Lifetime of injections
Diabetes Action Month – Taranaki boy battles back
Ngaru Toa Moeke has 103,660 injections to look forward to – and that is if he is cautious.
The 10-year-old Taranaki boy started August healthy and fit.
But late in the month mum Laura Clarke noticed him looking ‘‘small’’ in a kapa haka performance. Back home she weighed him and realised he had lost 3kg in a month.
That was a Friday night and by Monday morning Google had given her a likely diagnosis of type 1 diabetes.
A simple finger prick test at hospital – ‘‘it took less than a minute’’ – and the internet diagnosis was proven correct. It also meant that Ngaru found out he had type 1 diabetes before going into a coma – often the first people know of the problem.
Now Ngaru has a life ahead of about four daily insulin injections and six to 10 finger prick tests – a simple test that measures whether glucose levels in the blood are at dangerous levels.
Assuming he lives until New Zealand’s life expectancy of 81 years, that will be 103,660 more self-administered jabs.
And that is the best-case scenario. If he doesn’t monitor his glucose levels religiously he faces kidney failure, heart failure, blindness or early death.
Clarke and Ngaru are going public with their story during Diabetes Action Month.
Clarke said they wanted to dismantle the belief that type 1 diabetes was caused by lifestyle choices (it isn’t) and to let people know what the symptoms were.
For Ngaru, these included passing more urine, thirst, and weight loss.
Diabetes is a chronic disease that means the pancreas is not able to make insulin, or can’t make good use of the insulin it produces, Diabetes NZ says.
Neither type 1 nor type 2 of diabetes can be cured, but both can be managed to allow people to live active and healthy lives. However, type 1s need insulin at least once a day.
While type 2 – by far New Zealand’s most common form of diabetes – can usually be prevented by living a healthy lifestyle, type 1 cannot be prevented.
Symptoms of type 1, a suddenonset auto-immune condition, include thirst, passing more urine, weight loss, tiredness, and mood changes.
They can also include abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, skin infections, thrush, extreme hunger, and poor concentration and performance.