England centre Slade discovered he had diabetes by accident when he was 18.
A month before starting his professional career with the Exeter Chiefs, he and his school friends were messing around testing their sugar levels on a friend’s blood testing kit.
His result was “pretty high” and the next day it was “even higher” so his parents took him to the doctors, who told him ‘you’re about to develop diabetes’.”
His first thought was, “Can I still play?” The doctor’s answer was “yes”.
“As soon as I heard that, I said I’m never going to let it stop me doing what I want to do,” he said.
“And that’s the message I’ve tried to spread to people. It doesn’t affect how much weight you can lift, how fast you can run, how fit you are, as long as your blood sugars are in the right zone.”
Getting them there, though, is no easy task.
The 32-year-old wears a glucose monitoring device on his arm which is connected to his phone and watch, sending him constant updates and alerting him to signs of a sugar high or low.
“I have to plan how much I need to inject or what I’m going to be doing when I get to training,” he said. “I’m figuring out how much carbohydrate I’m going to have for breakfast and how much I need to inject because it’s sort of a ratio you work out.”
Then throughout the whole day he thinks about questions like ‘what time of day is it?’, ‘how cold is it?’ and ‘how are your stress levels?’ because these factors can all affect his levels.
He found that on match days, adrenaline was sending his levels “through the roof” by half-time so he now injects insulin just before the match and at half-time.
“It’s helped a lot because the adrenaline spikes your blood sugar levels,” he said. “It affects the way you think, how you feel, your fatigue levels. So being able to control blood sugars is really important on game day.”
Slade is passionate about raising awareness to help with early detection and addressing what he terms the condition’s “scary” stigmas and confusion with type 2 diabetes, which is largely seen as linked to lifestyle.
“The majority of people I speak to just assume that it’s because I ate too many sweets when I was a kid or had a bad diet growing up,” he said.
“That’s so far away from what it actually is. It’s autoimmune, you can’t control it. Anyone can get it, any time.”
