“As active as I want to be” - Dianne Mattiace uses Eversense CGM to thrive with T1D in her 70s Diabetes Connections | Type 1 Diabetes

This week, managing type 1 diabetes into your 70s is a bit of uncharted waters.. While thankfully more and more people are living long with T1D, that wasn’t always the case. I’m taking to Dianne Mattiace who is in her early 70s and was diagnosed as an adult, 30 years ago. She was the first person in the US to use the Eversense CGM when it was approved in 2018 and she’s still using it today. She answers your questions about this implantable CGM, why she’s stayed with it and what else she does to manage in retirement and beyond.  
This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider.
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Episode Transcription: 
Stacey Simms  0:00  
Diane Matisse. Thanks so much for joining me. Welcome to Diabetes Connections. It's great to talk to you.
Dianne Mattisse  0:04  
Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, let's
Stacey Simms  0:07  
jump right in. Let's start with your diagnosis story, because you were initially misdiagnosed, right? Take me through what happened? Yes,
Dianne Mattisse  0:15  
I was 40 years old. And my family history was type two diabetes. And they actually, as soon as you say that to a physician, and it was a general practitioner, it was not an endocrinologist, they automatically just put that label on me and said, you know, you're another type two in your family. It went on for about three months. And I actually was in the honeymoon phase, which now was not even recognized back then. But I, it was at the time where you're making enough insulin to keep you from going into DKA into ketoacidosis end up in a hospital, but not enough to make you feel well, so my blood sugar's were still rising, the medication they had me on wasn't working. And finally, after, I think about three or four months, well, during that time, I saw an endocrinologist. And he also was doing a lot of testing, even the C peptide, which is now a diagnosis tool wasn't able to be done where I lived, they had to send it out to a lab in Atlanta. So once that was kind of established, he admitted me, and started me on insulin and, you know, multiple injections per day,
Stacey Simms  1:35  
why did you What led you to actually seek out an endocrinologist?
Dianne Mattisse  1:39  
I was not feeling great with the general doctor treating me and I just kept getting worse and worse. And I was taking oral medications, they weren't all these designer meds that they have now for type twos. Back then it was couple pills. So I was I would call them increase the pills. And as I was increasing the pills over the three or four months, so was my blood sugar increasing, and I kept losing weight. And I'm thinking, well, this is a great diet I'm on I was eating better. But my blood sugar's were going into the three hundreds. So finally, I had been in the medical field before that, actually, it was in the medical field at the time, I was a controller for a nursing home company, but it didn't really have access to a lab or anything like that.