Hi! My name is Nicole and my husband’s name is Phil. First off, I’d like to thank all of the founders of this site. It has been incredibly helpful and I look forward to reading more threads.
Our oldest daughter, Carmela, has T1D and her/our story is as follows.
Carmela was born in NYC at the end of March 2014. We had her with no family present at the hospital so we had little parental distractions. Our plan was to move to SW Virginia where my parents and sister resided.
In December 2014, we quit our jobs and we moved into our first home and everything seemed to be going just fine. Our second daughter, Josiephine arrived in September 2017.
We were really happy and it was much less stressful this time around since we didn’t have plans to change jobs, move hundreds of miles, and buy a house. However, Carmela seemed to be coming down with frequent sinus infections during this time and was very reluctantly taking Amoxicillin. She was also prescribed an inhaler because the doctor heard a bit of weazing during one of our visits. About three weeks after we brought Josie home from the hospital, Carmela started exhibiting strange behaviors such as urinating through her diapers during the night and then begging us for water as we were changing her sheets. It was alarming but we honestly had no clue. On the third day, we called the doctor and spoke to a nurse who said “why don’t you cut back her water intake before bed so she doesn’t urinate so much”. This was genius. Why had we not thought of this? I knew that it was bad advice but having a newborn I wasnt thinking clearly.That night Carmela woke up at about 10:30PM complaining of stomach pain. My husband took her to sleep in our spare bedroom. He woke up at 3AM to Carmela vomiting on his chest. At this point we knew something was wrong. In the morning, my mother came to our house with ketone test strips. She had suspected that it could be Diabetes but we all thought it was highly unlikely because no one on both sides of our family had Type 1. The ketone test indicated the presence of large ketones and at that point we became scared and worried.
We took Carmela immediately to her pediatrician and within 30 minutes was told this was the onset T1D. They reassured us but said this was a medical emergency and sent us to the ER. We spent three days in the hospital nursing her back to health, fighting anxiety attacks, and trying to learn the basics of how to keep her safe when we went home.
At this point, I am trying to learn everything I can in order to teach her to be independent and manage her diabetes. I want to instill in her that she can still do anything she wants to do and this will never hold her back. She just got on the omnipod pump and she also uses a dexcom CGM.
In my former life I worked in the fashion industry, now I am a yoga instructor and take care of our daughters. My husband is a CPA.
But she is very lucky to be your child, and she will be fine!
(I mean, it kinda sucked but it’s alright.)