I was on my way to school early in the morning and wasn't aware of how close the car was in front of me. When I registered the proximity of the car I slammed on my breaks, but still rear ended the car in front of me. I had no major injuries. The worst was that my head hit my headrest with force and I had a migraine, but NO big deal.
I went to school, came home, went to bed, blah blah blah. The next morning I woke up and realized I had wet the bed. Obviously wetting the bed at 17 is concerning, so my mom called my pediatrician who explained that wetting the bed is common after traumatic events. To be careful I went in for a minor checkup and my doctor discovered that I had a high blood sugar and my urine had a sugar content of +1. The high blood sugar was attributed to eating a sugary cereal for breakfast and the sugar content in my urine sample to the traumatic event (first car wreck). She said that I should come back in a week so that I could give another urine sample. That next week, my urine had a sugar content of +2. Here we go..
I was immediately being told that I needed to take a Glucose Tolerance Test at Children's Mercy Hospital. Children's Mercy Hospital is one of the best children's hospitals in the Midwest, so I could not get in right away..the next available appointment was in March.
March 2011
I was ready for my appointment. I was NOT diabetic. Mind over matter, right? Despite my positive attitude efforts, my fate became clear when after 2 hours into the test, my Blood Glucose came back at over 400. I could see the nurses looking at my results and whispering.
The nurses were not able to give me a diagnosis on the spot so I went sent home with some hope that the doctor reading over my test results would call in a few days and say "nope, you are in the clear!" I was anxious to receive the call because I was leaving in a couple of days to leave with classmates on a mission trip over spring break. I started to become very sick: fever, vomiting, diharrea, and probably more that I blocked out for my own well-being. I knew I had diabetes. Nothing felt right. I was hazy and exhausted. Ironically, the way I feel now during a high blood sugar. My mom told me that I needed to stop thinking about my test results. Thinking about the test results was making me physically sick. She was right, right? no.
I had to stay home from my mission trip because I had a 104 fever and could not stop vomiting. I hadn't been able to drink water and keep it down in 2 days. My doctor threatened to put me in the hospital if I didn't get some liquids in me. Well, I couldn't and I ended up being ambulanced to Children's Mercy Hospital in ice blankets to get my fever down.
Turns out that I had been a Type 1 Diabetic since January. During the past few months, my immune system had grown so weak that I contracted a disease called: Kawasaki. If you know anything about this disease or do any research you will find out that the disease targets children under 6 with an Asian background. At 17, I did not fit either of those criteria.
I ended up being hospitalized for 2 weeks, missing my entire trip and almost my Junior year prom. The doctors did a lot of talking with my parents and not as much with me because my eye sight and hearing were sensitive due to the Kawasaki. During my stay my Glucose Tolerance Test results came back and I was diabetic.
I’m not sure if I was oblivious or just trying to ignore the situation, but throughout my stay nobody ever sat me down, looked at me and told me what I had become. It wasn’t until a few days before my discharge that a nurse walked into my room with a needle, handed it to me and said “okay, its your turn,” that I started to get the picture. I asked her why I needed to inject myself when she had been doing my injections all along. That is when she said that I needed to practice in front of medical staff to show that I was capable of doing injections by myself at home. I then realized that this disease wasn’t being cured during my hospital stay but that it was actually coming home with me and was becoming a part of my daily life. That is the one distinct moment that tore my life into 2 parts: before and after.
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