Article about Zephyr

Published Wednesday, June 30, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News
by Loretta Green

TWO-year-old Zephyr Straus of Redwood City ran back and forth, playing with her toy stove and her trampoline. Then, she put the red and yellow stove on the trampoline and played with both at once.

In her bout with juvenile diabetes, little Zephyr also made a choice. She understands that wearing an insulin pump and leaving it free to do its job means she won't have to get injections.

"I show," the toddler said, lifting her blouse to reveal a slender tube leading from the pump on her waistband to the catheter in her abdomen.

When her mother, Lisa, announced that it was test time -- one of eight to 10 pokes a day -- Zephyr perched on the edge of the trampoline.

"Myself," she said quite emphatically as in "I'll do it." She tore off a foil packet containing a test strip.

"I'll hold it,"' she declared and inserted the lancet into the holder.

"What finger will we use?" her mother asked.

"This one," Zephyr said, nonchalantly holding out a finger.

A prick from the lancet, a drop of blood on the test strip and the meter read 180. It was a high sugar reading for some, but fine for Zephyr, who then raced off to get her blocks.

It is unusual to see a toddler wearing an insulin pump. The device gives small, frequent injections to Zephyr.

"As far as we know, Zephyr is the youngest in the country," said Dr. Darrell Wilson, chief of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes at Lucile Packard Children's Health Services. As a rule, children don't have a pump because a level of maturity is needed for determining insulin needs. The pump is not on "autopilot," Wilson explained. Rather, it is a kind of calculator that must be told how much to give. Lisa Straus jokes that figuring her daughter's carbohydrates has made her a mathematician.

But said Wilson: "It occurred to us that as long as parents were running the whole show, why not have them run a pump."

Lisa Straus also runs a small support group for toddlers on insulin and their parents. Zephyr appears on a KidsRPumping Web site.

"Zephyr had Type 1 diabetes which accounts for 10 to 15 percent of all the diabetics in the country," Wilson said. "This type is almost always the result of auto-immune destruction of the cells that make insulin in the body. It's your own body, oddly enough, that turns and attacks these cells."

Wilson is involved in a national study of Type 1 diabetics called Diabetes Prevention Trial and is seeking relatives of Type 1 diabetes to be screened. (Phone 1-800-425-8361 or http://www-med.stanford.edu/dpt1/.

The Strauses were selected with another California family to represent the state at the first Juvenile Diabetes Foundation's Children's Congress this month in Washington, D.C.

A goal of the event, attended by actress Mary Tyler Moore, national JDF chair, was to increase awareness of the need for increased research funding by Congress for diabetes research.

In addition, children testified. Some told stories of discrimination involving not being allowed to take their shots at school or being told "diabetic kids are a hassle."

Lisa Straus remembers being away at a conference nearly a year ago and receiving her husband's distraught call telling her Zephyr had diabetes.

There was hardly a dry eye in the house when Zephyr's father gave his testimony and pleaded for a future free of diabetes. Here are excerpts:

"My name is Jim Straus and this is my 2-year-old daughter, Zephyr. I have had to live with diabetes since I was 10 years old. It is difficult, but it is nothing compared to living with the knowledge that I have passed diabetes on to my daughter.

"Zephyr was 15 months old when I realized that she was demanding more and more fluids, saturating diapers and becoming increasingly listless. Finally her symptoms hammered through my denial and I squeezed some urine out of her diaper onto a test strip. I was in a state of shock as I watched the strip turn brown, indicating a very high level of sugar and ketones in her urine.

I grabbed my own blood glucose test kit, pricked Zephyr's heel and waited the longest 30 seconds of my life. Can you imagine how I felt when I realized her blood sugar was too high for my meter to read?

"I don't ever want Zephyr to have to set her alarm and get up every two hours to check her child's blood sugar. I don't want her to lie awake all night between the alarms fearing that she's given her child too much insulin, too little food or too much exercise during the previous day, which could lead to a coma or even death . . .

"With your support and an increased focus on curing diabetes at the National Institutes of Health, we can cure diabetes for me and Zephyr and 16 million other Americans."