Sean Busby was one of the international speakers brought to the conference, and in my opinion perfect as a role model for Diabetes Youth. You’ll see from the clip above that Sean was already a successful snowboarder at the age of 14 and was absolutely at the top of his game by the time he got to the age of 19. However he got increasingly sicker and sicker at that point in his life, and continued to struggle with intermittent bursts of uncontrollable vomiting. Alongside this, he lost shedloads of weight. It took him nine trips to the emergency room (A & E) for someone to finally pay attention to how sick he really was. It was at that point that he was diagnosed with diabetes.

Several things I found interesting about Sean’s talk:

• Sometimes I’m jealous of the U.S health system because if you’ve got medical insurance, you are entitled to an insulin pump, paid for by your insurance. I’ve never really thought about the downsides of the whole country being run on insurance though. Firstly, if you’re not lucky enough to have a job where you have it, or you can’t afford it (insurance). Secondly – the bureaucracy which surrounds things run by insurance people. In Sean’s case, he was diagnosed in Colorado. He was unbelievably ill at the time. But because his medical insurance was only valid within a 12 mile radius of his parents’ home in California, all the Colorado medical team could do was to stabilise him (which took 12 days) before he could be flown home to CA to be properly diagnosed and looked after.
• “Properly diagnosed” is a bit of a relative term, it turns out. Sean – already really debilitated and underweight – was mis-diagnosed with T2 diabetes. Get this – it was because he was 19 – and apparently 19 year olds are too old to get T1. This is only seven years ago – unbelievable!! He was put on Metformin and sent on his merry way. Not so merry though – he continued to be terribly ill, lose more weight and start to lose all of his snowboarding sponsors. He was highly depressed and ready to retire from snowboarding altogether.
• Finally, some of his snowboarding supporters urged him to go back to the doc and demand an explanation. When the hospital re-checked, they realised a terrible mistake had been made. Sean’s blood records had been swapped with someone else’s…. so when they were measuring all of the indicators which would detect T1 diabetes they were looking at someone’s records who didn’t have T1 – but they certainly weren’t Sean’s. He finally got the right diagnosis and went on insulin…. and thus he began his turnaround.
• Sean was inspired by the stories he read on the JDRF website – he recognised that he had been lucky growing up without T1 and that the kids who are quoted on there and who take their stories to parliament to get their voice heard have a lot more of a challenging time through childhood and doing sport than he ever did. This inspired him to set up his Riding on Insulin camps, which he has now done all over the world with T1 kids (again, see the video above).
• Sean hasn’t let his diabetes stop him from great achievement in sport, nor adventures around the world. He’s used a trial and error method in all conditions to see what effect those conditions have on his diabetes, and to fine tune and refine his insulin/diet and exercise. He advocates really getting to know your own diabetes and doing the same test, test, test and learn method to find what works best for you.
• My favourite story from Sean’s talk was when he was in Patagonia, hiking. He couldn’t get his diabetes equipment to work (because it was too cold) so he started singing simple songs/nursery rhymes backwards to himself. If he stumbled over the words or started stuttering he would know he was going low and treat it. Genius!