My story: Rock and type 1 diabetes

Receiving a type 1 diabetes diagnosis is not fun by anyone’s account, but it can get much worse if it goes unmanaged. Rock explains the highs and lows of the condition and how medicine and technology have come together to make life easier.

Transcript

00:00

Having uncontrolled diabetes really sucks. But you have to take care of it because uncontrolled diabetes can be catastrophic.

00:06

[UPBEAT MUSIC] I was diagnosed two weeks after my second birthday with type I

00:12

diabetes. I never knew anything different. I remember I was very young, two, three years old, getting stuck with a much larger, more painful needle

00:20

than there are now. In the first couple years of college, I had a really big slip up a couple times. And I actually went into DKA.

00:28

I was put in the hospital overnight with an ICU-- with an insulin drip. I was excessively dehydrated.

00:35

With ketoacidosis, the big thing is you become dehydrated. Your insulin that you take doesn't work if your body's dehydrated.

00:42

Type I is an autoimmune disease. So no one really knows why or what causes it. Sometimes it's a traumatic event.

00:49

Sometimes it's stress related. Being two, I don't know of any traumatic events. I didn't have a lot of stress at that point. So it was hard to really pinpoint why or what caused it.

00:58

I've grown up with it, so it's never affected me. It's never slowed me down, either. There was a lot of technology advances

01:04

in the last several years. I've gotten really lucky and I'm actually on a pump which has got the closed-loop system, where I have a sensor that--

01:13

and that transmits to my pumps. So that's why the pump, for me, was such a great advancement, because it gives me just a continuous stream, almost

01:19

to replicate a pancreas, which is what your regular pancreas would do if it was producing insulin correctly. Diabetes it's just-- it's there for the long term.

01:27

It's there for now. Hopefully, they're going to find a cure, but until they find a cure, there's nothing I can do to fight it.