Just to start this first post, regarding this crazy idea of creating a Blog to share my experience as a new father of a kid with diabetes, I would like to write about my first experience after the debut of my daughter Lucia last April of 2022.
But First, I’m going to go to the origin, to how we realized that my daughter had diabetes.
Everything started during a wonderful trip to the Canary Islands, to the spectacular island of Lanzarote. We spent a week enjoying the sights, the beaches, the food, the hotel, but there was something that captured our attention. Our daughter Lucia was thirsty all the time (she drank water very often) and woke us up several times at night because she wanted to go to the bathroom.
My wife was very worried because she said that it was very strange (mothers always have an extra sense for everything related to their children). But I told her several times that it did not seem strange to me, that drinking water was not bad and that She probably went to the bathroom so much because she was nervous.
However, when we returned to Madrid in April, after Easter, my wife took Lucia to the doctor of the Health Center, who, when we told her the symptoms, quickly told us to go to the hospital and take her for some medical tests.
Here began for us some of the hardest weeks we have passed in our lives.
After doing the blood glucose tests and urinalysis at the Health Center, we got the bad news. Our daughter had blood sugar measurement very high (450mg/dL) and had ketone bodies in her urine.
Lucia was quickly admitted in the O’Donnell Maternity Hospital in Madrid and our lives changed suddenly. Our poor Lucia had never had blood tests before and she was terrified because of COVID PCR tests. She suffered a lot because of the stick they put in her nose to obtain samples (it seems that they took the sample from scratching your brain!). On that day, our beautiful Luchi, passed everything that we had not made her go through before.
She was allocated at the hospital emergency room for a whole day, and she cried and cried after each test she received. We, her mother and me, alternated to remain with her, speak sweetly to her and encourage her as much as possible. After spending that day in the hospital emergency room, the doctor finally confirmed what we already had quite clear, that our daughter Lucia had diabetes.
Fortunately, we had detected it in time and Lucia had not suffered any complications, which when I started reading later, I found that they could have been achieved: fainting, loss of consciousness, pain, dizziness, etc. This point is very important for parents. If the usual symptoms that I have mentioned and that are easily detectable in a child occur: he drinks a lot of water, goes to the bathroom many times, has lost weight lately or even if he has sudden mood swings (gets very angry or gets drowsy) it is always convenient to take your children to the pediatrician so that they can measure the blood glucose content and check that they do not have ketone bodies in their urine.
Diabetic Ketosis occurs when the body begins to burn fat because not having enough insulin when the pancreas stops producing it, it needs energy to continue functioning and that is why the energy reserves that our body has, the stored fat, begin to be mobilized. This produces the symptoms I mentioned before (a lot of thirst and a lot of desire to go to the bathroom), as well as weight loss (by burning fat). I leave here a link on this topic where it is explained in detail: link
After this point began another adventure for us, a new story in the Hospital, in the Maternity of O’Donnell.
If you want to know how this story continued, I wait for you in my next post of Digital Diabetes.
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