My 17-year old son was diagnosed in December of last year. He had spent the summer with Drum Corps, and seemed fine, but after Thanksgiving we noticed that he had lost weight and was drinking water constantly (a habit we thought he had developed during the rigorous DCI training). I took him to the doctor, and they put him in ICU with a blood sugar of over 800. Fast forward to today - Completely insulin-dependent, he got his diabetes under control like a champ, and went to three Corps camps preparing for the summer tour. But after he started summer training last week (three drill sessions a day - two 3-hour ones and a 4-hour one), his pancreas decided to start working again. Having just spent six months being told low blood sugar could kill him, he was panicking at not being able to keep the level up enough to train, and meanwhile was completely off of all insulin, with BS levels from 150 down to 60. Every time he ate, the level would drop, and we were told different things by different doctors - His beta-cells are hyper-reactive to carbs and he won’t be able to control lows without constant small meals; his pancreas was stimulated to start working again by the strenuous activity and he should be fine until it slows down again; it’s impossible to tell what will happen next because his diabetes is now out of control and unpredictable. We don’t know what’s going on or what to expect, and he decided to not march this year until the “honeymoon phase” is over and things level out. Has anyone else experienced this type of reaction, and if so, how did you handle it? What can we expect?
Thanks for any information you can share with us!
hello,
blood sugar is tricky enough, when your body throws in some insulin it means more testing and more micro-management.
do you mean he is not taking any kind of insulin, at all, zero, and he’s still low? that’s important. I would get a second opinion on the “hyper active beta cell” explanation from an endo, because there are other reasons for being hypo while not taking insulin and those reasons need to be checked.
re-starting insulin production happens to most t1’s usually within the first month or so following treatment. call it whatever you want. the co-insulin usually tapers off after about a month to a year, then he’ll need to take all of his insulin by shot or pump. misdiagnosis is common, so that’s why an endo really needs to follow up after initial diagnosis.
if he is still taking some kinds of insulin, such as a basal insulin and shots after meals or one or the other only, he’ll need to adjust these insulin shots, sometime radically, during this time.
get a hold of an accessible CDE they can be super helpful and possible a good one might be someone who he can touch base with every couple days while things are “up in the air”.
regarding your question, my honeymoon was nice, I had to inject only a little insulin and no basal insulin and my control was almost perfect for months; so much so that I thought my diabetes was “going away” which made it very depressing when I needed more and more insulin afterward. this isn’t easy, diabetes is one of the only diseases where we have to be the doctor and adjustments are daily, sometimes hourly.
perhaps you can check in with your local JDRF chapter for additional support, you can go to the jdrf home page and put your zip code in for a reference. good luck.