Matthew and diabetes
Yesterday evening when we got home, there was a message on the answering machine from Megan at the hospital with Matthew. He’d been sick, supposidly with the same cold bug that I had, all week. So they finally decided to take him in to urgent care (since it was a saturday and the dr. office wasn’t open yet) and see if they could get some antibiotics for him or something. I don’t know how it all worked out, but they sent them to SW Washington medical center, where they did some tests and found out that his blood sugar was like 500 (instead of the normal 80-100). This coupled with them finding out he had lost TWENTY pounds in the last week, and his huge thirstyness/peeing constantly issues led them to believe that he probably had diabetes. They took him and mom in an ambulence over to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital to the ICU, where they gave him an IV and tried to get everything back to normal. I guess he was pretty lathargic and listless before this point because he had no energy.
The way Megan explained it is that Type 1 diabetes usually has a trigger event that brings the diabetes to the surface - for Matthew, it was the cold bug that had been pretty bad this time.
SOoooo, he’s still over there, they wanted to observe him over night, and then today, they’ll start teaching him how to give himself insulin and test his blood sugar and help him and mom learn what his diet will need to be like after this point. Poor kid, he’s very much like me in that he loves candy and sugary cereal and all that kinda stuff. And mom has pretty much let him have what he wanted, much more than the rest of us ever had because she’s been too busy over the last few years to cook healthy meals every day.
I’m really glad that Megan was here to help mom deal with this all. Although I’m pretty peturbed that they didn’t even try to figure out where dad was to call him. I found the number for Meg last night at 10 when we were talking (he was in Spokane and had been for 3 nights on that sales run), so hopefully they got ahold of him.
So I’m gonna be doing some research on Diabetes, just so I know more about it for myself, and hopefully I’ll be able to be knowledgable for Matthew.
Links found thusfar: American Diabetes Association, Children with Diabetes, Doernbecher’s info
Comments
Awww the poor thing! I’m sure happy they found out about it before he really got sick! Also, Beatriz has put together a really great page on Diabetes called the The Red Dot Project. It’s possible that you may find some additional resources over there that you haven’t stumbled across yet. Hope it helps!
Posted by: Catherine | January 13, 2002 11:22 AM
i hope that everything is okay with matthew!
i’m glad that they know what’s wrong with him. it’s gonna stink to not be able to eat a lot of sweets and stuff anymore, but he’s going to regain his energy, and he’ll be able to be a kid again.
*hugs*
Posted by: Cori | January 13, 2002 12:23 PM
Oh how scary for them! I’m glad they got an early diagnosis and really hope he’s feeling much better soon! Being a kid in the hospital just sucks...
Posted by: Robyn | January 13, 2002 12:42 PM