It was March, our family was getting ready for spring and a fun filled summer. Our three year old boy, who is a loving, solid, rough and tumble kid with a positive attitude about life we all should try and emulate, was going about life learning about Star Wars, building Legos and looking up to his older brother for how to make Batman jump higher on the Playstation 3. Basically, as parents, we were living the normal fun filled routine with a three year old.
One week, we noticed that our boy was asking to go to the bathroom a lot. Not the normal “a lot”, like any three year old boy, but 15 – 20 times a day “a lot.” We didn’t think much of it at first. We actually thought it must have been because he was finally tall enough to reach the stack of cups on the counter so he could help himself to water from the water cooler in our house. Over the following few days, we noticed he was drinking water from the water cooler a number of times per day that far exceeded what would be considered normal expectations of how much a three year old should drink, even more than a normal adult would drink. The next couple of nights, we heard him getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom to get a drink of water. Two nights in a row, his Pull-ups actually exploded because he had filled them to capacity. We tried limiting his water intake, but he kept saying how thirsty he was.
Like any parent today in search of some information on their child, I turned to Google. I Googled “thirsty three year old”. Many of the search results discussed how we should stop giving him sugary juice or how we should restrict his intake of liquids, but the common theme was that insatiable thirst was a potential sign of diabetes. My initial thought was, it can’t be diabetes, he has only been thirsty for a week. I couldn’t imagine that diabetes, a disease I now realize I didn’t really understand then, would just appear out nowhere.
I called my wife and told her what I found online. We agreed not to get worked up about it, but figured we would call the pediatrician to see if he could see us. We figured at least we could “check the box” that diabetes was not the issue. The good news was our doctor was working late that day and asked us to come in. Our son was in good spirits, and other than being thirsty once in a while and having to use the bathroom more often than usual, showed no other symptoms. He was a happy and apparently healthy kid. After 10 minutes at the pediatrician however, my plan to “check the box” that it was not diabetes didn’t work out as planned. The pediatrician came back after a quick urinalysis that indicated he had substantial amounts of sugar in his urine. He called the pediatric endocrinology unit at the regional hospital and they indicated that based on the results, they wanted us to come to the emergency room within two hours.
My first reaction of course was to down play the situation. That of course they must be, out of an abundance of caution, wanting to double check to make sure he did not have diabetes. The pediatrician however, was not downplaying the situation at all. He said he was there for us and hoped it was all ok, but that we should pack up some things and plan on being in the hospital at least for a couple days. After a call to my now completely stunned wife, we regrouped at home, found a sitter for our other boy, packed up some favorite stuffed animals and a change of clothes for all and headed to the emergency room at Jersey Shore Medical Center. After an initial glucose reading in the emergency room of 550, he was admitted and by midnight that night, the diagnosis was diabetes.
All of this occurred within the span of a week and our lives were about to change forever. We were stunned, angry, fearful and naïve about what it meant to have a diabetic child. That lack of knowledge made it scarier, and it was not until we learned more, that we began to be confident in our family’s ability to handle the challenge. We were also going to find out a lot about our tough little boy and about the caring nature of an older brother. The resiliency of little kids is amazing and often times life’s challenges provide gifts in unusual ways. Our little boy has handled this challenge in a way that would make any parent proud and is an inspiration to our family and for kids facing similar challenges in their lives. This is why we decided to start this website and blog. We hope that the information and stories provided here will help make it all a little less scary, and will provide you shortcuts to be able to begin leading a normal life with a happy, healthy diabetic child.