Type 1 diabetes: ‘It is sometimes very hard to accept’

Leah Cheung, a 22-year-old beautician, has been living with type 1 diabetes since her diagnosis at the age of 12. "I remember drinking literally bucketloads of milk and water and sugary drinks and going to the toilet all the time and exhausted."

In her case there was a strong family history, so her mother was alert to the symptoms. “My granny, my grandad, my three great aunties, my auntie, my uncle and my cousin all had diabetes. So it was kind of written in the stars,” says Leah, who lives outside Gorey, Co Wexford.

A blood test at the GP’s showed her sugar levels were high and she was sent straight to Wexford General Hospital, where she spent about a week “beside somebody who snored every single night”. She felt very unwell at the time of diagnosis, close to passing out and “my ketones were very high as well”.

Leah recalls hospital staff telling her to draw a noughts and crosses grid on her leg and to rotate her injections around the different boxes, to make sure she wasn’t injecting in the same place every day.

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“I learned very quickly to do it myself.” But even now “I still flinch”, she says when every couple of days she has to switch the entry site of the insulin pump, which she has been using since about age 14 and finds works really well.

“It’s like a pancreas outside my body,” she explains. However, self-care was sometimes a challenge during her teenage years. After nights out, readings on her insulin pump could be a bit off due to the effect of alcohol, she says.

Also, just accepting that she had the condition was sometimes difficult. “All your friends, they’re asking you ‘Is it sore?’ ‘I’d hate to have that’ and saying [misguidedly] ‘You’re not fat, how come you have it?’ I think only in recent years I have started to accept it is what it is.”

What was very helpful to her were local camps organised for children with diabetes by one of the specialist nurses at the Wexford hospital. “They were great fun.”

Having type 1 diabetes doesn’t stop Leah doing her favourite activities such as horse-riding and long walks, “as long as I have food there, just in case, and that I test myself”. She could never do intermittent fasting as she really has to “graze” to balance her carbohydrate intake with the rate she’s burning energy.

During the recent heatwave, she found she was struggling with fluctuating blood sugar levels. “I wasn’t the only one, my granny was the same. The heat is something to be wary of.” She has to be extra careful on sun holidays and can’t go into saunas because her blood sugar drops very quickly.

However, Leah would assure newly diagnosed children and their parents that this condition needn't stop them doing anything they want to do. But initially acceptance can be difficult and she suggests they try to find other people living with diabetes, through social media or Diabetes Ireland (diabetes.ie) for peer support.

To parents she says: “Don’t put too much pressure on your child because pressure can really backfire. If your parent is constantly saying ‘You have to do this’ . . . we know we have to do it, but it is sometimes very hard to accept this is our new reality.”

Let them experiment with different types of food, she adds, and they’ll find what works for them.

Read: How do I spot if my child has diabetes?