My 7-year-old son (6 years old at diagnosis) doesn't tell the story well, so I have to tell it in more detail than is probably necessary.
Three or four months before diagnosis (June), he started wetting the bed just about every night. He was crying a lot in school, getting alternately angry and really tired, complained of seeing double, and had fallen in with a bad group of friends, so we thought it was something emotional or developmental...or just stress. We just figured he'd grow out of it eventually. We also took him to the eye doctor and spent a LOT of time in the school counselor's office. He ended up taking a whole lot of tests at school: hearing, vision, speech comprehension, IQ...but he was fine where all those things went. The counselors were stumped. Our next trip was going to be to a therapist to have him evaluated for ADD/ADHD, but I didn't think that was the problem.
In early June we went to visit my parents. On the plane ride over, it seemed like he was asking for water ever 15-20 minutes...just thirsty ALL THE TIME. I thought he was just looking for excuses to press the "Call" button. From my parents' house we took a week-long road trip and every time he fell asleep in the car he would wet the seat, so we had to put a waterproof sheet under him and bring lots of extra clothes. He also kept drinking bottles and bottles of water with those one-shot mixes...it was making me mad because we either had to stop every 20-30 minutes for him to pee (and he peed on a lot of trees at off-ramps without bathrooms!) or else we had to change his clothes AGAIN. I kept getting on him not to drink so much, poor guy. Also makes me shudder to think of the junk food he was eating on the way down, fast food, chips, Gatorade... I remember Skyping my husband and telling him that we should get the whole family screened for diabetes when we get back to my parents' house, since I have diabetes on both sides and was gestational diabetic myself.
Anyway, once we got back from the road trip, we were all exhausted, and he just didn't want to do anything but lie on the couch and sleep and watch TV. He also was eating much, and was thirsty but didn't really have the energy to drink much. The night of the third day he started breathing heavier, as if he'd been stair-stepping, although he hadn't been moving around much at all and we were just playing a board game.
The next day he was feeling so beat that he didn't want to go shopping, which he usually likes to do because at Grandma's house that usually means he'll get a toy. Instead he stayed home with Grandma, a type 2 diabetic. He was so out of energy that he couldn't walk the whole way across the house and finally just lay down on the floor. He was breathing pretty heavy by then. My mom got worried so she lay down next to him. (Naturally we didn't have cell phones with us.) He threw up once but didn't have the energy to move so my mom moved him. He threw up again and my mom didn't know what to do, but she checked his blood sugar anyway -- just in case -- and it was something like 386. He told my mom that he didn't want to breathe anymore because it was too hard.
By the time I got back he was unconscious -- my mom thought he was just sleeping but she was still concerned about his breathing. I came in to check on him and his breathing was abnormally labored and his lips were bluish. I called the Blue Cross-Blue Shield hotline and let the nurse hear his breathing -- she said to call 911 immediately. My parents live in the sticks, with a volunteer EMS team that would have to be recalled, which would mean lots of waiting...so instead we all hopped in the car and took off toward the hospital, which was 26 miles away. About a mile from my parents house we thought we'd just go directly to the fire station and hopefully get an ambulance and maybe something to help my son breathe easier. They did the best they could but his symptoms matched flu, pneumonia, or appendicitis (???).
That ride to the Emergency Room was the longest of my life. I remember they turned the siren on, but I never heard it because I was listening to the EMS team trying to keep my son awake. The firefighter driving the ambulance was really nice, trying to keep me calm.
In the emergency room I had to sit out in the waiting room while they figured out what was going on. Because their ER wasn’t equipped for pediatric care, they got in touch with a children’s hospital about 1 ½ hours away. The doctors there apparently immediately diagnosed my son’s diabetes and dispatched a helicopter. There wasn’t room for me in the helicopter, there was a storm rolling in, and there had been some helicopter accidents recently, so I was understandably a little freaked out when they rolled him out onto the roof and into the helicopter.
After another ungodly long car ride, we got to the children’s hospital. My son had a tube in his nose as well and what looked like a forest of IVs and a couple of huge syringes on pumps were somehow connected to him. The young doctor on duty started telling us about potassium levels and blood glucose levels, then about the possibility of brain and/or organ damage and the possibility of the need to drill a hole in his skull to do…something. I just couldn’t believe he was still talking.
The next morning my son woke up and gave us the double thumbs-up (he was still intubated and couldn’t talk). Over the next couple of days my husband and I talked with doctors, dieticians, nutritionists, social workers, juvenile diabetes nurses, and of course an endocrinologist. We all – including my daughter - learned to check his blood glucose level and give shots. After checking in on Sunday night, we took him home on Thursday at lunchtime.
When I read what people went through 10 or even 20 years ago, I’m amazed at how much progress there’s been. One of the doctors said she expected to see a cure for diabetes within my son’s lifetime, at least, and a couple of weeks ago I read about a treatment that may be able to prevent or even reverse Type 1 diabetes (http://www.jdrf.org/index.cfm?page_id=111149).