Mom-Of-2 Talks Details How Her Daughter, Cara Was Diagnosed With Diabetes At Age 5 And Lessons Learned From The Ordeal
A mom-of-2 has detailed what she and her family went through after her second child, Cara was diagnosed with diabetes at an early age.
Most parents worry about their children. Some concerns are exaggerated, particularly if youâre a nervous person, and tend to be fearful. In this mom’s case, she confessed to being both.
She said her first child, a son, caused her a great deal of needless anxiety simply because she had no idea how sturdy a child really is.
The mom, who shared her story on ScaryMommy site narrated that when Cara was about three, her growth rate slowed, and she was soon at the bottom of the growth curve. She added that she didnât really take it serious as there were petite people in her bloodline, on both sides of the family.
She said by the time Cara turned four, other changes came to light. She lost ground with vocabulary, became confused about the correct use of pronouns, occasionally confusing âsheâ with âhe.â She went on doing everything sheâd always done before, except with a bit less enthusiasm.
Read her story below…
”In the late winter of 2000, disturbing behavior changes were impossible to ignore. She was pale, irritable, and had less and less energy. Her lack of appetite was troubling. Her weight loss was the worst of all.
She ran a low-grade fever. At the age of five, she wet the bed. She also needed to go the bathroom more and more often. My husband and I put two and two together and suspected the onset of diabetes.
By the time we came to this awful realization, Cara was so sick that the pediatrician said getting her to the hospital in an ambulance would be faster than our driving her. We drove her anywayâIâm something of a demon behind the wheel when needs must.
She was given a bed in the emergency room, hooked up to two sets of IVâs, as the staff tried to correct her out-of-control blood sugar and the damage it was doing to her.
Later that night she went into a coma and was moved to the Intensive Care Unit. At the foot of her bed was a machine monitoring everything about her, and watching the machine was a nurse who couldnât leave the room until another came to relieve him.
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Sometime between three and four in the morning, Cara came out of the coma and announced that she needed to use the bathroom.
When I saw her in the morning, she was watching cartoons on the television, and having trouble using the plastic knife and fork to eat breakfast with, because her arms were taped to Styrofoam boards to keep all the IV tubing in place.
I helped her with her food, and she said she felt better. But this was a different child from the one admitted to the hospital the evening before. She was older, as if some chapter of her youth had come and gone in those few hours.
The world we entered then was one ruled by numbers: units of insulin per grams of carbohydrates; blood glucose levels, which had to be checked six to seven times a day, in a painful process of sticking one of Caraâs fingertips with an automatic needle.
It was a world of mixing this many units of long-acting insulin with this many of short-acting insulin in the same syringe; calculating when the last dose had been given; how long ago she had eaten; when she had to eat next, often when she wasnât even hungry.
It was also a world suffused with a dire blend of anxiety and terror. What if I mixed the syringe incorrectly? What if an overdose of insulin brought on a seizure?
What if I didnât catch the fact that her blood sugars were steadily rising, landing her in the hospital yet again? I had to talk myself down off of all these ledges on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day.
Cara was a good sport about the whole thing. She understood the necessity of sitting still for her âtummy pokes,â what we came to call her twice daily injections, although she despised them. She was less happy with the total invasion of her privacy in the form of her mother asking her every three hours to check her blood sugar.
Itâs one thing to realize your child is different from everyone elseâs, itâs another to have other parents drive that message home with their pitying looks that say so clearly, âThank God thatâs not my kid.â
Itâs one thing to take control of a situation that can tip sideways at any moment, itâs quite another to have a school district tell you they wonât let your child test her blood sugar at school because of the risk of contaminationâa position that resulted in our filing a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education and winning.
There are times when I despaired. What would Caraâs life be like if we didnât control her blood sugar well enough? Would she go blind by the time she was thirty? Would she lose kidney function? These nightmares kept me going, always revising her insulin and food regimen so that the numbers stayed in a healthy range.
Then we hit another road bump. Cara had a seizure when she was sixteen. I was able to bring her out of it by administering the emergency syringe full of glucose deep into her thigh muscle as Iâd been trained to do. Though terrifying, the event had no lasting effects.
Cara went off to college, majored in bio-chemistry, and got a job in a lab testing blood samples for a nationwide hemophilia study. She took over complete management of her condition, aided a great deal by using an insulin infusion pump which did away with the need for daily shots.
Sheâs twenty-three, and her control is excellent, so good that we donât fear for any of the terrible long-term complications that so many diabetics suffer from. But sheâs never really safe, not until a cure is found, and we all accept that many more years of research are needed before that becomes a reality.