Raising a Child with Type 1 Diabetes

Raising a Child with Type 1 Diabetes

Blaise Tanner was a happy, healthy sixteen month old beautiful boy, who always had the ability to make everyone he saw laugh. One day he began to feel sick and just could not get better. After two months of becoming worse with various wrong diagnoses, on July 6, 2003, Blaise was diagnosed with Type 1 juvenile diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is a chronic disease in which the pancreas does not receive insulin properly, and the child must be injected with insulin for the rest of their life. Syreeta Henry, Blaise’s mother, was now faced with not only being a new mother, but also meeting life changing challenges as a mother of an eighteen-month old Type 1 diabetic child.

Syreeta first had to understand Type 1 diabetes and how it affects the pancreas before she could learn how to control it. At Children’s Hospital, where Blaise stayed for five days, Syreeta had a variety of classes she was required to take. If she did not understand the disease, it could kill her son. She began learning why the pancreas needs to work, how to mix insulin, and how and when to give insulin injections properly. She also had to know how to check his blood sugar, what the range should be, how to read nutrition labels, and how to count and calculate carbs into insulin. This was a huge amount of information to process and understand, but was necessary to keep her son alive.

Now on top of normal worries of a new mom, Syreeta began to worry if she had counted the carbs correctly and measured his insulin shots just right. Blaise received four shots a day with three different insulin and at least eight finger sticks to check his blood sugar. For the next year and a half he was on a strict eating regimen. Although he was still allowed to eat most things, his food had to be measured exactly and eaten on time. Syreeta said, “It would take me four hours in the grocery store, reading the labels and counting in my head! It was all a learning process.”

When it comes to disciplining an eighteen month old, it is difficult enough for a new mom. For Syreeta, there was another factor to deciding if Blaise’s attitude was just normal or if it was caused by his diabetes. When a diabetic’s attitude is bad, it could simply be because his sugar is too high or too low. If Syreeta would punish him then check his sugar and it was off she would feel awful. She had just punished her son because of his disease that she was in charge