When 10-year-old Taisie Seigrist began drinking huge amounts of water and needing to urinate constantly, her mother Jennifer tested her blood sugar with a borrowed glucose meter and found a reading of 684 mg/dL. The family rushed to the children’s hospital, where Taisie spent about a week being treated and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
Taisie left the hospital with a continuous glucose monitor and a regimen that included rapid-acting insulin injections at mealtimes — as many as seven shots a day. Because she had little body fat, she often used the same injection sites, which made shots painful. The timing and duration of injected rapid-acting insulin (it takes about 15 minutes to start working and can remain active for two to three hours) also made it hard for her to manage blood sugar around school, track, and cross-country races. If she needed a correction right before a race, she sometimes had to sit out. Classmates sometimes accused her of seeking attention, making an already difficult condition feel isolating.
“Taking shots really hurt,” Taisie said. Jennifer added that a pump wasn’t a good fit for their lifestyle at the time, and for the first two years she administered mealtime injections before Taisie began doing them herself.
Michael Glazier, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Bluebird Kids Health, explains that mealtime insulin presents special challenges for children and adolescents: shifting schedules, denial or rebellion, embarrassment, and stigma can all reduce adherence. Skipping doses is easier than giving a shot in front of peers, which often leads to more time with blood sugars outside the desired range.
In 2024, Taisie’s endocrinologist offered her a spot in a clinical trial of Afrezza, an inhaled rapid-acting mealtime insulin designed to mimic the body’s natural insulin response. The idea of a needle-free option excited Taisie and her family, and she responded well to the treatment.
Jennifer says the inhaled insulin gave Taisie “metabolic flexibility.” Unlike injected mealtime insulin that lingers for hours, the inhaled insulin begins acting immediately and leaves the system in about an hour, allowing quicker corrections when needed. That faster action helped lower Taisie’s A1C and kept her blood sugar levels steadier. Socially and emotionally, the change was profound: she no longer had to mentally weigh whether a piece of birthday cake was worth another shot — she can simply eat and manage her insulin with an inhaler.
Today Taisie only takes a single long-acting insulin injection at night; mealtime coverage comes from the inhaled product.
On May 29, 2026, the FDA approved Afrezza for children ages 6 and older with type 1 and type 2 diabetes, roughly 12 years after the drug was first approved for adults. Jennifer and Taisie currently obtain the medication at a discounted out-of-pocket rate through the trial and hope the approval will improve access for other families.
Glazier notes that inhaled insulin won’t replace insulin pumps or recombinant technologies, which can offer tighter blood sugar control for some patients. Instead, it will be an important additional tool, especially for children and teens who have strong aversions to needles or struggle with mealtime dosing.
For families considering treatments, Jennifer’s advice is simple: talk with your child’s doctor about options. For Taisie, switching to inhaled insulin has meant less pain, fewer interruptions to activities, and a restored sense of normalcy.