheese, in your mind is like, free, like, Ooh, you know? And then the extent that you get normally, when you learn more is somebody goes, cheese isn't free, it's not free. But then it's not followed up with more conversation. It's just, you know, and you're like, Well, what do you mean? I flip the package over, it says zero. No such thing is free, right? Everything's impacting something somewhere, yep. Yeah. Okay, tell people a little bit about like you do something. I don't know if you call it part time or you do it like, in addition to your job, but tell people the other thing you do, yeah.

Catherine Alvarez 36:34
And I think that this has really helped me clinically, because I've experienced, I can't say what it's like to be a parent of a person with type one diabetes, but much more for San experience. So what I do is I also help a family where their little guy has type one diabetes. I moved from Pennsylvania to Florida two years ago, and he's five now, and I've traveled all over the world with them, and I spend most week days about two hours with them, but I also have sleepovers sometimes Tim as well. So I've just kind of learned for a very little one how different everything is, trying to be a pancreas for an ever changing little human being that you never know what they're gonna do next, and just the uniqueness and the challenges that comes with

Scott Benner 37:32
that. And so you think that just being around him, right? Yeah, being around this little boy, and seeing all the different impacts. Like, do you feel yourself leveling up constantly with diabetes? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 37:45
I think I mean, just professionally in this experience, it made a huge difference. I meet with most of the super little ones now that come to Integrated Diabetes services, because I have that first hand experience, yeah,

Scott Benner 38:02
it's a different world, isn't it? When, like, when you're trying to measure quarters of units in syringes, and, you know, they they eat, then they jump up and run around all of a sudden, and you're

Catherine Alvarez 38:13
like, I wasn't expecting that activity. Yeah, I didn't

Scott Benner 38:17
know that was gonna happen. And the growth

Catherine Alvarez 38:19
hormone is wild. I mean, like, just what they need sometimes, at when they first fall asleep, is just nuts,

Scott Benner 38:30
growth, menstruation, pregnancy. Those are the three that are just like, boom. I would maybe add to the end of that list, like the unexpected nature of how some anaerobic exercise impacts people,

Catherine Alvarez 38:44
right? Yeah, exactly. And I mean, just competitive sports like the adrenaline, that adrenaline, yeah, that's gonna that's tough to navigate, especially like when you have these different types of activity, you need a different strategy for practice versus game day. And, yeah,

Scott Benner 38:59
yeah, no, that's why I like the story that I ended up eventually telling on the podcast that I think has been the most valuable for people, because I hear them talk about it over and over again, is the idea of bolusing for a juice box if you think there's going to be adrenaline. And so, you know, I don't know if you've heard me say this, please stop me, but I have, oh, go for it. Okay, so Arden is, like, I don't know, young at the time, and she's playing this, like, in this little Sunday basketball league. And she'll show up, you know, it's always nine in the morning. These these games, they drag your ass out of bed. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you go over to the local school, to the gymnasium, bunch of little girls play this other bunch of little girls, and Arden has had diabetes at that point for a while, but still, it's like six years. And the truth is, is we're using a pump and a CGM at that point, but it's an earlier version of CGM, so it's kind of okay, like, you're still, like, hoping that the Bluetooth signals bouncing around on the metal deck ceiling of the gym and makes it back. Of the receiver, like, like, that kind of stuff, which, by the way, used to actually work, like, you could be in a room with a metal ceiling, and the receiver would work farther away than it would be if you weren't in a room with them. Anyway. So we'd get to these games, and some days her blood sugar would jump, like, into the mid two hundreds. And then some days it wouldn't. And so one game it would the next week, it wouldn't back and forth. And we, I was like, what is happening? And my wife and I are sitting there talking, and all I'm saying is, like, I we can't let her blood sugar keep going up to 250 like, like, we can't do that. And, and my wife's like, but, but last week it didn't So, what do we do? And I just, like, blurted out, I'm gonna Bolus for a juice box right before the game. And she's like, what? And I said, Well, if this adrenaline, that seems to be what it is, adrenaline, right? Like something's hitting her. And we actually eventually figured out where the adrenaline would come from and not come from, which is kind of funny, but I was like, here's the insulin. If the adrenaline pops off, then the insulin will will cut off the adrenaline rise. Now, she would still need food after the game, like it was still too much, but at least it got in the way of the adrenaline right? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 41:09
that sensitivity eventually kicks in. Oh, yeah. And that's, that's the big thing, is trying to figure out, well, how much insulin do you need to combat adrenaline rise?

Scott Benner 41:18
Yeah, well, so I still don't know how much was right, but what I knew was, if the adrenaline didn't come, I'd basically just pre Bolus the juice box. So if I didn't see the spike at some point, five or 10 minutes in the game, I'd be like, here real quick drink this juice to combat the insulin that we put in, right? And then after that game, she wouldn't need as much food. She still needs some, but not as much as if it the insulin was in there to battle the adrenaline. Now listen, this is very Listen, this is very rudimentary, but it worked, and it got us through it,

Catherine Alvarez 41:45
yeah. So you found your way. And this is what, this is one of the things I learned from Think like a pancreas, and I still use it to this day as like the starting point. But of course, everyone's different, so you gotta adapt every starting point. We say, okay, so her blood sugar usually went to 250 so we're gonna give a correction, assuming that's where she's gonna go. But because you are physically active, you're still gonna be more sensitive to that insulin. So you would do 50% less of what you would typically need to correct a blood sugar of 250 for the starting point, and then kind of go from there. What

Scott Benner 42:21
we figured out was, is that when she got to the game, like, Arden, like, was really competitive, and she'd assess the girls on the other side. I don't even think she knew she was doing it, but if she thought the game was going to be hard and that they would put up a fight, then she'd get this spike. And if it look, I usually say, like, if it looked like there were like, five little marshmallows on the other side, she'd be like, Oh, we're gonna kill these girls. And she didn't. She never got really excited about no problem. Yeah, listen again. It's a rudimentary way to take care of it. We got through it, everything, etc. But telling the story allowed people to realize, like, oh, adrenaline does that, and insulin will combat adrenaline, except later the adrenaline disappears, the insulin is still there, and then you have a problem, but I can still workshop that problem and try to get through it. And then eventually, one day, I adapted the idea. When a person said to me, you know, it seems like I need more insulin, but I don't know how much more to give at this meal, because we're not huge carb counters. Like, more like, Hey, I think this meal takes about this much kind of vibe. People would say, like, all I agree. Like, it looks like I need more at this meal, but if I've counted the carbs correctly, but I still need more, how do I make the leap of giving myself more? Like, it seems really scary to people to do just another unit or something like that. And so I adapted the thing from the basketball. And I said, Why don't you Bolus for the food that you know you've counted, plus a juice box, and then if you're too much, you can use the juice box to combat it. And if it's not too much, well, now you know that this much insulin plus this led us to this outcome. Do I need more or

Catherine Alvarez 43:56
less, right? And that's a cute way, I mean. And people think like, yeah, a juice box. You're right, that's not, it's not so scary. Doesn't seem

Scott Benner 44:03
too scary, etc. And that thing, when I go out into the, you know, into the audience, and I say, hey, because I've done this recently, I was like, Look, you know, over these 10 years, I've said so many, like, colloquial things that people will like, parrot back to me. Can you make a list of them for me? Because I don't. I've lost track of all of them, you know. And one of them that came back overwhelmingly was Bolus for a juice box. If you don't know how much more insulin to try, as crazy it is, is the slow progression of that story over years led people to be able to be a little more aggressive at their meals to see if maybe a little more insulin would be valuable for them. Crazy, you know what? I mean, yeah. So I like it, yeah, it's awesome. Like, the same thing with like, when people are like, I don't know how to pre Bolus for a little kid, they never eat. The same thing, right? You never know what they're gonna eat. And I just said one day, I was like, Well, is there a minimum amount that, you know, the lead, it just pre. Lost that much, and then, as you see it, go in, do the rest? You know, if more goes in, and that ended up being helpful for people, because the minute they see a pre Bolus actually work at a meal, it opens up a lot of other ideas for them,

Catherine Alvarez 45:13
right? And even a percentage of a pre Bolus is going to make a huge difference, yeah, yeah.

Scott Benner 45:19
So anyway, it's like little things like that that come from conversations and like and so you're getting to see those things with this little boy, plus you have type one. You actually have a rich layering of perspectives, because you watched your mom, I don't want to say she didn't take it seriously, but she wasn't putting the effort in where it needed to be put right. And then you figured it out for yourself, and now you're getting to watch a little kid live with it like, how long do you think you're gonna be like a Zen master at all this?

Catherine Alvarez 45:46
You know, something else that's super crazy too, that we haven't even talked about is my aunt. She has type 3c so she had her whole pancreas was removed because she had pancreatic cancer. Okay, so I get that too.

Scott Benner 46:01
Your mom's sister, yes, interesting. That can't be coincidental, right? The pancreatic cancer and the diabetes.

Catherine Alvarez 46:08
Well, right? I'm always so in all of us, my mom, my aunt and myself, we have it's called the Bronco two gene, so it puts us at, like, really high risk for breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer. So my aunt, of course, was very unlucky and wound up with all the cancer. Okay,

Scott Benner 46:29
so what's your mom's background? What's her family? Her

Catherine Alvarez 46:34
family? Well, actually, Mom, we got a DNA test and found out that we're asking Ushi Jew, so that's why, that's where that everybody

Scott Benner 46:41
is. Everybody gets, like a 1% I believe, yeah, not everybody, but a lot of people, well,

Catherine Alvarez 46:47
a little bit higher percent, which puts you at high risk for this bracket two gene, really,

Scott Benner 46:51
no kidding, that's what does it right there. But are you guys like Irish English?

Catherine Alvarez 46:55
Yeah, Irish and Norwegian.

Scott Benner 46:58
I sometimes talk about my friend Mike, who's passed. I don't know if I've ever, like, added this layer of detail about his his life, but he was diagnosed type one when we were in high school, and his mom eventually died of pancreatic cancer, so I don't know it. And they're Irish and, like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know how many different times you got to hear people's stories where you're like, this seems like, I hear about this, like a pattern, yeah, a little bit of a pattern here somewhere interesting. Are your mom and your aunt similar in their personalities, or did your aunt No, so your aunt took over and did what you needed to do.

Catherine Alvarez 47:34
Yeah, my aunt, we're kind of, we have similar personalities. She definitely is, but it's tough because she has a whole extra layer, like, we don't even realize, like, I never really appreciated the small things that my pancreas does do

Scott Benner 47:47
digestive sometimes. Yes,

Catherine Alvarez 47:51
yeah, it's just her, her trying to eat. Is it's quite complicated. Yeah, listen,

Scott Benner 47:58
I'm not a doctor and I'm not a researcher, I'm not anything, but, like, I hear a lot of people's conversations, and I so often when I see people with type one, you know, they always, Oh, my stomach hurts, or after I eat, or something like that. And I was like, Why does no one ever tell you, Hey, your pancreas does more than just this. And right? You know, a lot of you seem to have trouble digesting food, and then they'll tell you immediately that the doctor will jump to, well, you have gastroparesis then. And what if, just, maybe, you just don't have enough digestive enzymes, and you could buy them over the counter, by the way, and they're not particularly expensive, and they work really well. Like, why is that not talked about? I assume it's not talked about because they don't know the doctors, right?

Catherine Alvarez 48:44
Yeah, I always wonder that that same thing, you know, kind of talking, why? Why don't they mention the alpha cells? Yeah, I think it's just that. I know we talked a little bit about their time constraint. Maybe that's it. But,

Scott Benner 48:57
yeah, but how many times does somebody have to tell you my stomach hurts and they have type one before you go there, maybe I should say this out loud. And the amount

Catherine Alvarez 49:05
of people that don't even get checked for celiac antibodies is just shocking, right?

Scott Benner 49:10
Yeah. Or how about how many people's TSH has rise, and the doctor's like, that's fine, we're not gonna do anything about

Catherine Alvarez 49:15
that. Oh, right, yeah, as long as it, you know, they they're not looking for huge bumps every time. And as long as it falls within the range they're they're not going to

Scott Benner 49:23
see it. I love when a person's like, my hair is falling out, I'm cold all the time, and I can't sleep and I'm exhausted. My TSH is four, and the doctor's like, it's not that. And I have type one diabetes, and my brother's got celiac, and my sister's got a bump on her elbow. We're riddled with autoimmune issues. Like, that's probably not that, though.

Catherine Alvarez 49:42
It's probably your diabetes, honestly, yeah,

Scott Benner 49:44
have you tried cutting out flour? My thyroid is not well, you know, like, or I'm making it, my body's not picking it up correctly. Like, help. Help me. I. Leads me to ask you, have you. Helped anybody yet who's been added had a GLP added. What have you seen with that? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 50:06
yeah, there's, you know, definitely has increased in popularity, especially with these people in the DIY community, and doing it with unannounced meals. I've used it myself as well, but I'm not now, because I love to share too much information, but I'm trying to conceive, so can't take it during that time, but it's it is truly incredible just helping with that meal time and the fact that we are lacking in it really replaces a lot of what we're lacking in. So can make a make a huge difference.

Scott Benner 50:36
Have you seen anybody use it and it just didn't change anything for them with their blood sugars. Well,

Catherine Alvarez 50:41
what's more common is it did help them, but it negatively impacted them in many other ways that it wasn't worth it. Okay?

Scott Benner 50:50
So someone's like, Listen, I have diarrhea now, but my blood sugar is better. I'm gonna choose not having diarrhea, something like that, right? Okay, yes, but you haven't seen anybody just taken and just flatly, has not impacted their blood sugar.

Catherine Alvarez 51:03
I mean, you see people where it doesn't impact them from a weight standpoint, but no, from a blood sugar standpoint, I have not seen that. I'm sure I will. You know, no,

Scott Benner 51:11
I'm just trying to decide, like, I'm not in charge of anything. But I'm trying to figure out, like, Why did a guy come on the podcast, who was, I think he was, I don't know, 58 right? And he had diabetes for like, six years. He was probably lot. It was probably a really slow onset. He was overweight. They put him on GLP, gip one, and he loses a bunch of weight. But more importantly, like is literally not taking any insulin now. And he has excursions at meals. They go up 180 or so, they come back. He's clearly going to need insulin at some point, but his beta cells, like, had functionality. He was using a lot of insulin, like, as much as would make you I mean, he was comfortable calling himself a type one. So was this doctor. He was using that much insulin, right? And now suddenly he's not using any. What did that GLP do to free those beta cells up to handle the load, more or less? Like, do you know what I mean? And like, is there a world where his beta cells just weren't far enough along so they were able to be helped, like, with a crutch? And is there going to be a world where somebody's beta cells are so wiped out that even if you add that crutch, you're not going to see a benefit like, that's what I'm wondering, right?

Catherine Alvarez 52:23
And I think that would be the case, because if you think about, just think about people in the honeymoon phase in general. I mean, there is times where people don't need to initiate insulin right away. You know, they can supplement in some vitamin D, and with physical activity, they get away with not having to take insulin,

Scott Benner 52:41
or I wonder how much of that is inflammation, because

Catherine Alvarez 52:44
exactly that's yeah,

Scott Benner 52:46
I go back to, like, back before the podcast, where there was this one researcher who was trying, I don't, I don't remember any of the details about this. But other than to say this, one researcher was saying out loud, I don't think the beta cells are dead. I think they're frozen. They're inflamed to the point where they can't function. And I was like, Oh, that's weird. And then that's like, kind of the last time you thought about it again, right? Like it was back around when people were talking about stem cells a lot, and now you listen to people talk about GLP medications. Like I was just listening to a DR Drucker, who's like, kind of one of the pioneers of GLP, and I was listening to, like, a two year old grand rounds he was doing at a hospital recently. He's just talking about how the inflammation impact from GLP is almost like instantaneous when you put it in, like, they can see it impact your your inflammation markers almost immediately after it's put in your body. And like, I'm like, all that, like, wait till we figure out all this. But still, when they talk about it, like the researchers, I don't mean people who are like, you know, coming along, trying to find other research and uses for it. I'm talking about the people who, like, pioneered this thing. They still say we don't actually know how it works. Like, we have no idea what the heck is going on, yeah, which is not uncommon in man made medication, but to hear them say, like, yeah, you lose weight. Like, we don't understand why, yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 54:06
well, and not everyone does, though there's also some research. There's like, a blood work that you can do. I wrote an article about it. I wish I remembered it more like in a better way to explain it, but they can test something and see, like, predict if they would be a responder, really? Yeah,

Scott Benner 54:28
oh, that's interesting. So there's a blood test you can do to tell you if you're going to respond favorably to GLP,

Catherine Alvarez 54:35
right? Yes, huh? Yeah, I, I wrote a little article on it. So, yeah, I know it's out there somewhere.

Scott Benner 54:44
Is it a genetic test?

Catherine Alvarez 54:46
I don't even, I couldn't tell you. You know, I write so many different things. I wish I had a better memory. But

Scott Benner 54:55
no, don't, don't, please. I you know, again, these, how these good. Com. Conversations happen. Like, that's why none of this is, like, you know, it's, it's not medical. Like, this is a podcast. You don't even like, you're talking, you know. And you see if people don't hear something and go, Oh, I wonder if this is, you know, something I should look into. A C peptide test is one method that can help predict whether a person will respond well to GLP, right? So

Catherine Alvarez 55:21
well that, yeah, that's not what I read. That's not

Scott Benner 55:24
what you're that's not what you wrote about. Yeah, I

Catherine Alvarez 55:27
know C peptide, well, I would remember that. Yeah, no,

Scott Benner 55:29
but I mean, like, that's not what you're talking about, but it is what we were just saying about the other guy. Like, you know, if your beta cell still have the ability to, like, do some stuff, but it's just being held down by your body's inability to process the insulin and get the result, etc, that you want. Like, I can see why. I don't know, taking some of the like, it's weird to talk about even because, like, are you increasing your insulin sensitivity, or are you decreasing inflammation? Are both of those things happening, like, like, is it like a mix, and then it's just crazy when you hear the actual researcher talk about and they go, I don't know, but it works like, okay,

Catherine Alvarez 56:06
okay. I actually, I found the I found the article that I wrote about. It's called Hungry gut gene test shows who will benefit most from a govi, hmm, so yeah, I guess they're grouping them based off of this gut test, and it is a gene test. There's

Scott Benner 56:22
a genetic test available that's often referred to as hungry gut gene test, which identifies people who might respond better to GLP, one receptor agonist like semaglutide for weight loss. The test analyzes genetic variants associated with how the gut and brain regulate hunger and satiation. In studies, individuals with the hungry gut obesity phenotype showed greater weight loss up to 19 and a half percent compared to those without the phenotype. There you go. Yep, there it is, just like that. Yeah. Anyway, my point is is that this stuff's gonna is gonna help people, you know, and it's gonna get to helping people with type one. We were talking last night, like in a little private group, about how one of the big speed bumps for doctors, about giving glps and type ones is that in some people, and Dr Blevins has come on the show and talked about this too, it can lead to DKA, because their insulin needs go so low, right, that they almost can't use enough insulin to ward off the dka, because they obviously still Have type one diabetes, yep, and their beta cells aren't helping enough to ward it off too. So they're looking at protocols that will then make the FDA comfortable with the prescription being written. And that protocol may be as simple as you get a ketone meter and you have to test a certain number of times a day to make sure you're not in DK. And

Catherine Alvarez 57:41
that might get that good old precision x Oh, but yeah, yeah. But

Scott Benner 57:45
that literally might be the thing that helps it get written for type ones,

Catherine Alvarez 57:49
yeah, yeah. And it'll be a part of our CGMS. It sounds like too where alert us if we have ketones.

Scott Benner 57:56
You think CGM are going to tell people about ketones one day? Oh, yeah, there. I

Catherine Alvarez 58:01
mean, that's already kind of something that has been in the works, but it's almost like, is it too much information? Just kind of have to find that balance, yeah,

Scott Benner 58:09
yeah, overwhelming people with stuff. But anyway, I think that's interesting that like. So what this means is, if that thing is right about the ketone meter, is that the FDA knows it helps people with type one diabetes, and they just need to be able to put it into the world in a way that's not going to cause anyone to have DKA. And once they can guard against that, then they'll be okay with it being written, which then means it'll be covered by insurance too,

Unknown Speaker 58:31
right?

Scott Benner 58:32
Yeah, so that's exciting. Wait, wait, you trying to make a little Catherine? What are you doing over there?

Catherine Alvarez 58:37
Yeah, we want to bring a little human in to the world. What

Scott Benner 58:42
happened? You started watching this kid and you got what they call the baby fever.

Catherine Alvarez 58:46
I think I've always had the baby fever.

Scott Benner 58:48
Oh, are you like a little caregiver at heart? Yeah, I

Catherine Alvarez 58:51
just, I just love there's something so special about little ones. They're sweet innocents, and just adore them. How

Scott Benner 58:59
long have you been trying,

Catherine Alvarez 59:01
I guess, like eight months now, really, yeah, so taking a lot longer than you know what we had thought. But I think I'm probably just been stressing too much about the whole thing. So

Scott Benner 59:12
do you have any PCOS symptoms? No,

Catherine Alvarez 59:15
no, and I've been tested in everything

Scott Benner 59:19
stressing. Yeah, it's probably all it is no kidding. They say sometimes you just like, I'm sure I've said this before, but I'm adopted. My parents adopted me after being told like they could not have kids. Then, keeping in mind, this was the late 60s, early 70s, when they were being told that, and I'm not sure what the level of discourse was around this, they adopted me, and five years later, my mom got pregnant. I

Catherine Alvarez 59:42
keep hearing stories like that. It's so incredible. Yeah, and I told, I told my husband, Kenny. I was like, maybe it's just like, our calling, that we're supposed to adopt and then we can have far because, I mean, there's so many like, people need to adopt. It's has to happen.

Scott Benner 59:58
Yeah? Well, they. Doctor told my mom it was a fluke. She probably just relaxed enough for it to happen. I love the way they talk to women about their health. Literally, you don't have to worry about that. It's never going to happen again. And then five years later, she got pregnant again, pregnant again. Oh my gosh. So my brother is, like my youngest brother's, you know, 10 years younger than me. Yeah, it's huge. Yeah. We should have seen my mom, in her 60s, dealing with my like, teenage brother. She was like, Oh, the hell's going on here. Also, what was your husband's name? Kenny? Yeah. Kenny, yeah. I mean, Kenny wants a baby. But he's also like, I can't believe this. The fun part is lasting so long, this is awesome, so he's fine with it. Yeah, yeah. I bet you haven't heard him complain yet?

Catherine Alvarez 1:00:40
No, you're getting

Scott Benner 1:00:44
to the point where you're like, listen,

Catherine Alvarez 1:00:47
it's like, what's wrong with us? Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:00:49
well, you know, once it's on your calendar, now you're like, something's not working right. Where you're like, does it say here Thursday at two make baby. You know so well, I wish you a lot of luck. I'm I know it can be incredibly frustrating, for sure, yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 1:01:03
but you know, we're happy we have a crazy dog that really keeps us on our toes. So nice. Uh, because dogs are good practice, yeah, it makes me feel like I was not at all prepared. We, uh, we found our dog. She's a dumpster baby, and she has really humbled me. Oh,

Scott Benner 1:01:20
wow. Somebody threw puppies in a dumpster.

Catherine Alvarez 1:01:24
Yes, that happened. I

Scott Benner 1:01:25
guess that does happen. I don't know why I'm so surprised every time something horrible is brought to my attention, but Oh, wow. How did you like so somebody found them, brought them to a shelter, and you came and got one.

Catherine Alvarez 1:01:35
No, we found her. You found her. Yeah, just hurt her and, oh, my god, Catherine, what

Scott Benner 1:01:42
are you doing in a near dumpster? Are you okay? You're not living in an alley or something, right?

Catherine Alvarez 1:01:49
No, no, I'm not dumpster diving or anything. Gary's paying you, right?

Scott Benner 1:01:57
So you, you and Kenny are walking down the street and hear a dog in a dumpster? Yeah, we

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:04
just had eaten at our favorite sushi place. And yep,

Scott Benner 1:02:08
oh God, it wasn't the sushi place's dumpster. Was it?

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:11
Yes, it was,

Scott Benner 1:02:13
oh god. Did it make you wonder what you just ate in the sushi place? No, luckily,

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:16
the dumpster did not smell. So no, I

Scott Benner 1:02:19
don't mean that. I mean you anyway, oh, okay, I see what you're like, uh, oh, so you took the puppy out. It was a puppy, yep. What kind of dog is it a mutt or like, yeah, she's

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:31
mostly, she's pity Staffy bulldog and Boxer,

Scott Benner 1:02:35
wow. And how does it humble do?

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:38
Well, I mean, she is. She has eaten two couches, multiple dog beds, multiple shoes, purses, tampons.

Scott Benner 1:02:52
Yeah, it's a low moment when your dog's running around the house with the tampon.

Catherine Alvarez 1:02:56
Yeah, yep, and then has to go to the emergency vet because that's not freaking very bad.

Scott Benner 1:03:02
Oh my god, two like, so just chewed through sofas. Yes, so obviously you can't wish that you didn't hear the dog in the dumpster because of the moral implications of it. But have there been moments when you thought like, oh God, dogs not for us? Or just, no, I

Catherine Alvarez 1:03:19
love her so much. Like she has an Instagram I'm totally just at a reels for this dog. Did

Scott Benner 1:03:26
that? Flip you out when you realize the dog owned a phone, we're like, oh my god, the dog's smart enough to post on Instagram. Why doesn't it not know not to eat the sofa? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 1:03:36
I know, right. She is. She's really smart. I mean, she's gone through like, a lot of training, spent so much on that, and she knows she knows how to be a good girl.

Scott Benner 1:03:49
Oh, you're at this point now where you're looking at the dog going, I know you know not to do this. Why is this happening? Yeah, my wife thinks the dog looks at her differently. Sometimes she's like, he knows I'm like, I don't think he knows anything. I think his brain is the size of a walnut, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't know anything. Actually, Arden said on the podcast recently that, um, that she learned about consciousness and that dogs don't have it like, the the way dogs have consciousness is different than how, like, higher beings have it, like, it's something about the mirror test. Interesting.

Catherine Alvarez 1:04:22
Well, she makes these very like, I'm very sorry mom faces at me after she does something bad. So

Scott Benner 1:04:29
I believe they say that that's you giving human feelings to an animal. There's a it's called Adam. I can, I can never, like, pronounce the word Hold on a second. I sound like an idiot.

Catherine Alvarez 1:04:43
Do you know about that? I mean, it makes sense, but no, I don't anthropomorphism,

Scott Benner 1:04:47
it's a term that refers to the tendency to ascribe human traits, behaviors or intentions to non human entities, including animals, objects and even natural phenomenons. For example, saying, Oh, look, the dog feels guilty because of its body language after doing something wrong. That's a form of anthropomorphism. So you are doing that, not the dog.

Catherine Alvarez 1:05:11
Well, I'm still gonna believe that my dog is very sorry.

Scott Benner 1:05:16
You just want the dog to be sorry, whatever the just want the dog to be sorry. You're like, it must be regretful, because that sofa cost $1,000 No, she's sorry. Because if the dog's not regretful, you're gonna take it back to the dumpster and like, so you have to, like, tell yourself, it's not that you would do that. I'm assuming you would take it to a shelter and abandon it properly. Yeah, I would never abandon please take care of your animals. Like, please don't take on responsibility for an animal. Like, that's why. Catherine, how much do you listen to this podcast?

Catherine Alvarez 1:05:48
I wish more, but, you know, I not a lot. That's fine.

Scott Benner 1:05:50
So you don't know that I have a chameleon. Or you do know this? No, I don't know. Okay. So my family gets me a chameleon for Christmas. And my first thought was like, Oh God no. Like, I don't want to be responsible. Like I have, like, a strong sense of responsibility for things. Like, if you put me in charge of something, I'm gonna feel that very deeply. Yeah, and I actually think that's helped me with the podcast. And you obviously have that with that dog, or you would have lost it outside, lost it in quotes. Do you think that helps you at your job.

Catherine Alvarez 1:06:21
I guess. I mean, I guess I could make the argument that it does. Do you have

Scott Benner 1:06:25
less feeling that people feel guilty when they do something wrong than when the dog does it?

Catherine Alvarez 1:06:29
I think that my dog feels more guilty. Okay, let me

Scott Benner 1:06:33
ask you another question, because you've dealt with so many people. Okay. I've been asked this question. I've heard it said a lot of times. I don't actually think people don't care about their health, like, you know how people they'll say, like, they don't take care of that they don't care. Or I don't think that's true. I think everyone cares. I think that the way, the tools they have to attack that the problem are greatly varied between person to person. But I don't think there's any person who's like, I'm not gonna Bolus for my food today because I don't care. Like, I just, you know what I mean? Like, I don't, I

Catherine Alvarez 1:07:10
think they're, yeah, they're overwhelmed by it, or, you know, there's something else going on.

Scott Benner 1:07:14
I genuinely believe that too. Like, I'm not saying you can't get into a situation with mental health where you physically and intellectually can't I know that happens if, I mean every day to day person walking around who's not stricken by horrible depression or, you know, mental illness or something like that, I don't think there's anyone out there who's just like, I don't care if I live or die. And even if they say that, I don't think that's necessarily true. I just think they are lost and they don't know what to do next. Yeah, yeah. That sucks, yeah. I

Catherine Alvarez 1:07:44
mean, I think, yeah, they're just in such a such a dark place this world. I mean, sometimes it's hard to find the good in it. So

Scott Benner 1:07:52
yeah, is it hard when, like, you're younger, right? So, like, let's think about you for a second. You said you over shared. So let's keep over sharing for a couple more minutes before I let you go, right? Yeah. So you're diagnosed at 12. That sucks. You've got a mom who has type one but is of no help to you. You feel pressure to help her, because you realize she's not helping herself. That doesn't work out. You know, you get this job that you've always wanted because you know, you've read this book and you're like, oh my god, I could work with this person who you know taught me so much stuff. You go do that, you train yourself up. You become a certified diabetes education and care specialist. Does anyone hear it when I'm saying it? Why did you think this was a good Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialist? Yeah, see what you did. You made it bad. Okay, so you become that thing, and now you're helping people, then you go off to like, you know, you help this little boy, you're trying to build your own life. You're having your own struggles making a baby. Like, all this stuff's happening. And when I gave you the opportunity to say something, you said, like, the world's hard sometimes, so why are you not beat down by it?

Catherine Alvarez 1:08:57
It's a choice. And I mean, so to add to it, like the hardest thing by far that totally overshadows, like all of my other struggles in life, is that my brother actually passed away. Oh my gosh, I don't think I'll ever go through something that was would be as hard as that was because he was like he was my

Scott Benner 1:09:18
person in life, unexpectedly from an illness. It

Catherine Alvarez 1:09:21
was from drugs. Okay? So, yeah, he was, he was just 21 but, you know, we were really close in age, and we really did everything together.

Scott Benner 1:09:30
This is only seven or eight years ago. Is that right?

Catherine Alvarez 1:09:33
Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, yeah, like, I just came to a point in my life where it's like, am I gonna let like? Is this gonna be where my life stops, or am I gonna choose to keep going and almost try to make him proud?

Scott Benner 1:09:50
That could have happened? You could see that moment as an inflection point where you just kind of gave up to Yeah, yeah. How long did it take you to get past that feeling? Yeah?

Catherine Alvarez 1:10:00
Around two years, wow.

Scott Benner 1:10:02
Would you consider yourself depressed during that time? Oh, yeah. Did you have to do anything like, like, what did you do to manage that?

Catherine Alvarez 1:10:10
I tried talking to people I really fell into a dark place with, like, alcohol for a while in my college days. But eventually I, and this is going to sound so like cliche, but really, exercise is what ended up turning my life around. I found CrossFit, and I got really into fitness, and it was exactly what I needed to to heal me.

Scott Benner 1:10:40
I'm glad you found that. Yeah, see, now you should listen to more of the podcast, because eventually everyone says something like this, after we've been talking for a while, and then later they'll say, I don't know why I told you that, but I appreciate you sharing that with me. That was really lovely to be that open. Did you ever consider like because it feels like you went towards diabetes because of your mom and you. But did you ever think like, I could also help people with like, addiction or drug use issues, like, like, where does that like lay in your mind? Yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 1:11:11
that so I think that. I think that just hits too close to home. You couldn't be around it like that. I don't touch that so much, but when someone does lose a loved one, I think that I can definitely be a person that they feel safe confiding in,

Scott Benner 1:11:28
yeah, oh, okay. I know it's hard. I'm sorry. You okay? Oh, yeah,

Catherine Alvarez 1:11:32
I'm good, okay,

Scott Benner 1:11:33
I was gonna ask a different question. No, it feels like such a pivot. I'm sorry. Um, after you make your little, not dumpster baby, but but your actual own human baby. After that does, happens and the baby comes, comes and is in the world, are you gonna go right back to using a GOP again? Well,

Catherine Alvarez 1:11:51
I think that I will want to bring more babies into the world. So No, not right away, getting gonna

Scott Benner 1:11:57
do Irish twin it up. You're gonna go. Go twice. Real hard. Maybe. Let's do it again. My gosh, oh, my gosh. Well, that's, that's crazy. Like, we didn't talk much about or at all, because it just sort of came up. But you know, the amount of people that I hear come through here, like, when you say, you know, when you said earlier, like, you can kind of see pathways, like when I'm when I said, like, oh, I don't know how many people I have to interview who are like this happened to me. You know, I interview a lot of people who also have, like, a bipolar person in their family, or there's depression in their family. When you start thinking about depression, or, like, you know, bipolar and inflammation, and, you know, like, how this stuff seems to go hand in hand through bloodlines. Really? Do you think that the depression you had was solely from the incident, or do you think that it's a thing you've had or have had since? I

Catherine Alvarez 1:12:50
think, I mean, it's, it's definitely, you know, ongoing, it's a trauma that will always be a part of me now, yeah, but

Scott Benner 1:13:01
it started at your brother's passing. Or you think it was before that? Oh, it's probably before that too. Did you notice any alleviation on the GLP, no,

Catherine Alvarez 1:13:12
you didn't. No, no, no, it didn't, not with that aspect, not

Scott Benner 1:13:17
that it should, just that. I you, you don't know this. But like, a lady came on recently who said that GLP medication alleviated a lot of her child's bipolar issues, there's so many questions. And yeah, no, I was just wondering if you noticed, like a lightning of your load in that time or not.

Catherine Alvarez 1:13:32
Yeah. Well, I don't think I personally suffer from depression. I think that, I mean, I do. I have medication? I eventually found the right SSRI for me personally, that's,

Scott Benner 1:13:46
I'm glad you found something Well, I think you have laid out perfectly why people might want to contact you. I think maybe Jenny's calendar is going to open up now, because right now, if you try to get Jenny professionally, what's it take? Like, six months, right? Yeah, oh

Catherine Alvarez 1:14:00
yeah. Jenny is hard schedule to get on. Yeah, she's, uh,

Scott Benner 1:14:03
she made a lot of fans, so you can go steal some of those people. Now, would you share your email address at work? Yeah, it's

Catherine Alvarez 1:14:11
just my name. Actually, it's my old name. So it's K Gen teal, my old last name at Integrated Diabetes, com, G, E,

Scott Benner 1:14:21
N, T, I, L, E,

Catherine Alvarez 1:14:22
you got it?

Scott Benner 1:14:23
Okay? Well, if you're interested in Catherine helping you with your diabetes, that is how you would reach out to her. That's, I know that's not why you came on, but I just, I thought you did such a nice job, and, you know, laid out, you know, a path of of what you think and and how you know what kind of a person they might intersect when they reached out to you. So, you know, I hope you don't mind me saying that. Oh, thank you. Appreciate it. Oh, it's my pleasure. Did we talk about everything you wanted to talk about? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I did. That always surprised. I

Catherine Alvarez 1:14:53
mean, I really didn't even have any plans, like, I was just like, No, can't wait to talk to Scott. This is gonna be super

Scott Benner 1:14:57
cool. We spoke on the phone once. Four, is that right? Yeah, you

Catherine Alvarez 1:15:01
helped me make friends at the children with diabetes conference.

Scott Benner 1:15:05
Oh, that's right. They don't let me come there, but I still knew some people. By the way, that's not fair. They just, I've never been invited. I'm sure it's fine, but I

Catherine Alvarez 1:15:13
think, yeah, they, I think they just have, I think they have a different approach. I don't know. I think I so. I've gone for the past two years now, and I love that conference. Oh my gosh. It is really fun. Yeah, I

Scott Benner 1:15:26
swear to you, I don't like I have no ill will about it. And if you know it's not a problem at all, I just every year I'm inundated with, are you going to be at friends for life? Are you going to be with children like people? So every I know it's like, on my calendar, almost like this is when it starts happening, when people ask me if I'm coming. And I'm coming, and I'm always like, I've, you know, I would come if I was invited. I've not been invited, that that's all,

Catherine Alvarez 1:15:47
yeah. So yeah, yeah. I just decided to volunteer, um, this past year, nice. And I hope that I get to volunteer forever, because I was tell me what you took from it, the connections that I got to see form, or the connections that were already formed just from so many years of attending. It really is just like they're a family, if you're looking for a family feel. I mean, I don't think there's a better place to be. Yeah,

Scott Benner 1:16:13
I just got back from an event where I was around a lot of people, and, like, I had so many different interactions that were just heartwarming and stuff I won't forget anytime soon, you know, from like, little kids who are just doing better, and you know, since the last time you saw them or watching people make friends, you know, had this really cool little conversation in this group of children where, like, we didn't Talk about, like, you know, and talk about diabetes management or anything like that, but I just there's, you know, I don't know, 50 kids in this room, and I just went around and just asked them questions, like, you know, like, What's it feel like to be low? What's it feel like when you're higher? You know, you know, you know. What do you struggle with? And then, as you let them talk, from like five years old to, like, 15, when they started relating to me the questions they had about their health and their life, and you really started seeing the things that they were thinking about. Like, not that I didn't think kids were thinking about that stuff, but it's, it's eye opening to hear them articulate it. You know what I mean to have a nine year old tell you I don't understand, like, what happens to me, and I wish I understood better. And you know, because I go to school and I try to take a test and my blood sugar shoots up and I don't feel well, and I don't know if I should Bolus or not, like, all this other stuff, like, and it's just this young girl, you know what I mean. And you know, then to explain to her, like, what adrenaline does to her, and then to watch all these little faces in the room go, Oh my God. And then they can start relating it back to their own lives. Then five or six people put their hands up. It's like, my blood sugar always goes up here. Like when I get to school in the morning. I said, Oh, that used to happen to my daughter. And I said, and then does anybody's blood sugar drop really fast when the school day is over? And so many of them are like, how do you know that you know what I mean and like? And just to see them feel like, Oh, this is not like an I'm not crazy, and this is an abnormal, yeah, and that guy's saying that it might be because of this, like one little girl, if anybody's listening, I would love to have her on the podcast. She came up to me afterwards with a notebook in her hand, and she had been taking notes the whole time. We were talking, like, in the in the hour. And I said, is that a notebook? And she said, yeah. I said, What are you writing in it? She goes, I was just writing down things, you said. And I was like, Okay. And she goes, would you sign it for me? Almost like, only if you want me to cry, like, you know, like, so, like, I signed it, and I was like, thank you. She goes. Thanks a lot. I have a lot to talk to my mom about. And then she just went away. So, so adorable. Yeah, it was awesome. I love those things, those those those groups are, are awesome. I'm glad you found them too. Okay, I'm gonna let you go. You've been on a long time. I apologize for keeping

Catherine Alvarez 1:19:00
you, yeah, well, it was an absolute pleasure. I'm glad

Scott Benner 1:19:02
you had a good time. Thank you.

A huge thanks to Dexcom for being longtime sponsors of the Juicebox podcast. Dexcom.com/juice box. Head over there. Now get started today. Omnipod five sponsored this episode of The Juicebox podcast. Learn more and get started today at omnipod.com/juicebox links in the show notes, links at Juicebox podcast.com, I'd like to thank ag one for sponsoring this episode of The Juicebox podcast and remind you that with your first order, you're going to get a free welcome kit, five free travel packs, and a year supply of vitamin D that's at AG one.com/juice box.

Are you starting to see patterns? But you can't. Quite make sense of them. You're like, Oh, if I Bolus here, this happens, but I don't know what to do. Should I put in a little less, a little more? If you're starting to have those thoughts, if you're starting to think this isn't going the way the doctor said it would, I think I see something here, but I can't be sure. Once you're having those thoughts, you're ready for the diabetes Pro Tip series from the Juicebox podcast. It begins at Episode 1000 you can also find it at Juicebox podcast.com up in the menu, and you can find a list in the private Facebook group. Just check right under the featured tab at the top, it'll show you lists of a ton of stuff, including the Pro Tip series, which runs from episode 1000 to 1025 okay, well, here we are at the end of the episode. You're still with me. Thank you. I really do appreciate that. What else could you do for me? Uh, why don't you tell a friend about the show or leave a five star review? Maybe you could make sure you're following or subscribed in your podcast app, go to YouTube and follow me or Instagram. Tik, Tok, oh gosh, here's one. Make sure you're following the podcast in the private Facebook group as well as the public Facebook page you don't want to miss. Please do not know about the private group. You have to join the private group as of this recording, it has 51,000 members in it. They're active, talking about diabetes, whatever you need to know. There's a conversation happening in there right now, and I'm there all the time. Tag me. I'll say hi. The episode you just heard was professionally edited by wrong way recording, wrong way, recording.com, you.