When I was almost 22 years old, I started losing weight rapidly, experiencing extreme thirst, and feeling tired all the time.  Unfortunately, these symptoms all came on gradually — not to mention I didn’t know the symptoms of diabetes, so it took a while for me to go the doctor and get diagnosed as diabetic.

The tiredness especially was a concern, though I didn’t realize at the time how tired I really was.  Looking back on it, I realize that I was sleeping 10 or more hours every night, and that even so, I’d get tired mid-day and need a nap.  All in all, I was probably sleeping 12 or more hours out of every 24 — and I was still tired.

There are a lot of things other than diabetes that can cause tiredness, so when we went to the doctor at first she didn’t know what it was.  We thought I might be hyperthyroid, which is where your thyroid produces way too much hormone, which speeds up your metabolism and causes you to lose weight like crazy.  My mom has hyperthyroid, or Graves’ disease, so we thought it sounded like a good guess.  Hyperthyroid is treated with a drug that slows thyroid production.

Another thing that can cause extreme tiredness like that is sleep apnea, a condition where you stop breathing in short little bursts throughout the night.  This disrupts your sleep patterns and prevents your body from getting restful sleep, which could have explained why during this period I generally went into REM sleep almost immediately — just as if I wasn’t getting any of it.  (Studies have shown that if you don’t get enough REM sleep over time, your body will start jumping right to that stage of sleep when you go to bed, as if to catch up.)  Sleep apnea is treated by using a sleep apnea machine, or a CPAP machine, which keeps your airway open by blowing a constant flow of air down your nose.  This is uncomfortable for some people, so BiPAP machines were developed, which use alternating pressures — a higher pressure for inhaling, and a lower one for exhaling.

In my case, the doctor really didn’t know right offhand what was wrong with me, so she ran a bunch of blood tests — which came back showing that my blood sugar was 727.  That is ridiculously high, so I was sent to the emergency room shortly after the results came back.  And that’s how I found out I had type 1 diabetes!

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