Hi Sharon,
I feel for you and understand precisely as I went through exactly the same. A son who accepted diabetes for a few years then hit puberty & with added mood swings and testosterone of growing up he rebelled big time. The total breakdown in trust between us damaged the family beyond belief. Like your son he started lying about testing, injecting and what he was eating & went through major DKA & hypos as well as repeated hospital admissions as a result of his issues in the next few years, as well as a few smashed windows from the permanant anger. It has taken 6 years for him to rebuild relationships and start talking to me about his diabetes again. The good news is that at 20 he is now (almost) coping perfectly, living independently and leaving the country for a gap year working in south america at the end of the month and we trust him to manage.
I have listed below what I had learnt after a few years of hell. It may not be true for all diabetic boys, but it is what eventually worked for mine.
What helped:-
1. Follow nice guidelines for children over 8 years which says and try to get him to take control of his own food and dosage. This is hard as you are used to knowing what he was doing precisely but the faster he starts taking his own decisions the better all round. Accept that he may not get it right but not quite right from his own decisions is way better than very ill from lying about "doing as he was told" - which he can then blame on you and cause an argument.
2. Allow him to increase his insulin as much as is needed to bring the blood sugars down to the normal range. - The impact of hormones can reduce it's effectiveness & as long as the sugars are off the scale your life will be hell. My son ended up at aged 14 on twice the daily dose his diabetic team had recommended only 5 months earlier & it helped no end control the blood sugars and hence the anger. I~wish I had allowed him to increase it at 12 when the trouble first started.
3. Except that growing teenage boys have "hollow legs" and will be permanently hungry & actually need the food to grow. Restricting his food during a growth spurt ( as we were recommended to do by our ignorant diabetic team at the time) will just stunt his growth permanently and is the one mistake I made that I regret to this day when my adult son is 12" shorter than all his friends.
4. Encourage as much as possible more meat and veg in meals and less carbs, this will slow down the peaks and troughs in his life. We took to daily meals with decent joints & roasts as the smell of the cooking stopped him snacking on biscuits or bread after school & the food was lower G1 so stayed in his blood longer.
5. Accept that teens do not want to be different from friends when out so will eat whatever they are eating. Teach/allow him to work out himself what works and what dose he needs to deal with it. accept that if he gets it wrong he will feel ill & have to learn to deal with it.
6. Do not try to stop "treats" such as sweets and biscuits entirely as he will just eat them when out and lie to you. Far better to serve very small but delicious portion controlled puddings after a main meal so they have chance to digest more slowly with the main course and still makes him feel normal. ie chocolate& cream eclairs only have 10g of sugar in each & those tiny frozen party deserts look & taste fabulous yet have very little sugar as they are so small. Having it as part of a main meal makes him share the food with the rest of the family so he cannot binge on an entire cake etc alone.
7. I kept all biscuits or puddings out of sight, either in the freezer or if not frozen, locked in my car boot & only brought out enough for the meal at hand at any one time. this prevents absent minded snacking pushing blood sugars up without needing to. Have a readily available range of zero sugar snacks such as pepperami or fridge raiders as well as the typical cheese & carrot sticks in the fridge which make no difference to blood sugars.
8. Encourage exercise, any, even walking into town and back after school is enough to level out high blood sugars. Often when he is very angry due to high blood sugars letting him go off on his own for a few hours is the best thing you can do. Remember if he has high blood sugars he is not going to come to any harm in a few hours. ( hypos have fast onsets but don't have the anger, the DKA that comes from high blood sugars which are the main reason for the anger take 12 hours or more to happen so a few hours playing playing football int he park or just wandering round alone will not bring him to any harm & will probably bring the sugars down enough to be able to return home in a better mood.
9 If he does end up in hospital try to Invite his friends to visit him in hospital each time he gets admitted & quietly explain to them why he is there & ask for their help in encouraging him. peer pressure is much better than parently pressure. This will also help if/when he next gets ill when older & they will realize the symptoms of throwing up on the pavement may not just be alcohol poisoning & maybe someone should call you( my son first got very drunk at 15 as part of that rebellion & yes someone called me).
10. MOST IMPORTANT
Learn to stop worrying about his diabetes - "bad news travels" as I was told. If he is really ill someone will tell you I guarantee.
Worrying about him will possibly make him worse & it will wear you down so that all your conversations become about only food or injections and you lose the happy family conversations about everything else and he will only become more resentful & deliberately go against whatever you and the team suggest. (Rebelling against parents is an evolutionary trait common to all races of human, best not to fight it. )
If you really can't stop worrying, just try not to show him that you are worried. Allow him to go out with friends, eat what he wants and inject when he wants. you may have to pick up the pieces occasionally but making mistakes with a bunch of school friends around to call his mum is way better than not learning and making those mistakes as an adult when their may be no friends around. Long term the poor control is not good but the faster he learns wisdom to realise he must look after himself independently on a daily basis the less time he will spend in this dangerous blood sugars bouncing off the scale phase.
You can teach him anything except wisdom, which he must learn by his own mistakes.
If all else fails my son tells me he was recently contacted by a university research team to ask if they could use his medical notes from his teenage years as a case study, someone out there has documented and analysed what they think went wrong in his life. Remember you are not the only mum going through this & will not be the last.
Prioritize your own happiness & try to find other things to think about other than him, as the best thing you can do it to have the energy to help when he finally asks for it (which eventually he will). In a few years you will look back at just a bad few years & he will have grown up a bit.
Good luck,
