How were you diagnosed?

People with diabetes, I think people with type 1 often refer to a diaversary, you know, the actual date when you are diagnosed. And for a lot of people, particularly those diagnosed in childhood or adolescence, that is a very identifiable dramatic date. And, you know, which is quite literally that they were fine one day and then after the sudden onset of symptoms are less than fine and it often involves a hospital admission and people tend to overdramatize it and talk about being in DKA and so many minutes from death even. It wasn't like that for me, but I have got an identifiable date the 19th of December. So that's when I sort of publicly say that's my diversity because that's when the doctor first said to me the word diabetes. I'd actually had creeping signs through that autumn and when things come on gradually, you don't necessarily respond to them. You perhaps just put them down to something else, my most obvious creeping sign was thirst. There are lots of reasons to be thirsty and whenever I tell this story, I also think back of... you know, I can remember one occasion when I've been at a meeting in Manchester and I had to run for a train and I'd had lots of sandwiches and crisps for lunch and you just think of a salty meal and then you get out of breath. But you know, it was a train with no buffet on it about an hour, an hour train ride home and when I got back, I was really uncomfortably thirsty in a way that I've never experienced before but I just thought okay. Again, I didn't really take notice of it because when you're about 40, it's arguably quite welcome but I had noticed that my belt needed tightening one more notch and that varies a bit seasonally it varies depending what pair of trousers you're wearing and things like that but looking back it was actually as I was losing weight because weight loss is a potentially worrying thing anyway but it wasn't dramatic and nobody else noticed. So my diagnosis actually came to a head as a result of an illness. I had flu and it's still touch wood the only time I've actually had proper flu the sort that puts you in bed for a week and that was in the week a couple of weeks before Christmas as I say leading up to that date of the 19th and it was really that I got better a bit better one day and then then took a nosedive the day after that and I actually had a urinary infection and it was that that took me to the doctor and that that caused her to do a test and that that revealed very high blood sugar. She passed me on to her colleague at the GP practice not that day because it didn't have the appearance of an emergency and he at first assumed me to be type 2 And it wasn't until I had tried initially, he just said cut down on sugary foods. Then, and this was a couple of days later, I had done so, but that was a bit difficult to do because I have a famously unsweet tooth. He put me on some medication and again a couple of days elapsed and it got worse, not better and it was only at that point that he said well it might be type 1. At the time, I didn't really know much about it, I didn't really know the difference between type 1 and type 2 and I don't think many people do. I think we have to remember that all of this 1997 is just before Dr. Google. It's very hard to remember isn't it a world. 25 years ago, when it wasn't very easy to find out about anything that you didn't know much about you know you have to go to a library or buy a book. I imagine now, probably through that autumn, I would have been frantically Googling things like thirst and weight loss. And I think in no time, I'd have found the words diabetes. So it was a bit of a long journey. So, you know, it took me, shall I say, an autumn of creeping symptoms, an actual identifiable diagnosis date, but it was well into the new year. You know, it was sort of teens of January, I think, when somebody finally said, I think this might be type one and sent me off to hospital, but I was never admitted, nor was I ever seriously ill, nor did I ever miss any days off work after that week in bed with flu. So yeah, not very dramatic really.