Hi! I'm Izzy and I'm 11 years old.
I really like to do dance. I recently made it onto the competition team.
[Music]
We thought she had a stomach flu and it started to go longer than it would be normal for stomach
flu to go and I just started to have a sense of concern about what was happening. She lost a lot of
weight. But then she also started to tell me things like she was having some blurry vision. She was
feeling really thirsty. And, that you know she was just feeling really really unwell.
Type 1 Diabetes, which is more common among younger kids and younger people, occurs when
the organ in the body called the pancreas doesn't make enough insulin and insulin is
a hormone that mainly controls the blood sugars. It allows the sugars to go into the tissue,
So it keeps them in normal range. When the body can't get enough sugar in the tissues, it looks
for other forms of energy. One of those forms comes from breaking down fat and
eventually muscle and can be what's called ketones and those can make people very sick.
The treatment is really giving the body back the insulin that the body's not making enough of.
Unfortunately, we don't have a pill. The insulin doesn't come in a pill form, so the only way to
give it is as either an injection or as an insulin pump. You do have the option to get something
called a continuous glucose monitor which checks her blood sugar and we can see it on our phones
and see where she's headed. We also have an insulin pump, so instead of getting shots every day, we're
able to do that through a device that looks like a phone and she doesn't have to get a shot every
single time she needs insulin. So, before I was not feeling very like confident and me being
able to handle my own numbers and I felt like I wouldn't be able to do any of it on my own. I
feel like if I did start handling it by myself I would just end up completely failing at it.
But, after I came here and I've learned about everything,
I feel really confident in myself with handling my own diabetes. I've loved working with Dr. Levenson
and really the whole team because to me what I love about coming is that at times with diabetes,
you know, success or failure with diabetes isn't always clear and at times we feel like
we're failing and she kind of re-grounds me and brings me back to no you're doing great.
Like, this is all going very well. Taking care of diabetes is really challenging, but patients
and families are not alone in that. Especially, here in our group we have a really strong team
whose main goal is to support our patients and our families. So, you're never alone, and you can
do anything you ever wanted to do as a child. I am really optimistic for the future for Izzy. She has
shown us that we do have to think about things a little more. She can do anything that she wants to
do we just have to put a little thought into it to get through the diabetes part.
You're going to have some good and bad days and like you're not going to be able to stop that from
happening, but I think don't give up hope, like being able to live like a normal life as a kid.