Hi....I'm a 53 y/o female, living in Houston, TX. I don't have a history of diabetes in my family (as far as I know), but was diagnosed last year when I took a routine blood test for insurance purposes. My blood sugar was over 500 but at that time I didn't have a clue what that meant. I made an appointment with the doctor and got on Janumet, went to classes as the hospital about diet and starting testing my sugars. I was pretty good about the diet, exercise and meds but have gotten lax about it. My blood sugar continues to be in the 250 range. The Janumet gives me bad upset stomaches. Does anyone have any recommendations about others drugs? Does exercise really help? I just took another blood test (more insurance stuff and they called me today and said my A1C level was 24 (and it should be 5.8). I guess I'd better start paying attention, huh? THANKS....I look forward to any advice you have.
Hello and welcome to the forum.
Like the others, I'm sorry to say that I find your numbers little short of frightening.
I was diagnosed last year when I just about went into a diabetic keto-acidosis coma with a blood sugar of 400 and an HbA1c of 8.2%. To start with the hospital appeared to treat me as a Type 1, but as my numbers settled down, they swapped me over to treatment more appropriate to type 2. Even now, no-one has "officially" told me what they really consider me. I've since found that this approach is typical - the patient is just a number!
Like you, at the hospital, numbers were thrown about without explanation of what they meant. That I had to find out for myself.
Cutting carbohydrates, losing weight and keeping the exercise going is the correct strategy.
Whilst you have to listen to the doctor on medications, don't listen too hard when they tell you that a "balanced" diet needs to be low fat and high carbohydrate.
As has already been said, do look at
www.bloodsugar101.com It's a goldmine of useful information. The other trick is to talk to the members of this forum. We've all been through it and whilst we will "agree to differ" on some minor points, we're all pretty much agreed on the basic ground rules of the low carb strategy.
Good luck,
John