‘Sugar control is not just about eating right and taking insulin’

NEW DELHI: Apoorva Gomber was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes just after her Class 10th Board Exams. She was 16.

“Though I ate a lot, I lost nearly 10 kgs in a few weeks and peed a lot. And though I was always top of my class, I flunked physics,” she recalls.

Her parents, also doctors, got her blood glucose levels tested. Her blood sugar level was 750mg/dL, against a normal of 72-108 mg/dL.

“It came as a shock and I went through depression before accepting this big life change with support from my friends in the UK and the US, who put me in touch with other type-I diabetics,” said Dr Gomber, who now runs a support group for type-I diabetics that meets every month. Dr Gomber tracks her diet, blood sugar levels, and insulin intake meticulously, but is unable to bring her HbA1c – a test to measure glucose level over the past three months – to normal. “It’s not always about just eating right and taking tinsulin on time. I even started doing yoga, but with the long nights during my MBBS, I began struggling with glucose control and ended up in the hospital emergency with keto-acidosis (a serious complication of diabetes where the body produces excess blood acids),” she said. What helped was using an insulin pump to continuously deliver insulin. “The pump gives me a lot of freedom. With the insulin injection, I had to have my lunch at one o’clock, but now I can adjust the insulin level on the pump and eat an hour or two earlier or later,” she said.