After I go to bed, my Mum and Aunty Liz often stay up late and chat away on MSN Messenger. Liz usually checks to see if I’ve been ok, and Mum checks to see if she and her husband, James are OK. James and I both have Type 1 Diabetes and even though he is a man and I am a boy, we have some similar problems with hypos.
My Mum and Aunty Liz both do the shopping when it comes to buying Diabetes supplies for James and me. They pick up our scripts and make sure we have enough of everything to keep our glucometers working. Mum and Liz also give each other tips on how to treat a hypo. James usually has softdrink, milk or something High GI to eat, where as Mum usually gives me glucose tablets. There are only two types of glucose tablets available in Queensland and Tasmania, and maybe the whole of Australia. After 5 years of Diabetes, if I am really low, I HATE chewing these chalky white tablets. They are called Glucodin, and we have bought so many packets in my life that I could draw the picture on the box! (The other ones are a big square shape and they are too big for me to eat; by the time I am finished eating one, my blood sugar has dropped lower.)
So Aunty Liz went hunting on the net. She found a place in America (!!!) called Fifty50 Pharmacy that sell different flavours of glucose tablets!! They have raspberry, grape, orange and even watermelon flavours!
This week, I ran out to get the mail. I found a strange package in the postbox; it was all lumpy and felt like it had little bottles inside of it. It had my name on it! I quickly rushed inside and showed my Mum. I looked on the back and saw that it was from Aunty Liz! I pulled really hard and found four bottles of RASPBERRY (my favourite) glucose tablets!!! They came in little tubes and when I opened each tube, the smell made my mouth water. Mum said that I was allowed to try half of one. Even if I didn’t have diabetes, I would eat these. They are just like lollies and it’s so exciting to have something new and yummy for when I have hypos. Aunty Liz bought some for James, too. She picked Grape flavour for him, so she sent some grape ones for me to try also.
I have had two bad hypos since I got them and they have helped me within minutes. They work so fast, and I can feel them pulling me out of the hypo. They don’t let me sink into it too far. Tonight, I was at the supermarket with my Dad and I crashed into a whole shelf of M&M’s. A sneaky hypo tapped me on the shoulder and made me brain send strange messages to my legs without me being able to help it. Dad quickly tested my blood sugar, and I was 2.2mmol/L. He popped open my glucose tablets and I crunched up two as quickly as I could. I felt better pretty much straight away. The funny thing about this hypo is that I was in the lollie aisle when it happened! 
My Aunty Liz is so kind to me. I know it’s strange to be excited about glucose tablets, but the day I got them was a really good day.
In this photo, Lance is showing off his new hypo treatment. These raspberry glucose tablets were ordered from America, arrived in Australia and sent to my friend, Liz in Tasmania. She then sent Lance a package containing 50 of them to us in Queensland. Between currency exchanges, shipping charges and postage, it was a slightly expensive but highly worthwhile exercise.
There are 140 000 people with Type 1 Diabetes in Australia, and that number is rapidly growing. The general rule when diagnosed is to treat a hypo with 6 large jelly beans or 8 small ones. It’was only after a while that I discovered glucose tablets and was amazed at how well they worked in comparison to jellybeans. Lance is prone to hypos where he is becomes very disorientated, scared and confused, and it is often a struggle to get him to eat anything, especially something that he has grown tired of. One of these tablets will at least make him cooperate with me enough that he will drink something sweet or eat something that will reverse the hypo.
I find it stupendous that we have to resort to ordering child-friendly diabetes products from the US!!! People with Diabetes deserve a choice too, especially when so much of their lives revolves around flavour and taste! Jelly beans work for some people with diabetes, however, every person is different, they have different hypo symptoms and have different recovery times. Lance has symptoms that are very different to a lot of other children that we have met. I am ecstatic that Liz bothered to research where we could order a different brand, and despite having to resort to ordering from America, I’m so glad she did, because three potentially difficult hypos were halted by these delicious discs of pure glucose.
Diabetes management isn’t an easy road to follow. It takes hours of research, hundreds of conversations and pages of reading to get current, helpful information and useful tips. I am so relieved that we have discovered something that is highly beneficial to assisting my son through these severe attacks, but there is also an element of sadness when I look back on his delight of discovering that he had aquired new glucose tablets. I found him that same night, studying a poster of the continents, and tracing his finger from the United States over to Australia. To order these 50 tablets cost approximately AUS$30.
I would happily invest every cent I owned into anything that helped or relieved his difficult and devastating days where hypoglycaemia sets in and drains his body of energy, leaving him with terrible headaches, fatigue and ironically, high blood sugar, a result from consuming so much sugar to reverse a hypo in the first place. It’s a horrible and exhausting vicious circle.
Insulin is not a cure.
