Forty-four years of living with Type 1 Diabetes.
It started with large syringes and a strict diet: no sugar, low fat. Food was framed less as nourishment and more as calculation and restriction. There was no way to measure glucose directly; only urine tests were available. You learned to interpret your body through delay and approximation. In that space of uncertainty and control, an eating disorder developed. Almost inevitably, as food became both threat and measurement tool.
Then blood glucose testing became possible. A small revolution. I still remember thinking: wow, twenty seconds, that’s incredibly fast! And with each passing year, the devices became faster, smaller, and demanded less blood. What once felt invasive slowly became routine.
Years of multiple daily injections followed. Structured, demanding, repetitive. Life organized itself around insulin doses, timing, correction factors, and constant anticipation. Eventually came the insulin pump: a new kind of continuity. Less puncture, more attachment. It changed the texture of daily life, but not its underlying vigilance.
And then came continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). Brilliant. Suddenly there was a stream of data instead of scattered moments. Trends replaced guesses. Patterns became visible. It felt like seeing something that had always been partially hidden.
After that, the hybrid closed loop system arrived. And my HbA1c has never been this good. Objectively, it is a success story: more stability, more time in range, fewer extremes.
But something comes with it. The better the system becomes at showing everything, the harder it is to ever fully switch off. There is more continuous mental load, not less. Not because control has failed, but because control has become constant. Every number is visible. Every fluctuation is accounted for. And with that visibility comes a quiet, ongoing responsibility that never quite leaves the background of the mind.