Hi.
I want to start this off with a warning. I am NOT a medical doctor, and I'm never going to be one. I am just one of probably millions of people who happens to have Impaired Glucose Tolerance. What makes me different?
I'm building a webpage about it.
Let's start off with who I am. I'm a 24 year-old American female. I live in Madison, Wisconsin. I just graduated from UW-Madison in May 2001 with a bachelor of science degree in physics, mathematics, and astrophysics. I have a job. I live my life.
And I have IGT.
How/why was I diagnosed with this? It's actually kind of a long story, most of which has little to do with this page. The short version of my epic is that the NP I saw last spring actually read through some of my old lab reports and records and decided that she wanted to run a whole list of tests. One of the tests was the ever-so-wonderful OGTT. I have the other numbers written down somewhere, but the only one that I distinctly recall is my 2-hour value of 173--right between "normal" and "diabetic". Go me.
The NP gave me my test results but didn't use the words "impaired glucose tolerance" at that time. In the next few weeks, I read all I could about the OGTT and discovered that my 2-hour value meant that I have IGT. From that point, I started reading the little I could find about IGT. When I asked the NP a few weeks later, "Does what I have have a name?" she confirmed my self-diagnosis and sent me off to see a dietician (more on her later).
I've only really known about this since May, but I've learned a bit, and this page is here for me to try to spread the word about IGT. It's not a bad thing, really. I mean, it's certainly not good, of course, but being diagnosed with IGT now is certainly better than being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes mellitus in 10 years, don't you think?
One of the things that irks me the most about my diagnosis is that I don't really meet the general phenotype for IGT. I'm younger. I'm not significantly overweight (well, that depends on whether or not you consider 5-10 pounds significant). There's not a huge genetic component. (Only my paternal grandmother and one of her brothers have had diabetes. Only 2 people out of my huge family). So why me?
I have no idea, and I don't plan on worrying about it. Really, what good would it do me anyway?
Last updated 12 Dec 2001.