Salinas teacher receives artificial pancreas

Monterey resident Rebecca Bishop, 54, was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 1972. She is among the first people in the world to receive an artificial pancreas. The MiniMed 670G system is a wearable device that monitors blood sugar levels and delivers insulin as needed.

“I sometimes say I’m just going to ignore my diabetes for one day, but I never do because I always end up feeling so bad,” said Rebecca Bishop, a type 1 diabetes patient since age 9.

The swinging blood sugar levels are hard for her to ignore, and Bishop said sometimes she just wants to give up trying.

“I didn’t like to check my blood sugars before because I always knew it was: they were going to be in the 300s or in the 250s and you get into that resentment,” Bishop said.

But now, an innovative insulin pump is making type 1 diabetes more manageable for patients like Bishop.

“What we’ve had up to this point is a pump that if you get down to a low blood sugar, it will stop insulin delivery. We now have a pump that’s saying I’m predicting that you are going to be low, let me pull off on that insulin,” said diabetes educator Dana Armstrong.

The device monitors patients’ blood sugar 24/7 and injects them with the insulin doses they need, especially at night.

“We always worry about lows overnight because the patients are sleeping and they don’t feel the low blood sugar coming on,” said Dr. Nicolas Kissell with Salinas Valley Medical Clinic. “They get used to it and they start not feeling them. When their blood sugar dips down into the 20s and 30s, we always worry about seizures and passing out.”

Once in mass production, the pump could make life much easier for the more than one million people with the disease.

For Bishop, avoiding the extreme highs and lows of blood sugar gives that number on her pump a new meaning.

“Because the pump is helping me to manage my diabetes, I’m more involved, even more than ever. And so I like to check what my sugars are because it’s almost always a good number,” Bishop said.

PREVIOUS STORY: Monterey resident Rebecca Bishop, 54, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1972. She is among the first people in the world to receive an artificial pancreas. The MiniMed 670G system is a wearable device that monitors blood sugar levels and delivers insulin as needed.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which a person’s pancreas stops producing insulin. It can occur at any age, but diagnosis peaks among mid-teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Type 1 diabetes prevention is not yet known, but patients can manage the disease with insulin injections.

Nonetheless, insulin is not a cure and does not necessarily prevent the disease’s serious effects, which could include: kidney failure, blindness, nerve damage, heart attack and stroke, according to JDRF, a nonprofit that funds type 1 diabetes research.

CORRECTION: In the broadcast version of our story, the patient is described as being in her “late 40’s.” However, she is 54.