A friend's kid started bed wetting right after the cat died.

[conuly]

Because this friend is a few years older than I am, she didn't immediately start the panic about diabetes, which it turned out to be. If she'd asked me, I would've immediately flashed back to that BSC book and told her. Say what you like about the outdated information in the babysitters club, it would've been caught a few weeks sooner if she had been young enough to read them when they came out.

And now I feel all bad, because I saw this kid two weeks ago and loaded her up on ice cream. You're not supposed to do that with diabetics, right? Well, nobody knew then.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I never read those books, but half my relatives are diabetic, so the bedwetting/diabetes possibility might have occurred to me, depending on the child's age and connection to the cat. The cat's death could be a factor if the cat had been accostomed to sleep with the child, so that the child slept more soundly through the night without it - cats do tend to wake one up around dawn.

Diabetes isn't really a 'panic' kind of disease like, say, leukemia. It's easily tested for, the protocols for managing it are well-established; it's not swiftly fatal - usually not fatal at all; not even debilitating if one follows one's regimen.

Diabetics can have ice cream. Diabetics can even have ice cream with maple syrup. It's just that if they do, they've blown most of their carbohydrate allowance for the day on fast-burning, not-very-nutritious carbs. The healthy pancreas continually supplies the right amount of insulin to deal with whatever carbs one eats - the diabetic pancreas doesn't. Therefore, either the diet has to be very low-carb so one's reduced insulin production can handle it, or if one's insulin production is not adequate, then insulin has to be artificially supplied.

The thing about that is, if one is insulin-dependent, one has to take the shots exactly on schedule, which means one has to eat on schedule, and eat the correct amount of carbs. Too few, and one falls right over - this is why insulin-dependent diabetics all carry an emergency snack; when they need to eat, they need to eat right then, not in 15 minutes. Of course, if they have to eat the snack because supper's late, then they're not going to be able to eat all their supper, because x dose of insulin requires y amount of carbs.

Diabetics who aren't on insulin have more latitude - it's just a matter of cutting back the carbs to a level the body can handle, and having reasonably regular mealtimes. (Don't get me started on the rant about certain diabetics who refuse to do either of these. "I hadn't eaten all day, so I HAD to get ice cream": grrr, what is wrong with this picture?)

Taking in more carbs than the body has insulin to metabolize results in high blood sugar - high glucose levels in the blood. This isn't the same kind of 'sugar' as table sugar - the carbohydrates in a carrot turn into glucose, the same as the carbs in a brownie do. But too much glucose in the blood causes damage to the nerves and blood vessels over time, which can lead to neuropathy, blindness and gangrene of the feet.

Children are usually Type 1 diabetics, which means injected insulin and a lifetime of eating what one is supposed to, when one is supposed to. Therefore, I think it's wonderful that you loaded your young friend up on ice cream before her diagnosis, and I hope she's old enough to remember it, because it was probably the last time in her life she'll ever get to eat all the ice cream she wants without counting the cost.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

See, I'm probably younger than your friend - and never read those books - so I wouldn't initially have thought of diabetes at all; I would've thought the kid was missing the cat so badly that it was falling back into nappy days. (Well, depending on the kid's age, of course.)

But hey. The son of a friend of ours (who was trained as a nurse!) was drinking absurd amounts and feeling utterly fatigued for weeks before she told someone else, who immediately suggested diabetes. Parents apparently are often blind to the (relatively) obvious, even if they have the background knowledge!