Fast forward a little over 2 years to December of 2013. After 2 years of 5 shots per day, 6+ finger pokes/BS tests a day, and roughly 10 doctor visits the message from the doctor was the same. Samuel's A1C (3-month average BS) was almost that of a non-diabetic. They've repeatedly told us he has one of the most controlled BS of all their patients. While that was good to know, we felt there was still room to improve - there were still too many lows and too many highs that we couldn't control with 5 shots a day. It was time for a pump.
There are a lot of pumps to choose from and Dan researched all them. Many aren't approved for people under the age of 16, so that narrowed our options. It was also important to know what was happening with his BS between his 6+ finger pokes per day. A special device called a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) shows us his BS (sort of, but I won't bore you with details) which allows us to look at his pump any time we want and see his BS and a graph shows us if he's trending up or down. Pumps have a learning curve to them, but after 3 months, we're fairly fine tuned now. Samuel definitely likes not getting 5 shots a day now, but he doesn't love removing the infusion set (how the insulin is delivered) or the CGM sensor. Here's what Samuel has to live with 24/7...
Since he's little, he wears a belt that holds his pump. (I'm not willing to take a chance of his pump going into the toilet while he goes potty). Most adults would just wear this with a belt clip, like a cell phone and he'll have that option when he's older. You see the hose going from the pump to the infusion set on the left?... this is how the insulin (in the pump) gets into his body via a thin catheter. There's a slow drip that constantly administers insulin to his body (just like your/my pancreas does). On the right is his CGM sensor. There's a tiny catheter that goes into his skin, with enzymes on it that "sense" what his BS is. It's not 100% accurate because it's not using blood, but more importantly we can look at his graph and see how he's trending. The CGM part is a little groundbreaking... his doctors office has no other patients under the age of 16 that have a CGM. We just had his first checkup since going on the pump and his A1C was the same as the last visit. Not great in our book, but not bad either. We expected the first few months to be higher while we tweaked his settings, so I'm encouraged that we will get better.
Even though he's young, we try to teach him a lot about his disease and he's gotten use to the pump and CGM. It's interesting though because he still remembers the shots. Just the other day, he and Evie were coloring and all of a sudden he said "Oh no, Evie, you need your shot!" I looked up from what I was doing and found him "checking" Evie's sugar (with a colored pencil)...
and then announced that she needed a "shot" (again, with a colored pencil)...
The fact that diabetes ends up in their play time doesn't really surprise me, but for some reason these two pictures put me through a range of emotions. On one hand I'm so proud of how he handles this (granted, he doesn't know any different) and it also shows just how resilient and adaptive toddlers are. But the next time I look at it, I'm nearly in tears because it's something he'll have to endure the rest of his life (and I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say it's something that impacts our whole family). The fact someone so innocent (ornery, but innocent) has to deal with this is sometimes hard for me to process. And although I pray every day that he'll be healed, we feel as though God has something in store for him (or us) via this disease. What that will be... time will only tell.
