Mich. teen copes with Type 2 diabetes along with COVID-19
High school is hard enough when you’re healthy and strong. But when it’s difficult to breathe and take steps because of nerve damage, when you’re crippled by anxiety and living through a pandemic, it is even harder.
Still, Nicaja Taylor, 14, tried to be optimistic in early August as she pedaled an exercise bike during a physical therapy session, looking ahead to the day later that month when she’d walk into Wyoming High School for the first time.
“I’m very excited about that, but also very nervous. I have never even seen the inside of the school before,” she said. “It has two floors, and it’s a big school, so I’m afraid I’ll get lost.”
Nicaja – who loves anime, Marvel movies and fantasy novels – also is worried she might not be able to handle the stairs at her new school in the western Michigan city that borders Grand Rapids.
She had asthma before she contracted the coronavirus in April and was hospitalized for a week.
“It wasn’t too bad at first,” she said. “I kept going back to the hospital because I couldn’t breathe . ... The last time I went there, I really couldn’t breathe and I had to be on an oxygen machine. And then, I think that next day, I was in the ICU.”
When it came time for her to leave Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital, Nicaja couldn’t walk. She had nerve pain in her left leg. She was so tired, all she wanted to do was sleep.
And she was coping with an altogether new diagnosis: Type 2 diabetes. The anxiety that had nagged her most of her life was at an all new level.
“In the beginning, it was a lot just to take in,” said her mother, Jovonne Taylor. “I was stressed … and if your child is not doing well, you’re not doing well.”
Nicaja needed to spend a week at a rehabilitation hospital to build strength and recover before she could go home.
“Her degree of disability ... was much more than expected with her lung infection and likely exacerbated by long COVID-19 effects,” said Dr. Doug Henry, a pediatric physiatrist who treated Nicaja at Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital.
She had lung tissue damage from the virus that compromised her body’s ability to oxygenate her blood, he said, and her obesity put increased pressure on a nerve in her leg.
“We do not know for sure if her COVID-19 infection caused her diabetes, but the time frame is there,” Henry said. “There is evidence that COVID-19 can do this.”
Nicaja and her mom have now fallen into a rhythm. They’re eating better, exercising and coming regularly to outpatient therapy. But it wasn’t easy getting from that panicked April to August.
“COVID does weird things to people,” Jovonne said.
“We’re just trying to help Nicaja right now cope with her feelings. She has coping skills, but sometimes she says, ‘I don’t want to use them.’ ”
One creative outlet for Nicaja has been poetry. She pulled a notebook from her backpack and read from one she’d recently written:
My legs are giving out. You can’t stop now. Body don’t give out, don’t let me down.
I am your mind. I march in line, keeping everything fine. I can’t breathe, waking up. I’m awake. It’s another day, another chance to change.