Most children tend to have type I diabetes, previously known as juvenile diabetes, although children are increasingly being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes as well. Type I diabetes occurs when the pancreas does not work and does not produce any insulin. Insulin is needed to help break down sugars (glucose) in our body to help it work efficiently. When this breakdown of sugars does not happen, as in the case of type I diabetes, the sugar stays in the blood stream.

Because insulin is important in breaking down sugars in the body to use for energy, insulin has to be taken to control the illness. Therefore type I diabetes is also called insulin-dependent diabetes. Exercise and diet are also important helping to control this type of diabetes. Caring for the child with diabetes means that you will need to recognize the signs of the illness, as well as any resulting reactions that can occur. The main signs of diabetes in children are:

Breath smelling like fruit
Constant hunger
Pulse beating faster than normal
Headaches
Being weak and dizzy
Difficulty concentrating
Vision becoming foggy
Skin tending to be cold and moist
Experiencing seizures

Next, you should be able to identify when the child is in crisis, suffering either a hypoglycemic or hyperglycemic episode, and you should know what to do help in either case. Hyperglycemia occurs when the sugar levels are too high. Rising sugar levels are generally a result of eating too much, not taking the correct amount of insulin, or not exercising enough. When a child is hyperglycemic, treatment by medical professionals is needed. A child suffering from high blood sugar will complain of the following:

Weakness
Extreme thirst
Needing to urinate frequently
Not seeing clearly
Not being hungry

With hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), the symptoms vary from child to child, but some of the typical signs include:

Clumsiness
Sudden mood changes
Sweating
Hunger
Seeming confused
Trembling
Headache
Tingling feeling around the mouth

The first course of action is to increase the child’s sugar intake by giving them something sweet to drink, such as regular soda, fruit juice or glucose tablets. Once the child is feeling better, you should give them something more solid to eat. If the child is too weak to swallow or is unconscious, administer the recommended dosage of glucagon and call for immediate medical assistance. Glucagon is a medication given by injection to rapidly increase the level of glucose in the blood. It is normally the first course of treatment in severe hypoglycemia.

Diet is a major part of keeping the diabetic child healthy. The caregiver has the responsibility to ensure that the child eats what is recommended. It is also important to talk with the child and let them know that they will get really sick if they eat too many sweets or other foods that can pose a risk. It is also important to let others, such as teachers, know that a diabetic child may need to snack to boost their sugar and energy levels. The child with diabetes must also have regular meals.

Exercise is important as well, and there is no reason why the diabetic child cannot participate in all regular physical activity. Exercise helps to control blood sugar levels. However, children with diabetes should not exert themselves before meal time. Also, they will need to have a snack, such as juice, crackers or a fruit, handy, as they will need to replace sugar lost during physical activity.

Most importantly, children should be taught how to test their blood sugar levels during the course of the day, once they are able to do soon their own. This is important so that they can take insulin or eat something as needed.

Taking care of children with diabetes is not difficult if you have a plan of action. This plan should include keeping all those who may need to care for the child aware of what can happen if the child’s sugar level changes and the remedies to administer. The diabetic child should also be taught how to monitor his or her own sugar levels and what to do in the event that the levels are too high or low. Numbers for doctors should be in an easy-to-reach place in case of an emergency.

To learn more go to Diabetes Diagnosis and at Types Of Diabetes

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With a sugar as low as, say 40, all you would want to do is have something sweet which can raise your sugar.

But having a lot of that will have an adverse effect on the low sugar. The sugars will shoot up drastically.

To prevent that, take something with sugar in it and along with it have something solid, preferably with some fat.

Having something sweet will increase your sugar levels instantly. The effect of having sugar lasts for about half an hour.

To increase the period of that effect taking something solid helps in slow and gradual absorption of the sugar.

So, instead of getting a high sugar after a low sugar you will have it under control.

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When your sugars are very high (say, 500 and above) the best thing to do is to take some insulin and drink plenty of water.

The reason for drinking plenty of water is because when you have such high sugars, ketones begin to form.

The ketones need to be flushed out of the body to prevent the kidneys from being damaged. Drinking a lot of water helps in flushing out the ketones.

After you have taken insulin, the best thing to do is to go and rest.

Any form of physical exercise causes secretion of adrenalin in the body. Adrenalin increases the blood sugar.

To prevent secretion of adrenalin in the body, it is better to just rest so that the already high sugar will not shoot up further.

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Managing type 1 diabetes on days when you are ill can be quite a pain.

If the sickness has got something to do with viruses and bacteria, then it tends to shoot your sugars up and they won’t seem to come down, even if you take a higher dose of insulin than normal.

So the best thing to do is not to get it in the first place. But yeah, you obviously cannot dictate when you are supposed to get some sickness and when is it supposed to go, can you?

Increase the insulin dose a little (make sure you don’t increase it a lot just to bring down your sugars. Remember your appetite is down as well) and don’t force yourself to eat more than what you can and that too with a low appetite just because you have taken a extra dose.

A thumb rule is you should never forget to take an insulin shot when you are ill because that can lead to more severe complications like keto-acidosis.

Avoid any strenuous physical activities because they tend to raise your sugar levels even further.

Just rest and hope that the illness goes away as quickly as possible.

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Okay, this is for those who think insulin injection is a pain.

Think again!! With a little bit of precaution and care, it can be virtually painless. In this short article, I will explain the right way to inject insulin.

The most important point to remember while injecting yourself is that the syringe should be perpendicular to the site of injection.

Before you start the injection process, clean the site of the injection and top of the vial with spirit which acts as disinfectant. Never clean the needle with spirit as it will remove the silicon coating on the needle.

Make sure that while taking the insulin in the syringe it is free of bubbles. Just to be on the safer side, take a unit or two more than what you are supposed to take and before injecting yourself push the plunger to remove those extra one or two units. This ensures that no air remains in the needle of the syringe.

After you have pricked yourself with the syringe, push in the plunger as fast as possible because the longer you keep it inside you, the more it hurts. Count to 10 and remove the syringe. Never massage the site of injection.

Normally you are told that a syringe can be used upto 7 or 8 times. Actually, by the time you inject yourself 7 or 8 times with the same syringe, it loses its sharpness and starts to hurt a lot. It generally doesn’t hurt upto 4 times with the same syringe.

Your doctor would have told you to rotate your site regularly, right? Well, that is kind of important because pricking yourself in the same site over and over again causes that site to swell and affects the dispersion of insulin in your body resulting in sudden high or low Blood Sugar. Though injecting yourself in the same site causes you less pain because the particular area becomes numb but it is dangerous to do so.

To prevent that, always rotate your site everytime you inject yourself. I have tried and tested these methods and they works pretty well for me.

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Many a times it so happens that you get a low blood sugar right in the middle of a lecture and with your friends around, you might think a million times before you take any action against it.

You might think that if I ate something for my low blood sugar in front of my friends, I might be the centre of attention and might even be laughed at.

Well, I’d say that being laughed at is any day better than getting your brain affected. Did you know that everytime you get a low sugar, it affects your brain?

Because, lack of glucose in the blood due to a low blood sugar causes loss of concentration, dizziness, confusion and if ignored can lead to coma.

How to handle the situation

1. Let your class teacher know about your condition (and subsequently the other teachers). Just let the teacher know that such emergencies rarely occur but they need to know what to do just as a precautionary measure.
2. Keep your physical fitness instructor informed about your condition so that he does not overdo it with the exercise part.
3. Let some of your close friends know about your health problems and tell them what diabetes symptoms to look out for and how to handle in an emergency.

After you do this, you are ready to eat that snack of yours in the middle of the class during a low sugar without worrying about your friends’ reaction.

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Since it has no peaks in its action, it will work at a steady rate.

It is entirely upto the user having diabetes to choose the time of injection.

It can either be morning or noon or night. But it has to be at the same time everyday.

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The Syringe

At the very beginning, I was on the conventional syringe for taking in my daily dose of injections.

It was the easiest and most painful way of taking in my daily insulin doses.

It was the easiest because it was technicality very simple to learn and administer. It was also the most painful. Obviously, because you had to poke and puncture yourself two to four times a day according to your requirements. Since most of the time, the effect of the insulin action lasted only 8 hours, you generally had to take a minimum of three shots a day. OUCH!!

The Lantus

After, say, about a year or two, I was introduced to the 24-hour acting lantus insulin.

That was much better because I had to take only 3 shots a day. Still pretty painful to prick yourself thrice a day for 4 years. It actually maintained a baseline for my sugars.

Since it had no peaks in its action, the frequency with which I got Hypoglycemia was reduced drastically.

Insulin Pen

My personal experiences with the pen is that I have had more disadvantages than benefits. If given a choice, I’d go in for the conventional syringe.

Why I am not for an insulin pen is because it involves a lot of technicality and is completely mechanical.

When I was using the pen, it gave me more trouble because the insulin used to take its own sweet time to come out of the pen, and it used to hurt a lot.

I do not know what other people feel about the pen, but I personally didn’t fancy using it.

Insulin Pump

And now I am going to tell you about the much talked about Insulin Pump.

This is what I am using presently and so far it has not given me any problems except a few minor ones which can certainly be overlooked considering how advantageous it is for young Type 1 diabetics.

Benefits:

1. It is by far the best technological advancement in the area of diabetes research for administering insulin.
2. It is handy and insulin can be taken anytime without worrying about needle pricks.
3. It certainly reduces the number of needle pricks to one in about three or four days.
4. It has many features to enable you to control your sugars as best as possible.

Disadvantages:

1. The complexity involved in using the pump. It takes some time to get familiar with the innumerable features and the method of using the pump.
2. While sleeping, it sometimes becomes very uncomfortable to keep it in your pocket.
3. Its cost is certainly more than the other methods of insulin administration as discussed earlier. The cost of consumables is comparatively more in the case of a pump.

I would say that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages of using a pump. I would definitely consider using a pump as the best option among all the options discussed above for insulin administration and controlling diabetes.

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It was somewhere around January of 2006. My exams were just around the corner when this happened.

I was running temperature on that day and had gone for my tution in the evening.

Generally, when a diabetic person has fever, the sugar shoots up. That evening, I forgot to take my evening dose of insulin and I went for my tution on my bicycle.

It was quite a distance away so I was tired. I finished with my tution and came back home cycling. I was very tired and the feeling I had in my stomach was very weird. I felt very uneasy and was feeling hungry so I had half a cup of soup.

After half an hour or so I vomited, then I felt better and decided to take another half a cup of soup in a while. I did so and again within half an hour after having the soup, I vomited. I decided to chuck the idea of having anymore soup and decided to just go off to sleep.

Around midnight I got up to vomit again. Now, my stomach started to ache a bit. I had not eaten anything but was still vomiting. From then on, I was getting up every half an hour to vomit. I was vomiting through the night without anything in my stomach.

Around 3 AM, my mother called up my Diabetologist and she told me to reach the hospital in the morning because that was the earliest that I could be treated.

Because of constant vomiting, I got severely dehydrated and basically was in a very bad shape.

I was admitted in the hospital first thing in the morning and I gradually recovered that day.

What had basically happened was that the sugar levels in my body had shot up to a very high level (600+) and it lead to the formation of ketones in my body.

The body had to throw away the ketones. The only way to do it was through vomiting or urinating.

I hadn’t taken any insulin the whole night and ketones continued to form due to the very high sugar levels…first due to lack of insulin and second due to fever.

If I had just thought of taking in some insulin, I would have saved myself from vomiting so much and in due course, severe dehydration.

Since I was dehydrated, I was given glucose and insulin to lower my sugar levels.

My blood sugar had to be constantly tested to get it to normal.

I was discharged after a day in the hospital. It was my worst nightmare.

This wasn’t meant to scare you guys. It is just so that you guys don’t make the same mistake that I made. whatever happens, never forget your insulin doses.

Additional Information on Diabetic Ketoacidosis

According to American Diabetes Association:

Ketocidosis means dangerously high levels of ketones. Ketones are acids that build up in the blood. They appear in the urine when your body doesn’t have enough insulin. Ketones can poison the body. They are a warning sign that your diabetes is out of control or that you are getting sick.

If you want to get in-depth information about Diabetic Ketoacidosis including causes, symptoms, exams & tests, treatment, self-care, follow-up and prevention, then you will get it at eMedicineHealth.com.

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I was wondering how I’d stop eating chocolates and ice-creams. They were my life. I obviously couldn’t stop eating chocolates and ice-creams all of a sudden. It was very upsetting.

The fear that I had to stop everything in life and stay at home, no freaking out with friends was all too heavy in the head. This had created a great anxiety in my mind.

I felt like crying at that moment.

But my Diabetologist doctor thought differently. When I met her first, she said I could have anything and everything I wanted. Except that the frequency had to be reduced.

I didn’t care much about the fact that I had to take insulin injections twice a day.

In those initial days when people had put all sorts of wrong and fearful ideas into my head, this was such a welcome relief.

At that point of time I was on cloud nine. Just to think that every other person on this earth was scaring the daylights out of me saying I wouldn’t be able to eat anymore chocolates and ice-creams and I could not lead a normal life!

When I think of it now, I just cannot believe how misinformed people are about diabetes, in general and Type 1 Diabetes, in particular.

All I know is that the doctor I went to knew how to handle any diabetic patient, both medically and psychologically and all I know is that it worked for me and I am more than happy living with diabetes.

If you are diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, my suggestion to you is that please consult with a good Diabetologist immediately. That will help you a lot in easing the tension and pressures of the initial days of diagnosis.

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