She’s bravely battling diabetes

“EAT lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise every day and diabetes will go go go…” sang three-year-old Kiara Lumsden to the tune of a popular nursery rhyme as she jiggled her small frame while having lunch, consisting of a small serving of rice and peas, baked chicken and lettuce.

Despite her carefree attitude, Kiara leads a very restricted life. Each day for her begins the same way it ends, with a needle piercing her delicate skin. She takes insulin three times daily to treat her type one diabetes and is pricked another six times to test her blood glucose level. At just three, she can recite the nutritional contents on a favourite snack as she would her alphabet, and her bedtime is at 12 midnight following her sixth test.

The thought that her daughter’s life has been forever altered by a disease now targeting the youngest among us, is never far from her mother’s mind.

“Initially when I just found out, even after a year later, I was crying about her illness and everything. The first time when I heard that they (diabetics) could go blind, and you know they might have amputations, of course I started freaking out,” said Kiara’s mother Maudielaine March. But with increased knowledge of the disease, her fears have been allayed and she is more optimistic about her daughter’s future.

“If the diabetes is managed well, she will not have any problems with her eyes, she will not have any foot problems, so I am just teaching her how to care for herself and just to make sure that her blood sugar is controlled,” she said.

March, a 29-year-old medical student at the University of the West Indies, Mona, said her daughter started showing signs of diabetes at age two. Having taught biology at both Vere Technical and Wolmer’s Boys for a combined six years, the mother had some inkling that something was amiss after her daughter lost weight drastically in a short space of time, and was barely able to summon the energy to play with relatives.

“I said to my aunt that I think the baby has diabetes, because she woke up every night asking for water, she had lost weight and she was drinking more than normal,” March relayed, while admitting that despite the obvious symptoms, she failed to see then how a two-year-old could be diabetic.

Highly concerned, she brought her to the hospital, only to be told after a few checks that Kiara was okay. But still not convinced, March asked the doctors to do a diabetes test after considering the fact that some of her older relatives have been struck by the disease. It was then that her worst fears were realised — her only child was diabetic.

Kiara moved from one hospital to the next following her diagnosis. She was admitted at both the May Pen Hospital and the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) for a short period of time as doctors tried to get her high blood sugar level under control. She now visits UHWI every six weeks and the Yale Paediatric Diabetic Centre (YPDC) in the United States twice annually for treatment.

While it was hard getting Kiara to accept her daily shots in her arm, thigh and buttocks initially, March said the three year old is now getting the hang of it, to the point where she is even administering her own insulin under adult supervision.

“There are times when she is still fussy, so we do things like rewarding her with cool band aids, like the ‘Barbie’, the ‘Spongebob’ and the ‘Dora’ band-aids. When we give her the shots, we put a band-aid on,” she said before Kiara piped in, “And Diego too!”

The band-aids and the stickers which Kiara sported while dining at the visitor’s lounge of the Mary Seacole Hall at UWI on All Woman’s recent visit, are suggestions from the paediatricians at YPDC.

March boards at the university, which means that Kiara is cared for by her grandmother at her home in Clarendon for the most part.

“The first semester at Med school was very hard, because mommy didn’t know as much as she knows now about diabetes,” said March, “So every day at 10:00 am, I would get a call. She would be like ‘the baby blood sugar level is this, what should I do now’ and by evening, I would get another call and by night, I would get another call, so I had to be monitoring the baby’s blood sugar as well as trying to do my work.”

But everyone it seems is now getting the hang of caring for Kiara, even her kindergarten teacher who does her blood sugar testing while she is at school.

“All the children, they are used to her and she has friends who understand. I tell her if teacher says that your sugar is high, share the food with your friends so that you don’t eat too much,” shared March.

The medical student, who wants to be a paediatrician, said it is still not clear how her daughter became diabetic at such a young age.

“It’s an auto-immune disease. They don’t know what really causes it and it can happen to anybody,” she said, before theorising: “She probably had a viral infection and her auto immune system would try to destroy the virus cells, but the antigens on the virus is similar to the cells of her pancreas, so it cannot differentiate between the virus and the pancreatic cells, so it just destroys everything.”

The mother is yet to see another diabetic as young as her daughter although she has been told of a 11-month-old baby who had been treated at YPDC for the same thing. Doctors believe that Kiara could have been diabetic since she was one year old.

March wishes there was a support group for mothers of diabetic children, especially now that the face of diabetes is changing. For parents whose children have already been struck by the disease, she said it is very important that they seek the support and advice of a dietician and other parents of diabetic children.