Before I got married and then again before my husband and I decided to try to have a child, I talked to my endocrinologists (two different ones) and both said that the risk of me having a child with type 1 were just slightly more than the general public. This was in the mid to late 90's and just at the start of the Internet as we now know it: finding information was extremely difficult.
Those discussions made what happened in the summer of 2004 extremely shocking to me. We moved to a new city at the end of July, just a week after our oldest daughter turned four. Our old house had not sold yet, and we were in the starting stages of building a new home in our new city, so we rented a two bedroom apartment. The girls (youngest was two and a half) started at a new daycare the first week of August and both my husband and I started new full time jobs.
After the first week of August, we noticed Ellie started waking up in the middle of the night asking for water. We wrote it off to sharing a small room with her sister and being in a completely new environment. Over the next two weeks, the waking up in the middle of the night turned into waking up multiple times per night. She developed a habit and got hysterical when we refused to give her water.
The weekend of August 28th, we went up to my parents house to celebrate my 30th birthday coming up that week. We had lunch on the deck looking over White Lake and I mentioned in passing Ellie waking up asking for water. One of my mom's friends was really concerned, but I assured them that it was soooo unlikely to be diabetes, that was just silly. She had just a slightly higher risk than their grand-daughter. I told my mom and her friend we would be sure to mention it to Ellie's new pediatrician at her first visit there for her 4-year appointment.
We setup a dinner date to meet my husband's father to celebrate my birthday at 5:30pm on Monday night. Ellie had her appointment at 4:30pm that afternoon. The entire family went to the appointment to meet our new pediatrician. I mentioned to the nurse the extreme thirst and they had Ellie urinate into a cup and then we waited for the doctor. About 15 minutes later, there was a knock on the door and a man I had never met said to us: "I'm sorry, there is glucose in her urine. Your daughter has type 1 diabetes." The first words our pediatrician ever said to us and my world crumbled.
We spent that night in the hospital, and the next day, August 31st in a pediatric endocrinologist clinic. It was my 30th birthday.
This group is for those people out there, living with type 1 who lived through having their child diagnosed.