"Do not fear, for I am with you;
do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you;
I will uphold you with my righteous right hand."
Isaiah 41:10
On May 30th, 2012, I found my 13- year- old son, Barret, unresponsive in the floor of his bedroom. With blood sugars over 1,600 (100 is a normal range), his organs had shut down, causing him to slip into a coma. For just a brief instant, I wasn't sure if he was alive.
Once I noticed that he was still breathing, very short, heavy breaths, I began to shake him and try to wake him. His body was completely limp. I believe that the initial fear I felt, when I wasn't sure if he was alive, sent me into a state of shock. I couldn't really think straight or comprehend what was happening. I remember thinking that I needed to get him to the doctor, but I didn't know how I was going to get him there if I couldn't get him to wake up.
What I did next will forever be the comic relief to this otherwise horrifying moment in time. In fact, Barret loves to tell people that I tried to kill him. I picked up the Gatorade that he had been drinking the night before and attempted to get him to take a sip. I may have even poured a little in his mouth, but of course that story has now been greatly exaggerated! As you might imagine, pouring Gatorade into the mouth of someone with blood sugars over 1,600 is a very bad idea. However, in my defense, not only was I in shock, Diabetes was the furthest thing from my mind.
It wasn't until Memorial Day, two days prior to this incident, that I first noticed something was wrong with Barret. We had been at the pool that day, and when he took his shirt off to go in for a swim, we were all alarmed by what we saw. I knew that he had slimmed up a good bit since the summer before, but I had assumed that was because he was going through puberty and had been getting taller. In fact, when I think back, there had been several "warning signs" that I had been attributing to puberty. For instance, he had been having mood swings, which were completely out of character. But again, this was my fifth child to go through puberty, and mood swings were not out of the ordinary with all the hormonal changes that come with the onset of puberty. Another sign, which is also not uncommon at this age, was that he had been sleeping more and was having a harder time than usual getting up in the morning. I didn't think too much of this either.
Another warning sign, which did have me a bit
concerned, was that he was having frequent headaches. None of my children had ever experienced this, and I remember wondering if I needed to have this checked out. Shortly after this started, however, I found out that one of his cousins, who is around the same age, was also suffering from regular migraine headaches. I decided that this was likely something that ran in the family and contributed this to being a result of all the new changes in his body as well.
Perhaps the most obvious "red flag" that I was missing, had I been aware of any of the warning signs of Diabetes, was that he was always thirsty. I would hear him get up several times during the night to get something to drink or to use the bathroom. But again, teenagers are always an interesting and unpredictable group. I just didn't think much about any odd or unusual behavior at this age. He had always been extremely active and he was eating more as well, so it made sense at the time that he would be taking in a lot of fluids. If he was constantly drinking fluids, it made sense that he would constantly be going to the bathroom. We had all begun making fun of him over this, never suspecting that something was terribly wrong inside of his body.
All of these were in fact classic symptoms of Diabetes, but of course we had no idea or reason to suspect this disease. It was nowhere in the family on either side. Yet, when I had noticed his shockingly wasting appearance that Memorial Day, I remember being instantly gripped by fear. After all, this had also been one of the first noticeable signs when Kaylee had first become sick with Crohn's disease.
Even so, as this fear tried to settle in, I quickly dismissed it. I had just won a 9-year battle over chronic disease with Kaylee. I convinced myself that the enemy was trying to instill this fear in me, and I was not going to let myself go there! There just had to be a logical explanation other than disease.
So for the next couple of days, denial set in. Even as he progressively got weaker, rather than taking him right to the doctor, I focused on his nutrition, just as I had always done with Kaylee. I began loading him up with juices, yogurt drinks, and the various supplements I had used for Kaylee. If there was indeed a more serious, underlying problem, because of my past experiences, I assumed it was connected to his gut or digestive system. Because of his chronic thirst, he eagerly gulped down all of these drinks, which were extremely high in sugar and carbohydrates (the #1 enemy of Diabetes). Needless to say, everything I was doing to try to help him only further contributed to his blood sugars being shot through the roof!
So this was how he had ended up in this condition, and now as he lay there unresponsive in the floor of his bedroom, I feared that I had made a huge mistake not to take him to the doctor sooner.
But how was I going to get him there now?
Because of the shock, it took a few minutes for it to even register with me that I needed to call 911.
My next vivid memory of that morning was being stuck in the bathroom at the Emergency Room. My children will probably kill me for sharing this, but in order to paint a true picture of this most traumatic morning, I simply can't leave this out. You see, while I had remained extremely calm outwardly throughout the events of that morning, inwardly I was not having the same reaction. I followed the ambulance to the hospital, and by the time I arrived, my stomach was completely torn up from my nerves! I literally had to run to the bathroom! It wasn't until afterwards that I noticed there was no toilet paper anywhere in the bathroom.
After I managed somehow to get out of this very unfortunate predicament (I will spare you the details), I rounded the corner in the E.R. and received the shocking news exactly in this way:
"Your son is a Diabetic."
Wait... What?!
For just a very brief moment, I actually felt a sense of relief. We had an explanation. He wasn't going to die. But that relief was very short lived once those words began to fully sink in. Although I knew very little about Diabetes at that time, the one thing I did know for certain was that he would not be leaving the hospital with the problem "fixed" nor would he return home as the healthy, carefree child he once was. Our lives were about to be forever changed (outside of a miracle). Here I was, once again, being given a life-changing, life-long diagnosis for one of my children. My heart sank.
Just like that, my son, who had been completely healthy (or so I thought) just a few days earlier, was not only being given a diagnosis of chronic disease, he was even being referred to by the name of this disease! This was extremely hard for me to hear. While this may seem silly to those of you who have never struggled with the stigma of chronic disease, I knew how hard this had been on Kaylee. Chronic disease has a tendency to start to define you and become your identity. To this day, I still won't refer to Barret as a "Diabetic." I don't want to give this unwelcome disease that much power over his life. I don't want to label him this way. Instead, I tell people, "He has Diabetes." This way it doesn't sound so permanent.
I had very little time to process this instantaneous diagnosis before I was being bombarded with questions, paperwork, and major life decisions. The staff did not feel that they were adequately equipped or prepared to treat a child in his condition and felt he needed to be transported immediately to Children's Hospital in Birmingham. Although they were being careful not to instill too much fear in me, they let me know that, although they had already begun slowly giving him insulin in order to bring his blood sugars down, he was not yet out of real danger. All of this had to be done in a very strategic manner with a child who now weighed only 64 lbs (This also came as a shock to me!).
They went on to explain that he had type one Diabetes, which I understood was the really "bad" type! With type one, you are completely insulin dependent and required to take shots every time you eat. Unlike type two Diabetes, which involves the body's ability to utilize the available insulin, there is no insulin production with type one. Type two Diabetes can also be helped and, in some cases, completely turned around with a healthy diet and exercise. This is not the case with type one.
What I wasn't yet unaware of, and what they went on to also explain to me, is that type one Diabetes is an auto-immune disease (type two is not). This meant that his own immune system had been targeting and attacking his pancreas for quite some time now. Upon hearing this, I was immediately taken back to Kaylee's diagnosis years earlier. Now things were beginning to make a little more sense. This wasn't such a "foreign" disease to our family after all. It was simply showing up in a different form.
One of the nurses looked at me and assured me that this wasn't my fault, and at that point I lost it. I completely broke down. I felt like it was my fault. I felt like I should have reacted sooner. And as I stood there watching them load him onto the helicopter, the seriousness of the situation suddenly became very real. Although I hoped they were being completely honest with me about everything, I wasn't convinced that they weren't withholding things from me in order to protect me. I knew that it was very serious if they were air-lifting him, and along with this fear, it was the absolute most helpless feeling not being able to go with him. I had over a two hour drive ahead of me before I could get to him. I felt sick.
As I was getting my things together to head to Birmingham, I received a phone call from the doctor in PICU (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit) at Children's Hospital. He explained to me, as gently as possible, the reason for the emergency air-lift. Because Barret's blood sugars had reached such a high level, and because we didn't know how long he had been in that condition, there was a concern that there could be permanent brain damage. He told me that he didn't expect this to be the case, however, they needed to take every precaution just in case.
It was all extremely shocking, and after I worked out the details for the rest of my children while I would be gone, I had more than a two hour drive by myself to try and absorb it all. There was so much to take in, so many unknowns ahead, and so much that I couldn't understand. More than anything, I was heartbroken for Barret as I thought about all the major life changes that were ahead for him. Although I didn't know very much about this disease yet, the thought of being right back where I had been for years, battling another disease, was overwhelming to me. Yet, after everything I had been through with Kaylee and all that God had shown me throughout that time, I knew in my heart that I couldn't simply accept this disease as the plan for Barret's life. I knew that I had to fight it, just as I had fought for Kaylee's life. How was I going to find the strength to do this all over again?
As I continued on the excruciating drive back to the hospital where all of this had started years ago with Kaylee, suddenly something else came to my mind. At the conference I attended shortly after Kaylee's diagnosis, Dr. Robbins had told us that he had seen success with nearly every disease through diet change alone. There was only one disease he mentioned that he had never seen turn around. It was type one Diabetes.
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