Again, Elissa being part of the conference was a big drawcard for me. I first read about Elissa and her amazing ways with her family a couple of years ago, and the company she started in order to make products for kids with diabetes, Diabete-Ezy.

For those of you who are less familiar with Elissa – here’s a quick background on her. Married to Australian Rugby League fella Steve Renouf (they were high school sweethearts), Elissa has five children: four boys and one girl. Three of the boys have type 1 diabetes, as well as Steve – so in a family of seven, 57% of them have type 1. Of the three boys who have diabetes, two of them also have coeliac disease.

More details from Elissa’s presentation as follows:

• Steve was playing for the Brisbane Broncos, and had just won the grand final then headed to the World Cup. He’d lost 8kg in the off-season: and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
• The first son to get type 1 was Charlie, who was only three years old at the time.
• Next up son Billy was diagnosed. Billy was also diagnosed as having coeliac disease six months later.
• That same year their just-over-two-year-old son Freddie started showing signs of diabetes – they tested him with their meters and sure enough, he had high BGs. About a year later he was also diagnosed with type 1, and like Billy he lasted about six months before he was also pronounced coeliac.
• Elissa made an effort to keep going back to the ‘newly diagnosed’ groups that the hospital runs and recommends this for any parents, even if they only have one child diagnosed. The overwhelming amount of information you get at a time when you’re pretty stressed out and emotional makes it hard to take it all in the first time around. She found that each time she went back to the groups she would have a little bit more capacity to learn a bit more information. She also advised this because the information and best practice advice changes as the research gets more advanced – for example, when Steve was diagnosed it was all in portions – now they carbohydrate count with all the kids and Steve.
• She and Steve test the kids six times a day – including a 1am test for all. They keep extensive records of diet, exercise and insulin levels so they can recognise patterns and make adjustments for each of the kids according to their specific needs and the nature of their diabetes. She and Steve do week on, week off for the 1am tests…. she jokingly noted though that Steve always seems to have hypos on his week on so she ends up doing a few during her ‘week off’ as well
• For the last three years, all three boys and Steve have been on pumps. They are all on Medtronic pumps. She’s a huge advocate of pumps – less injections, less calculations for her to keep in her head for the different ratios and rates each of the kids are on, plus a couple of the kids found that their long acting insulin would sting, so with pumps not using long acting insulin that has taken that issue away.
• She’s always given the kids choices with their own diabetes: e.g. they can have cake as long as they have an injection – it’s their choice. The kid will choose an injection and cake every time! She also gave all of the kids a choice as to whether they wanted to go on a pump or not.

Elissa finished off with a story which I thought was perfect for www.beingdiabetic.co.nz…. in the vein of ‘you can’t get it right all the time’. One night it was her ‘week off’ on the 1am blood sugar round duty. Steve crawled back into bed muttering and not making much sense, clearly hypo. He confirmed he was hypo and said he’d go and sort himself out, but that Freddie had been high, so he’d given him a correction. Steve asked Elissa just to ‘check his work’ because he was hypo and a bit scrambled. Elissa went and checked Freddie’s pump. It indicated that his BG had been entered as 16.4, and he’s been given 1.5u to correct the BG. So far so good. But – just to be sure, Elissa checked his BG meter. It was then that her heart started beating faster…. the last BG was actually 3.2, meaning that instead of giving Freddie glucose to bring him up, Steve had given him more insulin, which would be sending him at that very moment into a colossal hypo. She raced downstairs to the kitchen where they normally have Glucodin to mix into water so the boys can easily ingest even when they’re half asleep. No Glucodin left so she grabbed the gluten-free jellybeans she keeps on hand (Freddie is also coeliac). Unfortunately, not only are jellybeans a bit of an ask at any time to chew on (let alone in the middle of the night and when hypo), they don’t have a lot of carb, so Elissa had to give Freddie 30 x jellybeans to offset the insulin given and to treat the hypo. Once that problem was alleviated, she checked Charlie’s pump and his BG meter and everything seemed to be fine. She started to breathe more easily. Something though, made her check Freddie’s meter one more time. The last BG was 3.2, yes. But the second-to-last BG was the 16.4. All of a sudden she realised: Steve had tested Freddie’s BG, then felt low himself and tested himself on Freddie’s meter…. the 3.2 was Steve’s hypo!! So – poor ol’ Freddie then had to have yet another correction. (the story ended there but I’m sure there was not a lot of sleep had in the Renouf household that night).

This post is getting really long so I’ll end it here, but it’s fair to say that Elissa is some sort of super-woman. For those of us who know how hard it is to manage our own conditions (or for some of you, a partner’s condition or one or two children’s condition), imagine having four T1s in the household, especially three of them being kids who will go through lots of phases and growth spurts and attitude changes – not a challenge I think anyone could take on lightly. I doubt Elissa ever gets a break. She was a great speaker, and it was fantastic that Medica-Pacifica sponsored her journey out to NZ.