My life as a diabetic....diagnosis

It was late January 1980. I was a few months shy of turning eleven. I was in the fifth grade at Franklin Elementary. My teacher was Mr. Krepps. I was a very thin little girl to begin with but I was at the age where I started to see myself as fat. I started to get unusually thirsty, tired and had to pee almost constantly. I could hardly stand how thirsty I was. I would excuse myself from class a lot so I could get a drink of water and go to the bathroom. My clothes were starting to get loose and I was so tired that I stopped going out to recess. I can remember telling Missy, Mari Jo and Karin in the girls' restroom that I was losing weight. During this time Mr. Krepps had noticed my unusual habits. He called my mother. That night my mother watched me drinking lots of water. For every glass of water I got she poured one into a gallon jug. In an hour's time I had drank a gallon of water. The next day she took me to our good old fashioned family doctor. He had me sit on the table. He took my vitals, looked into my eyes. Then he leaned over and sniffed me. He straightened up and told my mother that I was a diabetic. He told her not to feed me after midnight (like a gremlin) and to take me first thing in the morning for bloodwork. That was Feb. 1, 1980. February 2 my parents took me to the hospital for my bloodwork. After we went out to breakfast. I think we went to Winky's but I'm not sure. I think I had french toast with syrup. That was the last time I ever had real syrup. February 2 is my mother's birthday. That night we had a birthday cake for her. We were still waiting on the results of my blood test. I decided I did not want to eat the cake. (probably good after having had so much syrup for breakfast) The next morning I noticed my mother was so glued to the telephone that she looked like it was a part of her. She was sitting at the kitchen table with that old green telephone stuck to the side of her head. The results had come in. I was definately a diabetic. Our old family doctor had my mother call Dr. D'Auria, a pediatrician to get me admitted to Children's Hospital. Later that day we were making our first of many trips to Children's. As I was being taken to my room I noticed all the kids wearing a board taped to thier arms. It wasn't long until I would be wearing one of those. I soon found out that children in Children's Hospital did not wear pj's during the day. You got to wear your regular clothes. I liked that. Soon they came in to give me a shot and put in what they called my heparin lock. So, that's what the board was! They put an IV needle into my hand and taped it down. There wasn't an IV in it. It was like a little port that they used to take blood out. Heparin was put in after they took blood out. They strapped my arm down to this board so I wouldn't dislodge it. I was given an IV in the other arm for the fluids I needed. So now I looked like the other kids on the ward. I was shown where the pee room was. That was the room where we would learn to do our own urine tests. I was shown the kitchen and then I was taken to the pool room. It didn't have a pool, but it did have a pool table. It had games, a stereo and a pay phone. There were comfy chairs and all the kids my age and older were there. The little kids had a separate room with little kids' toys. There was an older teenage boy in there playing pool. I wanted to talk to my grandmother on the phone but I didn't know how to call her with it. He told me I could call her collect if she will accept the charges. Then he taught me how to do it. My grandmother told me to call her collect as often as I wanted and to talk as long as I wanted. I had always been very close to her and spent almost all my free time with her. So, it was hard for me to be away from her. In the days that followed I learned many things. I learned how insulin worked and how it didn't work in me. I learned to take urine tests and give my own shots. I learned very quickly that I had the kind of diabetes that pills won't help. I learned which people were from the lab. I found all the closets on the floor and learned how to hide in them. I hated to see the lab people coming. It didn't take them long to learn that I liked to hide in the closets. Then I was introduced to an old timer. He was a ten year old boy who had been a diabetic since he was five. He was given the duty of showing me how to do a urine test. I thought he was really "cute". So there we stood outside the pee room, me and the cute boy holding our cups of pee. He told me to put so many drops of pee in the test tube and so many drops of water. Then put in the tablet. Don't touch the test tube now. It gets very hot and will burn you. The mixture of pee, water and tablet began to bubble and change colors. Then he showed me how to read the results from a color chart. There was another tablet that checked for ketones. You just put pee on it and it changed color. It didn't get hot and wouldn't hurt you if you touched it. The cute boy's name was Kenny. I only saw him once after I left the hospital, several years later. I was in the hospital for a week. I stopped worrying about being fat.