Hospital Stay

On our way to the emergency room I called my mom and told her the news. She was devastated (she herself is a type 2 diabetic). We spent a couple of hours in the emergency room. The worst part of the emergency room part was the IV. Nathan was so strong. He didn't even shed a tear. He squeezed my hand and said ouch about 20 times, but never a tear rolled down his cheek. The first blood sugar reading we got was 420. I often wonder what his highest blood sugar was. One of my biggest regrets was that I didn't feed him before going to the emergency room. We hadn't eaten lunch that day (big pancake breakfast). When we got to the emergency room it was close to dinner time. Nathan was starving. I wanted to feed him, but of course they wouldn't let him eat anything. By the time he got to eat the next day it had been 24 hours since he had eaten. Have you ever tried to deal with a starving kid?

After the pediatrician on call came in and talked to us, we were admitted to the hospital. Nathan was in the hospital Sunday, Monday and we were released Tuesday morning. Nathan loved the hospital. Most of it. He loved the hospital food. He loved that he got to play Nintendo all day. He got to skip school 3 days in all. It was great. He had great nurses, great doctors.

The only thing that wasn't great was blood draws. Okay...this is a message for all the lab techs out there. If you are NOT good at taking blood from children, please don't. We had a few that were good. We had a few that were terrible. The only tear Nathan shed that whole time was when some lab tech didn't hit the vein and kept digging around trying to find it. It killed me to see him in such pain. Or those techs who missed the first time and had to try again. Kids are going through enough in the hospital. The last thing they need is unneeded pain. Although maybe it was for a reason. Now Nathan's pain threshold is pretty great and everything is all relative. Compared to an IV and missed veins...nothing seems to hurt.

I remember the moment of acceptance for me. It was 5:00 in the morning on Tuesday. I was trying to make a list of foods Nathan could eat for my daycare provider using a carb book the dietitian had given me. I started with cereal. When I found that a serving of "sugared cereal" was less carbs than rice kripies, I knew everything was going to be okay. I had thought my child wouldn't be able to be a child anymore and that is what upset me the most. Knowing my kid could still eat his Lucky Charms, made the world of difference.

It wasn't long before I figured out that Nathan could eat anything in the world. We just needed to know how many carbs were in the food he was eating and then just treat him accordingly with the insulin. Really his eating hasn't changed at all. He eats the same "junk" as before diagnosis. Well...mostly the same. We look at carbs on packages a whole lot more and purchase more things lower in carbs. I do restrict him sometimes, but overall, he eats what he wants.