by David's mom, Lisa Shriver dshriver@rochester.rr.com
My son David has had diabetes for 2 years and 5 months ago he was one of the youngest kids in Western NY to get a pump. Our hospital Childrens Hospital in Bflo NY is just beginning to get young children on the pump. We have been very fortunate. David 's blood sugars have always been difficult to control and finally with this pump I see numbers that make me feel good. All the hard work that we put into controlling david's blood sugars is paying off. The best things we've been noticing are very simple. David eats with a spoon and utencils instead of me shoveling food into his mouth. No longer do I spend my days exhausted from encourageing David to eat the same amount of food everyday the same time of day. You can't imagine how creative you can be with food when preventing a low blood sugar. We can now eat together at the table as a family. David had frequent low and Highs so dinner time was very stressful for all of us. I did always feel diabetes ruled our lives. I can feel for all the diabetics in the world because I am in charge of my sons diabetes and failure is frequent. Keeping upbeat and positive is difficult and I'm not the one experiencing the feelings and symptoms. Our local support group is great and even though I rarely visit with them we always make the summer picnic. My girl Jessica and Jenny visit with other diabetic their age and they get some encouragement from them. They were very scared and had many feelings when their brother was diagnosed. Our family is growing up with diabetes and our knowlege of this disease grows everyday. I can tell you the site changes were the most difficult until I read a article in the diabetic interview about the product emila cream a local analgesic. I was familiar with it because we use it at our hospital on circumcisions. David is very thin and required us to manually insert the silihoute cath. so now my husband can even feel comfortable changing cath sites knowing its not painful. We did have a question about the reservoirs if they could be used more than once? I also didn't realize shutting off the pump during a low was necessary until we had some difficulties. With David and being small and thin the sites need to be rotated to different areas like legs one day the abd the next change and the butt the next change. Just moving the site a little over seems to interfer with insulin absorption. This absorption problem was the biggest thing we encountered when David was on injections. He sites were used up and puffy and insulin oozed from the sites even with changes in technique. I Thank God everyday for the pump and everything we've been able to do now being a pumper.
Sincerely
Lisa Shriver dshriver@rochester.rr.com