Additional News on Cutler’s Struggle With Diabetes

I dug up some additional news on what Jay Cutler has been going through since last season before it was discovered he has Type I Diabetes.  These are tidbits from an AP article I found on the Boston Herald of all places.  Jay says that he had all the classic signs of diabetes and ignored them: unexplained weight loss, frequent urination, constant thirst, lack of energy.  He had no family history of the disease so never thought it was diabetes.  He started to notice something different last season, but couldn’t put his finger on it.

“I had no energy,” the Denver Broncos’ third-year quarterback said Friday. “We thought it might be stress and the grind of going through a whole season. But once I got back here and started working out again, I just wasn’t making any improvement. I wasn’t getting any stronger. I was still losing weight.”

He couldn’t pinpoint the the problem until he was given the required blood test for the team’s offseason strength and conditioning program.  The test revealed that his blood sugars were 5 times higher than normal.  This prompted a meeting with doctors last month and they informed him that was in fact an insulin dependent diabetic.  He never was worried about his career through the process.

“No. That’s the first thing they said to me: ’It’s going to affect your lifestyle a little bit, but you’ll be able to continue to play football,’” Cutler said. “I’m not the first athlete to get diabetes and I won’t be the last.”

Cutler will have to monitor his sugar levels throughout a game drinking Gatorade if they drop too low or getting a shot of insulin if they go too high.  I’ve also seen it posted that adrenaline becomes a factor to deal with because it can send your levels crazy with the intensity of playing a sport.  Jay has put back on nearly 20 pounds since losing all the weight last season and says he is feeling much better since going on insulin.

“I’ve felt great. I’ve felt 100 times better,” he said. “Just a difference now and four, five weeks ago is tremendous. It’s hard to explain what you feel like when your levels are at 400, 500, it’s different. You don’t have any energy, you don’t really want to do anything, you sleep a lot. It’s tough to deal with.”

The articles states that there was a noticeable drop in arm strength the final five weeks of the season.  It also affected his offseason workout program with Tony Scheffler and Brandon Marshall.  He said going into the weight room he couldn’t lift as much as before and he couldn’t put muscle weight back on no matter how hard he worked out.  The workouts exhausted Cutler, there were mornings after wards where he could barely make it out of bed.

I’m not going to blame it on that, but thinking back, there were some throws that didn’t have a lot on them,” Cutler said. “I was able to go out and perform, I just wasn’t that energetic. I was tired. After the games, I was completely wiped out. Some games I didn’t do a whole lot. There was something wrong.”

“They would ask me what was up and I would say, ’I don’t know. I’m just so tired,’” Cutler recalled. When he went back to campus to visit friends at Vanderbilt, they, too, wondered what was wrong: “I was pale, I was skinny, I couldn’t run. It was pretty dramatic.”

The quarterback has seen a complete turn in how he feels since being diagnosed.  He can workout harder than in the past, feels better on the field with more energy.  Jay knows it will be a struggle to deal with the disease, and will now have monitor his diet like a hawk.

This could be a big change in how Jay progresses now that he has tackled this obstacle.  I think I speak for everyone at Broncotalk saying here’s hoping he can bring his game to the next level now that this problem is for the better part behind him.