1251 days have passed since my daughter was diagnosed. I no longer know what it is like to go to bed, knowing for certain that my daughter will wake up in the morning. I DO know what it’s like to force feed sugar to her in the middle of the night, knowing that I am sacrificing her teeth to save her life.
Lily started wetting her bed on July 16th, 2010, a Friday. We took her to her pediatrician and told him what was wrong and he agreed that we should check a urine sample. He started asking us if she had been drinking an unusual amount of water lately, we said yes, but it was hard to tell, because it was the middle of summer, so EVERYONE was drinking more water at the time. Heck, we encouraged it so the kids didn’t overheat. She might have diabetes. Dr. Moore came in with a glucometer to do an AccuCheck, but the meter said “HI” instead of giving a number reading. He told me to hang on for a minute while he made a phone call.
Dr. Moore came back in and told me that he had been on the phone with the pediatrician in the Mott Children Hospital Emergency Room in Ann Arbor, to go right there and they would be expecting me. I remember saying “Oh, I’m going there now?”
“Yes. Mike, you don’t go home, you don’t go run errands or drop the boys off. You leave here. You go there. Now.”
That’s when it hit us that something very serious was going on.
We checked in at the ER desk and they got us back to redo an accucheck. It was 764, still the highest she has ever been. We didn’t know how scary a number like that could be, or how lucky we were. We were fast tracked for an admit, where she stayed for 4 days until we could get her blood sugars under control and the staff could educate us on how to take care of a diabetic child.
Jackson, MI
