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    The Care & Feeding of Your Diabetic Child
    The Care & Feeding of Your Diabetic Child
    The Care & Feeding of Your Diabetic Child
    Ebook217 pages1 hour

    The Care & Feeding of Your Diabetic Child

    By Sally Vanderpoel

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    About this ebook

    A meaningful, practical and authoritative guide & an optimistic approach to the control of childhood diabetes. It includes valuable information and instruction for parent and child.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFrederick Fell Publishers, Inc.
    Release dateMar 1, 2017
    ISBN9780883915653
    The Care & Feeding of Your Diabetic Child
    Author

    Sally Vanderpoel

    SALLY VANDERPOEL, a home economist trained in nutrition and the mother of three, has had ten years experience with childhood diabetes. Her son is recognized as a successful example of mental and physical adjustment to his incurable (to date) condition. After observing the need of other parents to achieve a harmonious relationship in a family with this major medical problem, Mrs. Vanderpoel has been persuaded to share here knowledge and philosophy. She lives near Torrington, Wyoming.

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      Book preview

      The Care & Feeding of Your Diabetic Child - Sally Vanderpoel

      Child

      Chapter 1

      Common Sense

      Diabetics have higher than average intelligence. Without a doubt this startling generalization will be one of the small pieces of comfort your doctor will offer you soon after your child has been diagnosed as a diabetic. So many anxious parents have been told this that one begins to believe it. An unscientific contention is that, if true, it is a result of the old method of survival of the fittest. Those diabetics who adjust mentally and emotionally to the restrictions of their condition will live. Those diabetics who become self-reliant and self-disciplined will survive. Natural selection will choose those with common sense. Unfortunately, common sense does not always accompany higher intelligence, but in the case of the diabetic who is able to adapt, both intelligence and common sense seem to occur together. It has been said there is nothing so uncommon as common sense, and healthy diabetics have it, they have to have it.

      The general pattern for living with diabetes begins in this way: The parents of a child, let us assume he is a boy of six, notice that he doesn’t seem to be acting in his usual way. He seems hungrier than usual; he may seem to drink more water than he used to. At first his mother attributes these changes, if she notices them at all, to the hot summer days, or to some unusual activity. The night may come when the child wets the bed. In most homes this would cause considerable attention and comment. He may rouse several times at night to go to the bathroom, asking for a drink of water and possibly for something to eat. In the middle of the night he might ask for a carrot, a raw carrot. That is the way it happened to our child, Phil. After a period of fretful worry and concern the mother will finally consult the doctor. In our case I took a urine specimen to the doctor’s office suggesting to the receptionist that our son seemed to have a bladder infection. Will you tell the doctor what I think and have him call me? He soon called and asked me to bring our son to his office at once.

      When I went to school his first grade teacher told me she had been growing concerned about our son’s health. He had been asking to leave the room quite often but he seemed bright and alert otherwise. After the tests at the doctor’s office that day and the blood sugar the following morning before breakfast, with the classic symptoms of diabetes, our case was easy to diagnose. Sometimes parents or patients are not blessed with such clear signs, and great weight loss or other severe symptoms, even unconsciousness, are experienced before a doctor is consulted. Diabetes is an acceleration of the aging process on blood vessels—most apparent in the eyes, the heart, kidneys, and extremities, for this reason early detection of diabetes is important. All parents and all teachers should be aware of the classic symptoms of diabetes:

      frequent, copious urination

      abnormal thirst

      rapid loss of weight

      extreme hunger

      general weakness

      drowsiness and fatigue

      itching of the genitals and skin

      visual disturbances, blurring, etc.

      skin disorders such as boils, carbuncles, infections

      Too often when a child suddenly wets the bed he is punished as a behavior problem while his illness is neglected. Not all symptoms are present in every case and there have been cases when most of the symptoms were absent. However, with great regularity a child diabetic will follow the classic pattern. A parent or teacher must be alert to respond to the obvious signs of illness. Often in the press of other responsibilities illnesses can go unnoticed until some crisis calls attention to the difficulty. In our case, one amazing thing is that the first-grade teacher was herself the wife of a diabetic and still she did not jump quickly to an assumption of illness on the part of our child. Each teacher and each parent is preoccupied and busy, which makes a program of diabetes detection doubly beneficial. Many schools provide a once-a-year urine testing program for every pupil. Such routine screening will help to End the many undetected diabetics while they are still in good health without complications.

      A good general practitioner will recommend to the shocked parents of a new child diabetic that they seek the advice of a specialist in the Geld of diabetes. The services of a specialist are a great advantage, not only because of his wide acquaintance with all aspects of the condition—he sees many diabetics in a day—but because, and this is the best part, new information is being added each year to the store of knowledge about diabetes. It is impossible for one’s family physician to keep up with all these advances while practicing the warm, personal type of medicine that we all demand from our doctors. While it isn’t possible to find a specialist in every hamlet in the United States the need for his services is so great that he should be sought even if it means traveling several hundred miles to consult him.

      The cost of the initial course of study with a specialist is not prohibitive, and neither is the cost of the subsequent care. Course of study it is, because unlike many other conditions, the patient himself will be responsible for its regulation and control. In the case of a child this means that his parents will be responsible, not only for maintaining life and health, but for teaching the child how to continue beyond their supervision. After the beginning treatment the mother of a diabetic will feel she has taken a college course in foods and nutrition.

      It will become clearer and clearer to you that a parent’s concern is not only with the physical well-being of the child but also with developing a mental attitude that will avoid the natural rebellion against authority and control. In the case of this six-year-old we must encourage cooperation through the trusting-child years and, more importantly, on through the years of puberty and young adulthood when there is a stronger pattern for rebellion. If this sounds like walking a tight rope, that is only a slight exaggeration.

      There are so many old wives’ tales and superstitions surrounding diabetes that much of the fear that patients and parents feel is distorted. People say funny things about diabetes. Some have said to me, Your son uses honey, the natural sugar, instead of refined beet or cane sugar, doesn’t he? (Honey is a natural carbohydrate, just as cane and beet sugar are, and none of them can be used freely by a diabetic.) People assume (incorrectly) that diabetics cannot be parents. They expect that a diabetic cannot be an athlete, or that he will be a cripple, they are surprised that our son is so active. I said to our doctor, in the beginning, in despair, He will die. To which the doctor replied, gently, He will not die. He will live and he will be healthy and perfectly normal. I didn’t believe him then, but I held his words carefully in my mind and heart to keep them alive and glowing, to make them true.

      Either your family doctor or the specialist will explain to you and your husband what diabetes is, how it is controlled, and what responsibility you and your child will have in maintaining his health. The unique aspects of diabetes is the information given to the patient by the physician to enable him to understand the condition completely. The services of a doctor are needed but he acts in an advisory capacity, the actual treatment is continued by the patient. Fearful prospects are not withheld from the diabetic patient; by knowing of their possibility complications are frequently avoided.

      The child diabetic is a severe diabetic. He will probably be taking insulin. The oral drugs given for diabetes are not insulin. The action of these drugs, while not completely known, in order to be useful relies on some natural function of the pancreas of the diabetic. Children who develop diabetes apparently do not have this pancreatic function. Since no insulin is supplied to diabetic children in the normal way from the islets of Langerhans (specific cells in the pancreatic gland about which more will be said later) it must be supplied another way. Insulin is a hormone, an internal secretion, a protein substance; it is destroyed by an organic substance, or enzyme, in the stomach and is therefore ineffective if taken by mouth. So it must be administered under the skin by hypodermic syringe.

      The treatment consists of sufficient insulin injected at regular intervals to balance the amount of food needed for growth and energy. Exercise uses food, too, and a child gets lots of exercise. Insulin, once injected into the body, is constantly feeding on the sugar in the blood stream. It needs free or uncombined sugar; if it does not find free sugar it calls stored sugar from hidden places in the liver and other cells and feeds on it. Children do not have much stored sugar. In a non-diabetic when the supply of sugar in the blood is low the amount of insulin secreted by the pancreas is reduced. But when insulin is given by injection there is no automatic mechanism for decreasing the supply. Enough food must be supplied to use the insulin present in the blood at all times.

      The opposite extreme is the natural problem of a diabetic, namely, not enough insulin. In this case the body, which is used to discarding things it cannot use, cannot use the sugar in the blood stream. The unused sugar is thrown away by the kidneys, sometimes in great quantities, leaving the body hungry and seeking nourishment. Once again the body uses some of its store of food, or sugar, calling it from hiding places. But as it tries to use this food without the insulin required for its use, harmful poisons are manufactured in the blood. These poisons act as all poisons do to destroy

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