This post is the sixth in a series of true stories about children’s health care at WakeMed.
Holden was an average, healthy, nine-year-old boy who loved to play hockey. One day his parents, Stuart and Donna, noticed that their seemingly healthy boy was getting up to use the bathroom at night more frequently than usual. Although Stuart and Donna had no reason to believe anything was wrong, they decided to be safe and scheduled an appointment for their son to see his doctor.
Holden’s doctor ran some tests and they were shocked to find that he had juvenile diabetes. They were scared because they knew the seriousness of the condition. “It was our worst fears come true,” said Donna. 
Luckily for Holden, his doctor recommended he go to WakeMed Children’s Emergency Department. WakeMed’s pediatric diabetes team confirmed Holden’s condition right before he slipped into a diabetic coma.
Holden stayed in the hospital for several days. During this stressful time, Holden’s parents were warmly embraced by WakeMed Children’s culture of care – from the program’s registered dietitians, diabetes counselors and diabetes educators to nurses who specialize in the care of diabetic pediatric patients.
These specialized nurses taught Holden and his parents how to give insulin injections and test his blood. “Before he was hospitalized, he was scared to death of shots,” said Holden’s parents. “The nurse really did an awesome job of comforting him.”
After Holden’s stay at WakeMed Children’s, he was back on the ice in no time.
2 Comments
We were notified about this tweet by an alarmed community member. We know of and applaud your valuable program, but as someone who has taught diabetes management for 20 years, I believe that these types of “headlines” about diabetes being life-threatening and children almost dying do a disservice in the long run. We teach people every day who have found out they have diabetes and because of reading these types of stories, believe they have received a “death sentence”. Hope future tweets will be positive in nature about your wonderful program.
Ms. Hanchette. Thank you for taking time to bring this to our attention. We do realize that diabetes is not a “death sentence” and apologize if this came across as the tone of this tweet. We also agree that a better choice of words could have been used for this communication. In the future, we will make sure this is looked at closer to avoid any misrepresentation of our services to our followers. The intention of this tweet was to show a positive story about a young boy who was diagnosed with diabetes, and thanks to early intervention, he is living a happy, healthy life. We greatly appreciate the feedback from our followers and will work to ensure that future tweets are more accurate in their description.