looking back

i think about the time my son had all the symptoms of diabetes, before we knew he had it.

when you have a child that you see everyday it's hard to notice the little changes; like how tall they're getting or how much weight they lost or put on. mothers experience this a lot, when the jeans they bought, not too long ago, are now floods. so, when your child is in the bath and you can see his ribs poking out of his body, it is very alarming. i mean, i couldn't understand why his big eyes looked so sunken in. he ate and drank so much , he had to be putting on weight. little did i know that his body was using stored fat cells to survive. It's scary seeing your child like that.

my child was fighting to be a regular kid and this disease was tearing him down, right before my eyes. he no longer was the carefree, happy, independent, funny little boy. he was struggling with the extreme thirst, hunger and discomfort. it kills me to think of all the pain he was going through, the symptoms that had him feeling so desperate, irritable and not his usual self.

i remember being at my daughter's softball game, and he said he was hungry. i bought him a hot dog and some chips. after he ate that, he said he was still hungry. i recall being kind of frustrated with him, i thought he wanted me to just buy him candy from the concession stand, and since i already bought him something to eat, i was ready to watch my daughter play. of course i didn't know that he couldn't help it.

that weekend we were at another softball game. when we were leaving he asked for a snow cone. i ordered a small and he threw a fit. he wanted like an extra large. That's like the size of a big gulp. i thought, no way could he drink that whole thing nor did i want him to... he was 5, a small was good enough, but he knew that he was always so thirsty and he could drink that huge snow cone and more, and in no time.

i think about times like that. when a regular day for everyone was a struggle for him and nobody knew it. that was the summer before kindergarten.

it was like a few days after school started (aug30,'04), and the nurse called and said he was throwing up. we took him to his pediatrician immediately. by then we had a hunch that maybe he too was type 1 diabetic, like his dad who had just been diagnosed. we told the doctor of all the symptoms; how my son could drink gallons of anything you let him. the doctor tried to convince me that my son did not have diabetes. he labeled my son as a psychogenic water drinker. he said," it is very common in children."

i'm no doctor but if see a child with weight loss, extreme thirst, hunger, vomiting and has a father with type 1 diabetes, i would think that after medical school it would register to check this out. we pleaded for blood tests to be done. i think he thought that we were hypochondriac parents. it's true we took him to the pediatricians even for what may seem like the mildest sniffles, but we had some significant symptoms here.

in 2002 right after my husband was diagnosed, we did have our son tested for type 1 diabetes, worried that it ran in the family. the doctor checked for glucose in the urine and he checked out just fine.

so on august 30,2004 after convincing the doctor that something was not right--we spent the day at the lab getting blood work done. hoping that maybe perhaps the doctor was right. the doctor told us we would hear back from him in a couple of days, with the test results. it was actually just hours later that he called us with the bad news.

our lives and most especially his life has changed forever.