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Sky’s the Limit
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Snowboarder Sean Busby’s first-place finishes prove type 1 can’t stop you from winning
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By John Mcintosh
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Diabetes Focus Fourth Quarter 2006
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SEAN BUSBY was 19 and about a third of the way through his first season of international snowboarding competition when he started feeling the onset of type 1 diabetes. Neither he, his coaches nor his health care professionals knew what was happening to him.
“I remember my first sickness occurring at the U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix in Park City, Utah, in December during the 2003–2004 season,” Sean recalls. “I was feeling so sick to my stomach I couldn’t eat. But it sort of passed for a while and then, when I occasionally felt like I had the flu or was just not feeling right, I attributed that to all the travel—my other teammates were also ill from traveling back and forth to Europe.
“Then in late March of 2004, the day after the U.S. Snowboarding Championships in Breckenridge, Colorado, I became very sick. I remember throwing up and having no control over what my body was doing. It was awful. The next day I was supposed to fly out from Denver to the Canadian National Championships to wrap up the North American season. I called my father back home in California and told him that I was too sick to go to Quebec. But the next day I felt a little better. So I figured it wasn’t anything serious. I ended up going to Quebec and finishing off the season.”
Sean was lucky the season didn’t finish him off. His ability to smooth out the rough spots that sometimes go along with type 1 was severely tested during the first six months after he developed the disease.
When he returned to Steamboat, CO, his symptoms hit him once again—but this time they didn’t leave. “I noticed that about two hours after every meal I ate—I started looking at the clock—I became very sick,” he says. “I tried to keep myself from throwing up but it didn’t work. When I look back, I know that’s when my blood sugars were hitting me. I was just afraid to eat because I knew that in two hours I would be getting sick.”
His stories of continuing misdiagnoses are staggering. Sean was sent home from the local hospital’s emergency room between six and eight times over a two-week period. The doctors kept telling him he had the flu. When they finally admitted him, it was for a diagnosis of pneumonia. After nine days they sent him back to California to his folks. His blood sugars were in the mid-200s. By the time he arrived at his parents’ home his weight had dropped from around 150 to 122—in less than a month.
“Back in California the doctors thought that I had type 2 diabetes, because of my age—19,” he says. Sean’s age seemed more significant for their diagnosis than the fact that 1) he was a professional athlete, 2) he was drinking gallons of grape juice every day, 3) he had blood sugars twice that of someone who does not have diabetes, and 4) he had lost nearly 30 pounds in less than a month.
“They put me on oral medications for a few months. There was no improvement. I was still throwing up after every meal, still losing weight, and I was just laying on my parents’ couch or their living room floor.
“At one point they even mixed up my blood tests. I got a call from a nurse saying that I definitely was not diabetic. Then more confusion—test results that were supposed to go to a specialist never made it there. It was unbelievable.”
Still feeling lousy, lacking a correct diagnosis with no doctors suggesting any remedies, Sean decided not to sit around any longer. He headed back to Steamboat to begin training again. “In the airport, right before my flight, I nearly passed out,” he says. “My luggage was taken off the plane and my parents took me to the hospital—this time to University of California, Irvine, which is where they now have the UCI Joslin Diabetes Center. That’s where I was given the correct diagnosis by Dr. Ping Wang. Finally, I understood why I was so tired all the time, why I slept through alarm clocks, why I was sad and thirsty all the time, all that stuff. Then I knew.”
Sean’s first insulin injection came on his mother’s birthday, July 3, 2004, about eight months after he started feeling bad: “After that first shot, life came right back to me. I could feel the nutrition flowing back into my cells. At that point I started learning how to be a whole new person.” Sean learned everything he could about diabetes, and about how to come to terms emotionally with his new life companion. He then had to reestablish himself as a professional snowboard racer. “Coming back after my diagnosis was basically trial and error,” he recalls. “I started off by going to the local YMCA just to learn how my body would interact with exercise. I was so underweight and I looked so malnourished. I would go to the gym when it opened, usually at about five or five-thirty, and I would stay there a few hours, until about eight or nine.
I would constantly check my blood sugars and my heart rate because I had no idea how my ‘new’ body was going to react to exercise.
“Recording stuff into my logbook helped me fine-tune my blood glucose along the way. Being on injections gave me a lot of control, but I did experience the lows. Fortunately my sister—she’d had gestational diabetes—was also able to help me out in spotting those lows.
“In the logbook, I would write down the type of exercise I was doing and how many glucose tabs or how much honey I would give myself while exercising. I also started working out in the pool trying to build up my muscles. A lot of my muscles had atrophied during the time I was misdiagnosed. I made it a goal to compete in the December 2004 U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix in Breckenridge, Colorado—the event where I’d first started feeling sick the year before.
“Before the season started, I showed up at a competition just to watch, and none of my teammates or my coaches recognized me. I looked like a skeleton. Very, very, thin. I remember that whole summer I had to wear sweatpants because none of my clothes fit.
But I had my goal in sight.
“Not many people thought I’d be competing in snowboarding for at least another year, but I wanted to prove them wrong. So I continued to go to the gym every day and kept learning more about my new body. I have become very attuned to my body and can recognize what’s really going on inside as far as what kinds of foods I put in to it and the different types of fuels those nutrients give my body. I use that to my advantage in competition.”
The road back was made more difficult because Sean lost many of his sponsors—so necessary to finance the life of an athlete. “Sponsors dropped me during the time that I was chronically ill and still wasn’t diagnosed. It was very depressing. It’s been a bumpy ride.” Fortunately, Sean has been able to keep several sponsors.
“What kept me snowboarding was going to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Web site and reading about the ‘Children’s Congress’ that was going on at the time. They had all these stories about four- and seven-year-old kids and what they’ve gone through and what they’re going through today—not eating cake at a birthday party and having their parents come over on a sleepover to test their blood sugars. Because of them I wanted to stay involved in snowboarding. I want to become an advocate for juvenile diabetes. If it wasn’t for them, I don’t think I’d be involved with snowboarding right now. They gave me that second chance of hope and inspiration, and I want to be there for them and give the same thing back to them that they gave me.”
Sean has had eight World Cup firsts and several overall top-three world rankings in slalom, giant slalom and supergiant slalom. Look for him in the 2010 and 2014 Olympics. He seems to have things under control, and he’s faster, tighter and smoother than he’s ever been.
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