@LoopingnTheLoup

My 90 Second Intro…

[Stolen from #DiabetesChat]

  1. What my name? Mary Murphy
  2. Where are you from? I’m a #WicklowGirl re-homed as a #DerryGirl now in Northern Ireland.
  3. What do you do in the real world? Data Nerd, Lingerie Engineer, Design Engineer, Problem Solver.
  4. When were you diagnosed with diabetes, and how old were you? 1997 aged 18. It was weeks into my first term studying for an MEng in Aeronautical Engineering in Queen’s University Belfast.
  5. What type of diabetes do you have? Type 1 Diabetes – though never had an auto antibody test!
  6. How do you manage your Type 1 Diabetes? I’ve built my #DIYAPS from the shoulders of giants in the #WeAreNotWaiting Community. I use #iAPS on an iPhone with a Libre 2 Sensor and Omnipod Eros – moving to Dash very soon!
  7. Am I hypo aware? Yes, thankfully.
  8. What are your hypo symptoms? It depends on the environment I’m in. Whether in bed at night where I wake in a cold sweat with my heart banging. Or nt being able to get to sleep with a low grade hypo lurking about without symptoms but holding me from sleeping. Early signs when talking are that I can’t get the words I want out of my mouth/brain. In general though, I get an inner feeling of disappearing, I feel like my blood vessels sort of tremble – because nobody can see the trembles. This moves to feeling doused in a cold sweat if I’ve missed the early signs and not treated when I’ve been sitting still for ages for instance and I move to do something suddenly. These are the ones I eat the kitchen empty to feel better as quickly as possible and then feel washed out and roller-coasting the rest of the day.
  9. What is your go-to hypo treatment? Again depends on the environment. I’ve rubbish will power so I won’t purposefully store sweets in the house for hypos only. They’ll just get chomped! So it’s cartons of OJ mainly, Glucose Gels & Glucose Tabs. By choice when I’m travelling, I’ll buy a bag of Haribo though! Fried eggs are just the best thing in the jelly world to me.
  10. What do you think is worse – feeling hypo or hyper? I’m in between, I think they’re both rubbish but I don’t minimise my life to manage away from just one.
  11. What is one thing you like about diabetes? The people. We may not even have ever met, but if you or I ever chatted, it would be like we’ve known each other a long while.
  12. What is the one thing you don’t like about diabetes? What I don’t like about Type 1 Diabetes is that there is no break.
  13. Do I love or hate the smell of insulin? I always thought I didn’t mind it but I accidentally broke a cartridge recently and the smell just wouldn’t go away for so long. It realised that it smells like diabetes to me. I’m not a lover of diabetes ergo I don’t love the smell of insulin.
  14. What do you enjoy most about being a Diabetes Advocate? I love that my tiny voice counts matters and can make a difference – right where I am at.