TBF, hypoglycemia and testing accommodations is extremely vanilla in the case of Juvenile Diabetics.El Pollito wrote:How can anyone say this without seeing OP's application for accommodations? lolChrstgtr wrote:If you haven't already, contact an attorney. This is pretty standard ADA/Section 504 stuff and the school should have had accommodations in place for you
The reason is that as you know, your emotions can impact how your body functions. When you're really nervous, your heart might race, you might sweat, you might suddenly get really hungry, etc. Your body doesn't know why you're stressed, and assumes it's related to being under life threatening attack, no food supply or anything else your ancestors would've been afraid of 100k years ago.
The thing is that your pancreas is functioning, and even in a Type 2 Diabetic, the pancreas is either producing no/not enough insulin but is still working with other organs to ensure your blood sugar doesn't drop too low. So when you're in a stressful situation your blood sugar level probably drops, but it's never going to drop below 80. Your blood sugar, no matter the situation, how fat, skinny, tired, awake you are will always be between 80 and 120. A Juvenile Diabetic's blood sugar could literally go from 0-1000 in a few hours on any given day. Your mood and cognitive functioning will change drastically based on a fluctuation from 85 to 105. Imagine if you went from 800 to 40 on a given day.
A type-1 Diabetic's pancreas is virtually dead. It will not communicate anything, and the Type 1's Diabetic blood sugar will drop and drop and drop to the single digits, and the person will die. The obvious response here is to therefore run the Type 1 Diabetic high before a stressful event in anticipation of a blood sugar drop. This makes sense but for the fact that how the body reacts to emotional stress is unpredictable. If you run or play a sport then the blood sugar drops are predictable, but with exam stress and those sorts of situations, the blood sugar could also go very high. Even when Diabetics sleep it's impossible to predict blood sugar levels within a 40 point range, because even dreams can fuck up the blood sugar levels.
In addition, running high at a level of roughly 200 has an impact on cognition - children get more "silly," and adults show drastic alterations in IQ tests. Even if a Juvenile Diabetic could plan to run high as a safety net to stress induced hypoglycemia, which most can't, it is unfair to basically tell a student they need to do damage on their kidneys and perform worse on a test, because they're a Juvenile Diabetic.
This is why it is covered by the ADA, which not every similar condition is. Its impact is greatest in testing situations, and if you look at the case law and 504 plans, they almost always deal with testing for this very reason. When people say speak with an attorney, it's not because being Type-1 and not having class accommodations in and of itself is the basis of a lawsuit. It's that it is one of those conditions where accommodations in this context are incredibly common. It's not like ADHD, because it only impacts individuals like this in highly stressful situations they will not encounter frequently in the real world, and it's clearly entirely traceable solely to this preexisting medical condition, and nothing in the brain or character of the person.
Most people aren't educated on this subject, and you see Type-1 Diabetes like how you see a fat person's Diabetes. These are completely different diseases. In Type-2 the pancreas is overworked so struggles to produce insulin. In a Type-1, the person is born with a gene that causes their pancreas to completely die, normally before the individual reaches grade school and something like Chicken Pox is more than enough to kill the pancreas forever, which not only makes it unable to produce insulin, but also unable to communicate with any other part of the body at all, recognize blood sugar levels or stop the blood sugar from dropping. Hypoglycemia is very rare in type-2, and while high blood sugar will destroy organs over time, one low blood sugar results in an absence of cognitive functioning for a number of hours, can result in immediate brain damage and is the main cause of death in Juvenile Diabetics - one bad low, and you can die. Prior to the 20th century, if you were a 5 year old and diagnosed, which is the norm for Juvenile Diabetics, the life expectancy was a few months. Today, the normal life OP has is predicated on their pricking their finger, and eating sugar tablets. It's not exactly a fail proof plan here, and when things happen for which there is no cure and which OP hasn't brought on themselves, it's not unreasonable to say, if I'm temporarily unconscious/semi-conscious due to a constant life threatening disease, I should not have to lose that testing time.