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Melissa Zimmermann will never forget the day her 15-month-old son, Carter, was air-lifted by ambulance?unresponsive and not breathing well?from a regional hospital in Red Deer to Alberta Children?s Hospital. In the intensive care unit, surrounded by multiple IV lines and monitors, ?the doctor told us it was type 1 diabetes, and from that moment our lives changed completely.?
According to the Canadian Pediatric Society, 33,000 Canadian children ages 5 to 18 (which works out to roughly 1 in 195 children) have type 1 diabetes1?and a diagnosis like that can be incredibly stressful, not only for the child who is diagnosed, but for everyone in the family. In a 2020 global study conducted by Abbott, the makers of the FreeStyle Libre 2 flash glucose monitoring system, 93 percent of parents said they were distressed by the diagnosis while almost half of the children in the study said they perceive their illness as being a burden on their family2. Experts say that a child?s anxiety about the condition often increases in school and public places. So how do you manage the stress of a diabetes diagnosis" Here are five ways to bring some peace of mind.
Learn more about it: After the initial diagnosis, Zimmermann and her husband went through a massive crash course in the management and treatment of diabetes, provided both by their son?s diabetes team and through the JDRF. ?As you go through it and learn how to manage it, you see that diabetes doesn?t...