Tristan Update

Lot's of people have how he's doing, so I thought I'd post an update.

All in all, he's managing pretty well. He seems to have accepted this new thing in his life with not too much fuss. He occasionally has a moment here or there where he's frustrated, but we're working through it.

Our big issue has been low blood sugars. He can't go to bed if his sugar is below 100. Blood sugar tends to drop during the night, so he needs to be high enough to account for that. A couple times over the break, his sugar just would NOT come up. One night, he was up until 1:30 am!
So, we've adjusted when and how he takes his insulin, and so far, it seems to be working. We're in what they call the "honeymoon period" where some cells in his pancreas are still making insulin, but not the way they're supposed to or in any predictable pattern. Over the next 3-12 months, those cells will die off as the disease progresses, and then he'll lose his "free" 15 carb snacks......of course, for a 12 yo, 15 carbs is NOTHING. The kid eats like 5 meals a day right now! LOL!

He's doing more things away from us, which has been a bit hard on me, but he's got to learn to do it eventually. So far, he hasn't gone on any Scout campouts without Bruce, but I'm sure that's coming this spring. We had scheduled a quick training session for Scouts last night, but the roads were horrid so Scouts was cancelled. Everyone Tristan works with is more than willing to learn what they need to do to help him manage, and that feels really good. Our church folks have been amazingly supportive through it all.

And we've got one set of neighbors where it's a "knock and walk" relationship....she knows where my spices are, has a key to my house and so forth, and I'm that way at hers. We've chatted with them about what to do for Tristan in an emergency and all of that as well because we do leave the kids home alone for an hour or two here and there.

Quick Alana funny.......We've got an injection that would need to be given to Tristan if he passes out. We told the girls about it when we first got home from the hospital, as in, If we're not home........Well, Alana heard only the first sentence or so and ran away screaming! ROFL! Tristan and I both decided that we'd like to do that too, if only we could.

We had a follow-up visit with the endocrinologist yesterday. Tristan's A1C was 8.7%. That's a measure of how well blood sugar has stayed within the "normal" range over the last three months. Good control is 7% or lower. Considering that Tristan was only diagnosed 5 weeks ago, this is a GREAT number. My hunch is that the disease really came on quickly. He'd also gained over 17 lbs since his hospitalization...we think he'd lost about 10 lbs before diagnosis, so that's good news too.

So, yeah, we're adjusting and moving on. Estimating carb content is getting easier, though I need to organize the mountains of paperwork we've got related to this and get rid of a bunch of stuff that really isn't relevant, etc. Maybe next week? LOL!