Death of Diabetic Teen-Ager Stuns Family, Friends : Remembrance: Stomach flu may have contributed to death of bright, independent honor student at Patrick Henry High School.

It was a premonition of sorts, said Donna Hilton, that moved her to give her teen-age daughter a Christmas gift in November.

“I bought her a real nice watch for Christmas. But for some reason I couldn’t wait to give it to her. So, I gave it to her a month early. She needed a nice watch. If she was going to go to college next year, she might as well have a nice watch,” Hilton said.

A few weeks later, an anguished Hilton said she was thankful that her daughter was able to enjoy the watch, if only briefly. On Jan. 3, Hilton, 36, walked into her daughter’s bedroom and found the popular Patrick Henry High School senior dead in her bed.

An autopsy report said that Emily Erika Field, 17, died in her sleep, a victim of diabetic ketoacidosis. Medical experts said ketoacidosis is a complex but fairly common condition among diabetics. However, when patients practice proper care, ketoacidosis is rarely fatal, they said.

The condition is marked by a high blood sugar count that causes the body to produce acid byproducts which, if not treated quickly, can lead to death.

In Emily’s case, diabetes experts believe the ketoacidosis may have been compounded by a bout of stomach flu that hit her hours before she died. Hilton also believes that Emily may have missed her morning insulin injection, or may not have given herself a large enough dose.

“Teens are prone to do this (miss an insulin injection), and if you get something like the stomach flu on top of it, it can lead to tragedy. If you’re diabetic and have the stomach flu, you have to assume that you have ketoacidosis,” said Dr. Jeffrey Roth, who specializes in juvenile diabetes at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in San Diego.

“The horror of this tragedy is that it could have been prevented. You don’t have to die from something like this if you watch what you’re doing,” Roth said.

Diabetes in children and young adults is caused by the destruction of the body’s insulin-producing beta cells. Without the natural hormone that regulates the sugar in their blood, diabetics must carefully monitor the levels and inject themselves with insulin to remain healthy.

Emily’s sudden death was an especially cruel blow to Hilton. Until she married two years ago, Hilton had mostly been a single-parent almost since Emily was born. Emily had been a constant companion for nearly half of Hilton’s life.

One week after her daughter’s death, Hilton was just beginning to cope with the void left in her life. She has a year-old son who keeps her plenty busy, but, she asks, “How can you adjust to something like this?”

“I have trouble getting up in the morning. I don’t want to wake up. I just want to crawl into a ball and stay in bed. . . . I keep hoping that this is just a horrible, horrible nightmare, and I’ll wake up scared, but Emily will still be here,” Hilton said.

But the nightmare is real. Two days after her daughter’s death, Hilton had the furniture removed from Emily’s bedroom.

“It (furniture) reminded me of death. I didn’t want to keep the image of her lying there, dead,” she said.

Emily died hours after returning from a day trip that thousands of Southern California teen-agers take every year. She and her boyfriend, Clark Wothe, had spent the day at Disneyland. The excursion was Wothe’s Christmas present to Emily.

When Emily left for Disneyland, there was no indication that she was seriously ill, Hilton said. But when she arrived home that night, Emily began throwing up and said she had the flu. The young woman went to bed, and the last time Hilton saw her alive was Jan. 3, at 3 a.m., when she got up to check on her.

The teen-ager’s death rocked Patrick Henry, where Emily was an honor student and active in campus groups. When students returned to school Jan. 6, after Christmas break, they were “in shock and total disbelief,” Ruth Cox said.

Cox, who was Emily’s counselor for two years, described her as an “extremely independent person who took a demanding and challenging course load.” She said that Emily, who was scheduled to graduate in June, was enrolled only in advanced courses, including a college-level political science course.

“Your heart was always lifted when she walked through your door. . . . I know it sounds almost like a cliche, but we will miss her an awful lot. She was a very visible student, participating in a number of clubs and organizations,” Cox said.

Emily was president of the debate team and a member of the Science Olympiad, speech team, school chorus, cross-country track team, soccer team, yearbook staff and National Honor Society. In addition, she worked part-time at a fast-food restaurant.

During the summer, the young woman also served as a counselor at a mountain camp for diabetic youths near San Bernardino.

While Emily was admired for her academic achievements, her independence was almost legendary among friends and relatives.

That independence manifested itself at an early age, “when she began questioning authority,” Hilton said.

“Even when Emily was in grade school, if the teacher did or said something that she thought was wrong or unfair, Emily would call her on it. I was always getting calls from teachers because of that,” Hilton said.

Her diabetes was discovered shortly before her 11th birthday, and she spent her birthday in the hospital, learning to give herself the twice daily injections that she needed to regulate the her blood sugar.

“From the beginning, she insisted on doing it herself. She wouldn’t let me get involved with that,” Hilton said. “She would give me that ‘I can do it myself’ look.”

Mother and daughter traveled a bumpy road together, with Hilton sometimes working two jobs to make a living for the two of them.

Donna Hilton and her husband, Joe Hilton, said it was difficult for Emily to accept their marriage at the beginning. But over time, she was more willing to share her mother with Joe, and was overjoyed when her brother, Ian, was born last year.

“She wasn’t about to let me think that I was her stepdad,” Joe Hilton said.

Emily, who never knew her father, considered Richard Frost, a juvenile probation officer, the closest thing to one. Frost and Donna Hilton had dated on and off and lived together for about eight years. Frost had known Emily since she was 18 months old.

“Emily was my girl, even though she wasn’t my daughter. I helped raise her from babyhood to a young girl. I kept in touch with her, like a divorced father, after Donna and I ended our relationship,” said Frost, 48. “Believe me, I knew what it’s like to be a divorced father with visitation rights.”

In fact, Hilton was talking on the telephone with Frost minutes before she discovered her daughter was dead, shortly after 11 a.m.

“Emily and I were going to do some belated Christmas shopping. I was going to take her to a shopping center and let her pick out what she wanted. I called to confirm that we were still going, and Donna said she had to go wake her up,” Frost said.

“I couldn’t wake her up,” Hilton said. “I turned on the light and looked at her. Her body was purple. I knew she was dead.”

According to Frost, Emily talked about attending Northern Arizona University, where she wanted to study music.

She was an accomplished singer and was the only juvenile in the Skyline Wesleyan Church choir. Friends said her taste in music ran the gamut from the rock group Guns ‘N’ Roses to musicals like “Phantom of the Opera.”

Amy Rudolph, a Patrick Henry senior and Emily’s best friend, said Emily sometimes talked about her diabetes.

“She said that if she ever got married, she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to have children or not, because she didn’t want to pass the diabetes on to them. I was afraid for her. I thought that one day the diabetes could kill her, but not until she was 40 or so,” Rudolph said.

“You’ve probably already heard this, but Emily really was somebody special. She had a special charm. She was ambitious and always motivated to do better than she did. But she was already great at everything she tried,” Rudolph said.

Rudolph is a member the school’s choral ensemble. She sang “Home Free” at her friend’s funeral service. The lyrics said:

Sometimes the good die young.

It’s sad but true.

Hilton said she asked Emily’s friends to close their eyes and picture Emily as they remembered her. If, in that mental picture, Emily is wearing anything that they want, Hilton said she is willing to give it to Emily’s friends as a remembrance.

Rudolph said she knows what she wants.

“I have a T-shirt with a picture of a cat. I remember the first time I wore it to school, and Emily said she had the exact same shirt. There were a couple of times that we wore the shirts to school, and we pretended like we were twins. I would like to have that shirt. It reminds me of the times when we were really close,” Rudolph said.