She’s drinking water all the time, or pop and, of course, has to pee every five minutes. This is how it usually starts. By this time you are well on the way to joining the ranks of a parent of a child with Type 1 diabetes.
In our case, I’d suspected it might be diabetes when we were camping and my little sweetie would be in tears because we told her she couldn’t have a can of pop after supper. I was tired of getting awoken twice a night to walk down the road to the toilets with her and we figured maybe if she didn’t drink anything after supper, maybe it would take care of the situation. No, we were just torturing out child because we didn’t understand the dynamics of a metabolism out of whack.
See, the first thing that happens as insulin production slows down is the sugars we consume – and I’m talking about sugar from everything, before the health nazis begin to rant about white death, etc. The body makes sugar out of almost everything we eat and every cell in the body needs it to function. Honey, fruit, brown, white, potatoes, whole grain cereal…you name it, even meat, eventually turns into a combination of sugars and other compounds. Do I sound like I’ve had this discussion before? Since I was a teenager, my friend, and the rise of “use honey, it’s better for you because it’s not sugar” first hit the popular lexicon of catch phrases. Honey is sugar, brown sugar is sugar, dextrose is sugar, fructose is sugar. … sugar sugar sugar…. they metabolize at different rates, of course but that is a different discussion – something to hold in store for a later date…can you stand the suspense?
Anyway, when the glucose in the blood can’t get into the cells, it continues to circulate in the blood stream, thickening it – no, seriously, it really does, I know this because I’ve seen it for myself but that is later in the story – and making it harder to push through the system So, the brain is given the signal to take on more liquid to dilute the blood. This is the thirst. The kidneys are told to get the sugars out of the system by filtering it out and that is the urgent need to pee all the time.
That is where my sugar plum was when we were camping that summer – her blood getting thicker and the cells beginning to starve, slowly.
So ends the first chapter of the story. Here’s a link to a short list of symptoms of Type 1 from the JDRF international website. Symptoms There will be more about JDRF later but for now, read and learn and if that little voice in the back of your head is saying, gee, maybe that’s what is happening to my kid, don’t worry about being wrong, go to the doctor as soon as possible and be sure