News on Megan

Well, this wasn't the blog update I originally had intended. My plan was to put in some pics of my brother's wedding and Annika and Lauren as bell-ringing girl and flower girl. Maybe some other tidbits on Emily and Meg.

Well, that got changed about 15 minutes ago when I thought about the blog.

Yesterday I took 16-month-old Megan to the ER at Swedish Covenant Hospital because of a fever she had and seeming pain I couldn't treat at home. After several hours there, some chest x-rays and urine tests, the diagnosis was Type 1 diabetes.

Type 1 is insulin-dependent so Megan will have to have shots for the rest of her life. It wasn't brought on by anything we did or didn't do or feed her. This kind of thing can be hereditary (although we don't really have any type 1 running in either of our families) or an affect of the auto-immune fighting itself. If there was a weakness in the pancreas, diabetes can be brought on by a viral infection which might be our case. The infection didn't cause the diabetes--just kind of pushed the pancreas over the edge.

We seem to have caught it early. Megan didn't have diabetic ketoacidosis which is really bad. It's when the body can't use sugar for energy so it starts destroying the fat. One problem with that is destroying the fat in this way creates ketones, a harmful toxin. If you get DKA, it takes awhile for the toxin to get out of your system. So we didn't have go to through that.

Megan is at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago. We're hoping she'll go home tomorrow after they figure out a good amount of insulin to give her each day to regulate her blood sugar levels.

We're praising God that this was caught early, that Megan has been such a trooper, and that it isn't something worse. Please pray for us as we regulate her sugars at home. This is new to us, obviously! But we're willing to tackle it!

By the way, our oh-so-amazing pediatrician, who I thought was supposed to be on vacation this week, showed up at the ER last night when the ER doc contacted him regarding Megan's history. Dr. Morse even talked to the endocrinology fellow here at Children's to find out next steps and see if there were any other med options for sky-high blood sugar other than diabetes (in someone Meg's age--not really). We're going to miss him in August when we move somewhere else!

Sorry--no pics. I'm writing this from the hospital and just don't have the camera handy! You'll just have to imagine cute saying like Lauren drawing a picture of a sad umbrella: "But he likes being sad." or Megan stripping to the buff and saying, "shake, shake, shake; shake, shake, shake; shake your booty" in two-year-old-ese. Or Megan walking, finally! or Annika informing us that she's past Cinderella. Jasmine is the princess for six-year-olds!