Was anyone from your Family diagnosed with Diabetes? Take a Read, Comment on the Blog to show your Support and Share if you can Relate.
As an unwilling member of the diabetes community, I thought now would be a good time to lend my voice to the few things about this brutal lifestyle disease I would like to make people aware of. They are, in no particular order of importance as follows:
Know the signs! Know if your child is SUFFERING– Sweet smelling breath Unexplained weight loss.
- Frequent urination
- Fatigue
- Extreme thirst
- Rapid breathing
- Increased bed wetting
- Nausea and vomiting
- Grumpiness and irritability
If your child seems unwell and presents any of these symptoms, ask your doctor to do a blood sugar test. It is painless, takes about 10 seconds and could save their life.
Recognize The Symptoms of a Low Blood Sugar
Whether you know a diabetic personally or not, knowing the signs of a low blood sugar could potentially be life-saving should you come across one of the millions of people who have type 1 experiencing this dangerous side effect of insulin.
For a diabetic, a low blood sugar feels like blurred vision, extreme hunger and slight nausea, fast heart rate and anxiety, dizziness, and weakness.
For an observing outsider this may look like: glazed over eyes, slurred speech, uncharacteristic irritability, shaking hands, confusion.
If you come across a diabetic in the middle of a low, offer a rapid-acting sugar and stay with them until the episode passes. Of course, if they are losing consciousness or refuse treatment be sure to seek immediate emergency help.
This disease is relentless.
People will often remark on how healthy Ella seems. The only reason she seems healthy is that of the 24/7 monitoring of this invisible thing that threatens to kill her every day. The unseen insulin regime, round the clock testing, the miscalculated mealtimes, the frightening middle of the night lows that are caught just in time…these things must always be her reality. They are the high price she pays for a measure of wellness. There’s not a morning we wake up where keeping her alive is not the task of most precedence. I’ve come to dislike those cutesy t-shirts and memes that say something like, “to do list: keep the little people alive.” Because for parents who live under the daily shadow of the immense responsibility of managing their child’s disease, it actually is on our to-do list in a way that doesn’t seem very funny.
There are a lot of myths swirling around Type 1 diabetes. It is an often misunderstood disease, and with it on the rise – I had one of Ella’s nurses refer to it as an ‘epidemic’ – it seems prudent to raise awareness concerning it. As a mother, my biggest hope is that every parent would know the early signs to look for. I would never want them to need to say, “if only we had known!” And so this is my contribution in adding to the voice of those in this community who desperately want to tell you what you need to know.
