Ensuring a daughter’s health by checking in at ‘Midnight Three & Six’

JUDY WOODRUFF:

Finally tonight, our NewsHour Shares moment of the day, something that caught our eye that might be of interest to you too. It comes from The New York Times Op-Docs video series. It's about the struggles of a family in Fort Worth, Texas, to help their 15-year-old daughter, Grace, deal with type 1 diabetes. Her efforts to manage her blood glucose levels have been especially difficult. The short film is titled, "Midnight Three & Six," named for the hours when her parents must monitor her levels. Here's a short clip featuring her mother, Patricia Chamberlain.

PATRICIA CHAMBERLAIN, Mother:

My husband and I take turns on duty And on duty means we check her blood glucose levels through the night, midnight, 3:00 a.m., 6:00 a.m. Type 1 diabetes represents, I think the last figure I heard is 5 percent of all diabetics in the world. And Grace is a type 1 diabetic. She's a volatile type 1. She hasn't really stabilized and she is unpredictable. So every three hours keeps her safe. Every five or six hours can be very dangerous. By very dangerous, I mean she could die. That's the best we can do is checking her, correcting her, checking her, correcting her. Her pancreas is dead. And it died all of a sudden. And it becomes very life-threatening very fast. Sometimes, we have to check her every 15 minutes for a few hours or every hour for 10 hours. Just depends on what is going on with her.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

You can see the full film on The New York Times Web site.