By Katie Kindelan, Good Morning America
Hannah Jordan is a cycling champion who will compete this weekend in the 2019 Hillclimb Worlds in California on a demanding course that rises more than 2,500 feet in elevation.
But the 18-year-old will race the course with something no one else in the competition has: a gastrostomy tube, or G-tube, that keeps her alive.
In a sport where aerodynamics is everything, Jordan, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, uses a specially designed race jersey to hold the G-tube monitor that pumps glucose into her body, preventing her from going into potentially life-threatening hypoglycemia.
I’m the only person I know who is on a G-tube and competes like this,” Jordan told “Good Morning America.” “When I’m told I can’t, that makes me want to ride faster and better.”
Jordan was classified as small for her gestational age as a child and suffered extreme fatigue and dangerously low blood sugar because her body could not keep up with her brain’s need for glucose, according to her doctor, Madeleine Harbison, a pediatric endocrinology specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
Read the rest https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/wellness/story/teen-girl-rare-illness-wears-gastrostomy-tube-compete-66232661
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