Pumping night two did not go as well as night one!


Alison went to bed with a fairly normal BGL.  At midnight she had dropped to 6.1 mmol/l, okay, starting to creep towards the low end of things, but we'll take what we can get.  Then 3 am rolled around and we were down to 3.1 mmol/l.  I treated her, waited 15 minutes and tested again.  4.6 mmol/l.  I treated her again and was going to have to go back into her room, prick her finger again and probably wake her up when Alison asked me if I was planning on coming back in another 15 minutes (she gets things fast for a 4 year-old).  Upon my confirmation, Ali decided that she would rather be cuddled up with me in the parental bed than have me come in and disturb her again.  It is hard to argue with a child that you keep waking up and forcing sugary snacks into when she is making sense.  We dosed off, all snuggled up until I had to get up at 5:30 for work.  That's when she found the next heat source, Daddy on his side of the bed and continued on with her slumber.


Just before Terry was leaving for work this evening, Alison got her cannula caught on something and rather painfully pulled out her infusion set.  We had to do a site change and rotation tomorrow anyways, so it shouldn't have been a big deal.  Alison was so tired and upset from the sting of the other set coming out that she had a complete meltdown.  It took both Terry and I to hold her down to sanitize and re-connect her to the pump.  She also had a very difficult time with Daddy leaving for work.  I had to snuggle her for what seemed like forever to get her to stop bawling :(


I wish that was where the story ended.  The alcohol must not have been dry enough when we sanitized the new site location as the infusion set slid right out and the tape was toast.  I had to promise to not only give her a star on the blackboard (her reward system) but I had to make a star that was shaped like a pump.


As I tucked her in, she gave me one of those sweet moments that you get from no one but your children.  When I told her to get some rest, she replied "Mommy, you get some rest too, you had a really long day".


She truly is too sweet for words.

I'm Lovin' it!  What happens when a four-year-old, who almost never gets to visit the golden arches, gets a McHappy Meal?  She doesn't waste even one inch of the meal.

PUMP START, FOR REAL THIS TIME...

We started pumping insulin yesterday at 10:30 am.  It was really overwhelming for me, but Terry was pretty relaxed about it.  We programmed Ali's basal rate (constant insulin release) at CHEO, in our session.  Then when we went to lunch and tried to bolus (additional insulin to cover meals), we got an error saying that our line had an occlusion.  Up we went, back to the Diabetes Clinic to change our infusion set and start all over with the bolus.

We're talking to the Endo every evening, adjusting and re-adjusting Alison's basal rates and boluses so that we can figure out her carb ratios.  Once that is done we'll be sitting pretty for a little while.  Until then, we are checking her blood sugar at breakfast, two hours later, lunch, two hours later, dinner, two hours later, snack time, two hours later, midnight and 3am.  It is going to be a couple of really exhausting weeks (unless Ali's body and the pump sinc up more quickly).

What makes it all worth while is not only the health benefits that Alison will see, but how happy her pump makes her!  She is so proud of it.

Pumpin' Aint Easy?

So we made it through the first pump start session.  Ali, as you can see (above) is all hooked up and pumping saline.  We are bolusing, but just for practice at this point.  My monkey is always such a trooper. 

Late last night I told her she was my hero.  When she asked why, my answer was that it's hard having Diabetes.  Alison told me that it wasn't hard because I love her.  It is nice to know that in times that are scary and uncertain to her, that Mommy and Daddy are enough to keep her confident and calm.

Next week we will be replacing her saline with her NovaRapid and trying to figure out what her insulin sensitivity is.  And there will be still more things to learn and master.  That being said, I am feeling a lot more confident than before.

To all you soon-to-be pumpers, chin up, it wasn't so bad.

So Alison turns four today!  Happy Birthday baby!  I wanted to get her dressed up and go out to a nice resto, but she prefers going to lunch somewhere fun.  I think we'll take her to McDonald's for a treat and let her and Riley play in the playroom.

Two days until our pump start!  We've got a lot of reading to do before Wednesday.

So, we recieved our pump and start up kit from Animas today.  They have been really nice to us thus far.  Since the OneTouch Ping doesn't come in purple, they included two free skins, one for the pump and one for the remote.  Now when Ali gets hooked up next Wednesday, it will be all purple.  They also included a super soft Waist It and a carb calculating book.

We had such a busy night that we didn't get to do much more than take it out of the box and turn it on, but we will do more playing between now and the 8th in between celebrating Ali's birday with a party on the 4th, the museum on the 5th and a dress up lunch with Mommy |on the 6th (her actual birthday).

It was fun to see both Alison and her baby sister Riley go "Ohhhhhh" when the display lit up!

Everything is starting to feel real now that the big box is in our kitchen and since Ali keeps asking to be hooked up right away.  There's no turning back now!

so my friend, Sean, sent me this article regarding the possible reasons for the increase in the amount of people with Type 1.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/diabetes-rising/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+(Wired%3A+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))

So, the more I thought about it, the more inclined I became to share our diagnosis story.  Everyone affected by this disease has a Dx story.  I'll share ours, but you can post a comment about your own too!

In June of 2010, my husband and I noticed a few things.  Alison was drinking a lot more water than she had before.  We chalked that up to it being hot and her going outside with her Daddy everyday to play.  Then she started to leak through her diaper at night.  Not a little leak here and there, but so much so that we had to change her sheets almost daily.  We tried everything, doubling up on diapers, giving her less to drink before bed; nothing seemed to help.

Alison had always been independent but she started to get really clingy.  When the lethargy hit, we started to think that she was coming down with something.

Then it hit us full on.  The morning of July 5th seemed normal to me; I felt horrible, but I was pregnant with my second child and not known to have easy pregnancies.  I got to work, went into my cubicle and instantly the phone started to ring.  It was my husband saying that Alison was vomiting, acting bizarrely and getting major shakes on and off.  He was going to take her to our peds office to see what might be up.

Shortly after that I got another call.  The doctor who shares space with ours was filling in for him and she had tried to get Alison to pee for her so that she could check for ketones.  Ali was not cooperative in that she was so dehydrated from throwing up that she had no fluids left to provide.

I met my husband and Alison on my way to the hospital.  We were seen so quickly it scared me.  Alison was still sick to her stomach and was convulsing on and off.  She was just a shell of the girl we knew and loved.  This frightened me to my very core.

Within half and hour we knew that she had Type 1 Diabetes.  We didn't know what that meant, but we knew it was serious.  The first few days in hospital felt like an eternity.   What stands out most clearly to me is the kindness of the staff we encountered.  These are the people who are still part of our Endo team today.

It took a while for us to deal with Ali's new life.  My husband wanted to research Diabetes until his fingers were raw from typing.  I wanted to avoid the subject as much as possible.  Dealing with it only brought me to tears.  I ate my way through November, December and all the way into May.  That's when I decided to see a therapist to deal with the state that our life had fallen into.

Our sadness, anger, resentment and despair has fallen away, slowly but surely.  We still have moments of sadness and there will always be fear, but we, as a family, led by the smallest of heroes, decided to not only soldier on, but to make the very best of the situation that we now live in.