Fifth Grader Surmounts the Odds
By Alan & Sharon Lubin
Helena Lubin
Just a little more than one year ago, our granddaughter, Helena, was diagnosed with Type I diabetes. Helena is 10 ½ years old and a 5th grader at Karigon Elementary School in the Shenendehowa school district, in Clifton Park, NY, demonstrating a great talent in art.
After a brief hospital stay, she had to be injected six to eight times a day with insulin and had to prick her fingers often to monitor her glucose levels—all because her pancreas stopped producing the insulin needed to live.
Within two months, she switched to an insulin pen for the injections, and within a few more months, she switched to an insulin pump that has a pod that is required to be attached to her arm, leg or stomach by injection and taped on for two to three days. In addition, she now has a glucose monitor attached in a similar fashion to track the trends of her glucose. With these wonderful advances, she has gone from more that 55 actual injections a week to fewer than ten (plus finger pricks).
You never see Helena without her pocketbook filled with the Bluetooth monitors, test strips and the other equipment she must have with her whenever she leaves home. She still cannot eat anything without following a mathematical formula that must be changed often as she grows up. Yet she still smiles most of the time.
This disease can be cured in her lifetime if the research continues.
Helena and her parents, Annette and Evan, will again be participating in the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) Walk to Cure Diabetes in Albany. We hope you will join us in supporting JDRF in the research needed to find a cure for this life threatening disease.
Here is the link to Helena’s team page: http://www2.jdrf.org/goto/Sweet4Cure#
