PeekabooNWA

Ella’s Tale

Posted on 01. Mar, 2009 by admin in Personal Stories

It was January 2nd, 2009, the start of a new year, and Ella’s second birthday was fast approaching. We spent the day driving back to Northwest Arkansas from Wisconsin where we had spent the last two weeks for our family Christmas vacation.

We could not understand why Ella would not eat that day. She had wet through her diaper, clothes and her car seat numerous times. Three exits from home, we pulled over at Hank’s furniture in Bentonville because Ella had thrown up. I was annoyed and wanted to get home. “What is wrong with her?” I kept thinking.

The remainder of the weekend, Ella refused to eat, slept quite often, and I changed sheets and diapers constantly. When she was awake, she screamed for juice or water.

I finally logged the symptoms into medical web sites online. They all popped up “Type 1 diabetes”. I tried other searches like kidney infections, or behavior problems. I did not want to believe that I might be right, but deep down I knew Mommy instincts are almost always right.

Sunday night, she could not sleep. Every two hours my little girl who had been sleeping through the night for over a year woke up every two hours screaming for more water. She was in a diaper, running through the kitchen at one a.m. My husband said, “I think she’s dying!” and he started to cry. A feeling of desperation, confusion and fear ran through our house. I noticed she had rapidly lost weight, she was disoriented, thirsty and peeing all the time by this point. I announced: “Everyone get clothes on, we are going to the E.R.!” God guided me the rest of the way.

When we got to the hospital Ella was very dehydrated, her blood sugar was 574, and she had ketoacidosis. Ketoacidosis (ke·to·ac·i·do·sis)
is caused by the increased production of ketone bodies, as in diabetic acidosis. In other words, her blood sugar levels were so high and had been for so long, that she was in real trouble of going into a diabetic coma or even death. Since she could not get the sugar into her cells for energy, her body started to break down fat and muscle for energy. The by-product of this is acetone; so her body was basically being poisoned.

The doctors wanted to air-lift her to Children’s in Little Rock. Unfortunately, there was freezing rain at flight elevations, so we waited for an ambulance transport. I rode with her, while her dad went home to pack and drive down to meet us.

She was in the PICU, Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, for 2 days and one night. She was recovering quickly once insulin had time to work in her body. We were soon settled into a regular room and the diabetes education began. We stayed Monday, January 5th through Friday, January 9th in the hospital with Ella. Sleep was sporadic, meals were even more so, but she was getting better. She even had her birthday in the hospital on Tuesday. The diabetes team of educators, volunteers, nurses, and doctors were wonderful. We left the hospital Friday feeling like we had a newborn with a whole new set of instructions.

Once home and somewhat settled, we had to get up every night around 2 am to check her blood sugar. We now have to do constant monitoring and a regimen of insulin injections to keep her regulated. She is a healthy, happy, normal 2-year-old in all other aspects of her life.

Diabetes is manageable and controllable with constant blood sugar monitoring and insulin doses. Right now there is no cure so we can only hope and support ongoing research. In fact, the debate is out on what causes T1 in the first place.

Ella was a perfectly normal child before all these symptoms just erupted in one terrible weekend. In some children there is a slow decline in the production of insulin from the islet cells in the pancreas. In others it can happen very rapidly, as I think it did with Ella. It is my understanding that T1 does happen to babies and toddlers, but it is more common to occur in older children or people that are into their teens and twenties. When a diagnosis does occur in a baby or toddler, as with Ella, it is usually an emergency because they cannot verbalize how they’ve been feeling. Subtle changes go undetected or passed off as, “Oh, she is just acting like a toddler”. When in fact, she could be feeling “high” and that symptom is meanness. The thirst could increase over time slowly as well. Some may think their child has an addiction to juice, when this could be a symptom of high blood sugar. We are just so thankful for all of good doctors and nurses that helped our family.

For more information please visit www.jdrf.com to help make a difference for all the children with diabetes.