Afflicted With Rare Disease, Tulsa Teacher Has Positive Message

Last week, News On 6 introduced you to Beckett and Harrison, two boys with a rare liver disease called Glycogen Storage Disease.

We got several emails in response, one of them from a Tulsa school teacher who said she's lived with the disease almost her whole life, and she has a positive message for the boy's Mom and Dad.

Janie Mitchell is a first grade teacher at Mitchell Elementary School.

We came to see her because she's spent most of her life living with rare liver disease called Glycogen Storage Disease. The liver doesn't process sugars properly, chronic low blood sugar is the result.

It's the same disease affecting Beckett and Harrison Marshall, two Collinsville boys we met last week.

01/02/2012 Related Story: Collinsville Family Prays For A Cure For Children's Rare Disease

They are required to drink a solution of corn starch and water every few hours of every day. Without it, they could develop seizures.

Janie Mitchell's been there.

"If I'd get excited, my blood sugar would drop and I'd go right into one," Mitchell said.

Orange juice or apple juice would get her blood sugar level back up until the next seizure.

Forty years ago. blood sugar monitoring was not as routine as it is today, and the proactive corn starch treatment wasn't discovered yet. Seizures she said were just part of life.

She brought in some family pictures, what we can't see: her enlarged liver. She said it was like having a basketball under her shirt.

Time brought improved treatments, the seizures stopped, she grew, finished school, and became a teacher. Fibrosis developed in her liver, and in 2003 she received a transplant that changed her life.

"I'm enjoying every single minute of it," she said.

Her advice for the parents of the two boys with GSD: let them grow up as normally as possible, and be positive for their sake.