Medical Residents and Type 1 Diabetes: You Can’t Help, But Please Do No Harm

Posted on by Lynda Covello

Over the past 41 years of living with Type 1 Diabetes, I have met a lot of medical Residents: doctors who have completed their initial training, but are now doing further study on the road to becoming specialists – basically, newly-minted GPs with aspirations of greater things. Because my medical team has always been situated in or associated with teaching hospitals, Residents are part of the territory.

I try to maintain an open mind and a positive attitude whenever I am told that a Resident is studying with my team and asked if I would mind if he or she either sat in on my appointment, or saw me in advance of my meeting with my Endo. After all, if we don’t allow these people to deal with real patients while they are under the supervision of a specialist, how will they learn to do it properly? I would much rather meet them in the structured environment of their education than after they hang out their specialist shingle. So I have participated in the training of many, many Residents in the course of my many years of living with T1D.

Some of them have been wonderful. More of them have been arrogant, [...] continue the story

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Three A.M. Thoughts: ‘Doctor’s Orders’

Posted on by Lynda Covello

It is a cultural artifact that we regard medical professionals as authority figures. We expect them to command us and we are expected to obey. Hence the phrase: ‘doctor’s orders’. This relationship does not work for Type 1 Diabetes. It infantilizes the patient, which is the worst possible outcome. A person living with Type 1 needs a team of professional health care providers (endocrinologists, opthamologists, general practitioners, nurses, dietitions, psychologists, social workers, diabetes educators) to help with management of the condition. But the patient needs to be the Captain of that team. Healthcare providers should be trusted advisors, not authority figures. Healthcare providers may have relevant and necessary training and expertise in the science of the condition. I say ‘may have’ because in my experience not every healthcare provider who purports to understand T1D actually does. And a little knowledge, as they say… Many conflate it with Type 2, and seem to think that all diabetes — and all diabetics — are the same. This is one of the things that irritates me the most. As far as I am concerned, Type 2 is a whole different medical condition that is not relevant to my life or my chronic medical condition. The [...] continue the story

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Lost in Transition

Posted on by Lynda Covello

I was diagnosed with T1D at the age of 14 and a half, just before I was about to start high school in the fall of 1973. I spent August 29th in a ketoacidotic coma and most of September in hospital recovering and learning how to give myself needles. There were no doctors in Thunder Bay at that time who had the necessary expertise to help me manage my condition, and the nurses, in my experience, were often dangerously misinformed.  It was rough going, and the attitude was:  try this and see, try that and see. Bring her to Emerg if she loses consciousness. There was no glucose self-monitoring, and the only way to find out what my BG was, was to go to the hospital and get it tested.  I did test my urine at home, which told me what my BG was several hours before. So it was kinda like crawling through a dark tunnel trying to figure out where I was going by the feel of the surfaces around me, never really knowing where I was or what was next. I was dangerously thin and the advice was to fatten me up by feeding me about 3500 calories [...] continue the story

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Coming Out

Posted on by Lynda Covello

So, after 40 years of following the first rule of T1D Club: Don’t talk about T1D, and disseminating the information that I live with this condition on a need-to-know basis only, this has been an emotionally challenging week for me.  ‘Coming out’ as a person living with T1D in a very public way, using my August 14 gig as a vehicle to end the secrecy and raise awareness feels terrifying. What will people think of me now? What will the reaction be?  The reason I went underground in the first place was to avoid dealing with people’s adverse reactions to finding out: The uneducated, unsophisticated, unsolicited and dangerous healthcare advice (“Don’t eat anything with gluten”; “Stop eating any carbohydrates”; “Take (choose one: garlic/vitamin E/Omega 3/ St. John’s Wort) supplements and you won’t need insulin”; “You aren’t allowed to have sugar, so I’m not going to give you that orange juice you just asked me for, even if you say you are having an insulin reaction”; and so on, ad nauseum); The fear and exclusion: (“Lynda can’t come to the sleepover because she might die in the night and spoil the party”; “I (teacher) can’t possibly take Lynda on the field trip; I have [...] continue the story

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