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closeDay by day: Juvenile diabetes can strike suddenly; a mother shares her experiences
Joanne Haffly
guest columnist
Fifteen thousand children are diagnosed each year with Diabetes Mellitus Type 1, better known as Juvenile Diabetes, according to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. It usually comes on suddenly when, for some yet unknown reason, the beta cells in the pancreas which produce insulin stop functioning.
Without insulin, the body can’t process glucose that’s created from the normal breakdown of foods. The glucose builds up in the body, which causes sugar to appear in urine as the body tries to eliminate it.
Organ damage can occur from long-term high blood sugars.
I asked my friend JoNell Turner, a mother of six children — two of whom have JD — to talk about her experiences with the disease.
Ben, 12, was diagnosed with diabetes three years ago. JoNell noticed he was wetting his bed regularly and knew it was a common symptom from her experiences with her older daughter, Elena, who also has JD.
“As Elena had been diagnosed at 7 via bed-wetting, I should have seen the signs, but I think I chose to not believe it,” JoNell said. “(My husband) Darren had been out of town for a few weeks, and so I attributed the bed-wetting to stress/missing his dad.”
Darren even asked if JoNell had checked Ben’s blood sugar level, but she clung to the thought that he missed his dad.
Scheduled to go out of town with her husband for a long-awaited weekend, JoNell said: “I couldn’t leave town with that hanging over my head, so I grabbed Elena’s meter and checked his blood sugar — 276. I looked at Ben and said, ‘Oh, Benny.’ He said, very calmly, ‘I have diabetes, don’t I?’ ”
In people without diabetes, blood sugars range between 70 and 120 milligrams per deciliter.
JoNell called their pediatrician, who advised them to go to Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital.
She called Darren, who said, “I knew it!”
Then: “You had to check today, didn’t you?”
“Ben was a trooper right from the start,” JoNell said. “He’d grown up watching Elena take care of her diabetes and already had a clue about the measuring of food and counting of carbs. He was able to poke his finger to check his blood sugar from day one and accurately figured out his insulin doses.”
But life with Juvenile Diabetes has its ups and downs. The children must poke their fingers seven to 10 times a day, every day, and give themselves insulin injections.
JoNell has been dealing with it for more than 10 years and has seen a lot of changes.
“When Elena was diagnosed, she was given a set number of carbohydrates that she was allowed to eat per meal, and a set amount of insulin for each meal,” JoNell said. “If she didn’t eat all of her food, we had to scramble to get carbs in — make her drink juice or something — in order to prevent a crash. We were feeding insulin instead of feeding our child.”
Today, children are taught to check their blood sugar before eating, and then adjust their insulin dose, if needed, to the amount of carbs they are about to consume. Unfortunately, the same child can react differently to the same dose of insulin and food intake, so the balancing act is always there.
JoNell is never away from diabetes care. Overnight stays at friends’ houses only happen with trusted individuals who know how to handle emergencies that may arise.
Recently, Ben has had some problems with his blood sugar at night.
“Ben worries a lot about dying in his sleep,” JoNell said. “When I check him in the night, he almost always wakes up just enough to ask the number and to make me promise to check it again.
“It breaks my heart to think that my son fears sleep, that he worries that every kiss goodnight may be his last ... and it makes him sleepy and emotional during the day.”
I asked JoNell how she keeps her sanity.
“What little I have is protected by my faith in God and the knowledge that all things are in His control, my belief that suffering is not ‘bad,’ the community at childrenwithdiabetes.com and my friends who keep telling me I can do it when I think I cannot,” she said.
What to watch for
Symptoms of diabetes include: Frequent urination, increased thirst, extreme hunger, unexplained weight loss, extreme weakness and fatigue, urinating at night (nocturnal enuresis), blurred vision, numbness or tingling in the hands or feet, heavy or labored breathing, drowsiness or lethargy, fruity odor on the breath.
For more information, visit www.jdrf.org or www.childrenwithdiabetes.com.