The Joys of Diabetes

Has it really been three months since I updated this blog?!
Well I've been really busy with my son R who was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes in March this year. In September around the time I posted last he began to have a run of really high blood sugar levels. When I say, 'A run' I don't mean he had some high figures for a few hours or a day or two, no. He was dangerously high for about five weeks. At one point he was injecting twice the amount of insulin over twenty-four hours that you would expect for someone his size. What were the doctors and nurses saying? Not much. In fact so much of not much that we changed our GP surgery and got a referral to another hospital. Unfortunately because the other hospital is so good there is a waiting list just to be seen. We've just got a date - it's in December.

Meanwhile since September we've been managing R's care almost entirely alone. Fortunately we've got an incredibly supportive family and some amazing friends. We wouldn't have survived without the Children With Diabetes web site and email list.

Anyway, why am I posting this at 2.45am? Well, for the last three days R has been having less and less insulin but lots of hypos overnight. The last time he even had any insulin was Tuesday at noon and it's now the early hours of Thursday and we've just treated a hypo. We think maybe his pancreas has decided to start up its own insulin production again but it's going a little haywire and overdoing it during the night. We won't know for sure that this is the reason for the extended hypos until we see a consultant so I could be here each night from now until December, rather like some twisted advent calendar.