My Son doesnt want to accept

Hi Sharon, My son is not diabetic, so this is just my take on it, I can't imagine how stressful this must be for you, I'm sure it will get better, do you think he might benefit from a pump? Also I hear that for young people it might be easier (postcode depending) to get a CGM funded by NHS, I know it should come from him to care about it, but these tools might go some way in helping to automate a bit the process?

Best luck, I'm sure it's just a phase

hi im scott from Scotland /been tye 1 for 33 years and now on pump due to complications/ive been thrugh a lot over those years /im now on insulin pump /had 2 toes amputated have severe nureopathy /poor sight and kidney failure/youre son is rebelling against his illness and cant /wont accept/I am going to have a meeting with kids and diabetes and the dangerous time when so young/between 13 and 19 I rebelled and wasn't caring its not until later in life that the young years catch up/be blunt with him and explain to him all the dangers it has to be done keep telling him you don't take youre not illness his condition more serious he will DIE AND BE BLUNT/I was in a coma for 2 weeks after not taking my insulin for days and they thought I wouldn't pull through but I did and in intensive care of all the drips etc and the doc came in right to my face and said bluntly YOU DONT TAKE YOURE INSULIN YOU WILL DIE/and that gave me a BIG fright and I grew up fast/im going to speak to type 1 kids with the rebelling years locally/it may seem cruel but at the same time you could be saving his life he needs informed also it may not be affecting him just now but believe me later in life it WILL CREEP UP ON HIM DRASTICALLY /my brother died at an early age due to not taking care of his condition/keep reminding him and be blunt go onto a website diabetic complications and sho him the gory side/tell him of this weeks subject here /dead in bed syndrome as my brother passed over with thisyou must be blunt and do it nice but serious/hope ive helped /good luck

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,

Hi, I'm a type 1 diabetic for 5 years now and I am nearly 18. My diabetes was very poor the past 2/3 years, I struggled with it so much and being honest I still do. All that he is doing sneaking and lying I done it all myself, it is a hard condition to live with but you have to be very strict on him, he will have many complications in time. Kidney failure, heart failure any many more will come to him, sit him down and look them up and show him how important it is to take your insulin. I have went days without taking insulin and I Had really bad DKA's and they are not nice. I was in one for 9 days and the hospital said I was lucky for the 9th time. One DKA can kill someone. He can still go out and play with friends once he takes his insulin, it's only 30 seconds. Its something easy that he can live with if he does do what he's supposed to. I suffer from some complications( kidneys and heart) and its not nice and I wouldn't like to see a young man or anybody go through what I do, I on the road to recovery and I feel great again. I learned in life that it's something you have to live with, it won't kill you or be a bother if he does what he is supposed to do. What I say to myself is "take it, it's nothing, then I can do what I want". Another thing is tell him "there is worse cases out there and diabetes is not one of the bad ones". I hope this helps and he starts taking care of himself

when I was diagnosed a long time ago ( I was 14 ) my doctors basically frightened the life out of me by vividly telling me and showing me in pictures the things that could happen were I not to look after myself
It worked for me ( it is harsh I know )
and some may disagree and say he is not mature enough to have that thrust upon him
perhaps get him to google this stuff himself
I really feel for you though -- it cannot be easy

My son took it in stride, very courageous young man. It is his mom who is afraid about his future. May I ask if you also did some insulin adjustments during your teen years? Like increasing your insulin dosage and I:C? We we're advised by endo to do so, but I still noticed some patterns of high readings for some days now. We couldn't get our doctor on the since she's on leave. I might do some tweaking in his insulin needs maybe?

ivm18 said:

My son took it in stride, very courageous young man. It is his mom who is afraid about his future. May I ask if you also did some insulin adjustments during your teen years? Like increasing your insulin dosage and I:C? We we're advised by endo to do so, but I still noticed some patterns of high readings for some days now. We couldn't get our doctor on the since she's on leave. I might do some tweaking in his insulin needs maybe?

Click to expand...

hi ivm18
no I did not do any insulin adjustment back in those days -- the synthetic and analogue insulins that are in use today did not exist back in 1972
back then 2 porcine insulins got mixed together and given as 1 injection per day

Was it difficult? I mean what did you do when your blood sugar is high and you need to correct? My son is on MDI (was on a pump for only 4 days) and yet sometimes we find it difficult to get normal numbers even after some corrections. I guess hormones and stress in school works have some effects on why his level is all over the place atm.

ivm18 said:

Was it difficult? I mean what did you do when your blood sugar is high and you need to correct? My son is on MDI (was on a pump for only 4 days) and yet sometimes we find it difficult to get normal numbers even after some corrections. I guess hormones and stress in school works have some effects on why his level is all over the place atm.

Click to expand...

there were no corrections back then -- just time

keep talking to us as well -- hopefully the post will gather some more momentum as others read it and may have some further ideas

is there a young persons diabetic group anywhere near you ?
or I think Diabetes UK may run camps for young peeps with D
or possibly try www.jdrf.ork.uk - they may have some support they can offer ( good diabetic organisation )

Hi @sharon3570, My son has type 1 diabetes too, just diagnosed 4 months ago, we are still new to this. Maybe if you could take back again a bit of responsibilities of managing his disease, like you can check his BG and give him his insulin every morning? or whenever possible that you can check him?

sharon3570 said:

Thank you for your comments,and yes i have tried the nice sympathetic approach and the not so nice,i have tried talking,shouting, crying,i have shown him photos and have recorded things on the tv to show him,i have gave him insentives ie, treats,days out spending money etc if he just tries to make a little effort all these dont make the slightest difference to him.
I really have tried everything i can possibly do.
Only yesterday a friend rang me to say they had seen him playing out with a huge bar of chocolate,i didnt give him money!!
I ask him and he went mad,he just doesnt seem to realise the dangers and implications.But again what can i do?? I cant keep him locked in his bedroom!
The only positive thing is that his diabetes nurse is fully aware of this as she see visits every 2 weeks and sees it for herself which to be honest is a godsend as prior to this i was getting the " you should be doing this,that etc" and nothing i said made a difference.Thnk you will try some of the suggestions.

Click to expand...

Hi,

Here's my tactful take on it.. No lad likes to see his mum upset. So here he is with something that dominates every aspect of his life through no fault of his own.
Someone reports him for eating chocolate.. The undercurrent in the home is worry & fear for his long term health. At that age he can neither see past Christmas, let alone the future ramifications of bad control.. There maybe talks "over his head" at the D clinics too? He hasn't broken any laws..
Just casting my mind back to that age.. No internet then. Like @himtoo at that age I heard the horror stories. but thought it "urban myth." Until i broke into a student nurse's room to read her medical books while she was out clubbing, taking control back on the situation.. That as my wake up call.!

nice shout @Jaylee -- times are so different now as to then because of the changes to medications and the internet
Kids are so much more savvy

@sharon3570 - if I had upset my mother when I was that age I would have been devastated
can you use the psychology card to its max and genuinely tell him how much you love him -- and don't want to have his future ruined by complications -- I know many many tears will flow but could it be a turning point ?
i know I cried my eyes out along with my parents many times in the first few years post diagnosis
I am getting tears here now just thinking of your son -- i bloody wish I could make myself an apparition that could appear anywhere to chat as an outsider in these sort of situations -- I often wonder if that could be the key as sometimes family can be too close
please tell your son a diabetic man who is 57 and has been diabetic for 43 years is sending his best wishes for his future and that he hopes he will learn to accept that he is normal but with a few extra checks than other lads and that he hopefully wants to live to be happy and old like the 57 year old man