Mom Shares Video of Baby Eating Ice Cream—Days Later, Life Changes Forever

A mother illustrated how quickly and completely the life of her daughter has changed – just by sharing a video of her ice.

Erica Minond, 31, lives in New Jersey, and is the mother of a little boy born earlier this year, and her two and a half year old daughter Lydia.

Minond manages the tiktok account @ lydia.jean.pdcd, which she uses to raise awareness of a rare disease with which her daughter lives: PDCD or a complex deficiency of dehydrogenase pyruvate.

As Minond explained to NowsweekPDCD “is a rare genetic disease limiting life that prevents the body from using sugar and carbohydrates for energy”.

“Normally, when we eat carbohydrates, the body transforms them into fuel to feed the brain and muscles. In PDCD, the” door “which allows this conversion to be essentially broken,” she said. “Instead of becoming energy, sugar accumulates and turns into acid in the blood. At the same time, the brain and the body are left hungry for” fuel “.

“For Lydia, this means that carbohydrates are toxic.”

Since 2023, the dedicated mother has run the Tiktok account of Lydia to share her trip with PDCD, and on August 23, she shared what seemed to be a mild but ordinary clip of Lydia like a baby, trying her first bite of ice.

In the clip, Lydia, then five months old, smiles at her mom with Bight blue ice cream around her mouth – but Minond wrote on it: “The end of the night finds, but this is the only video I am going to have my daughter to eat ice because five days after that, she was diagnosed with a terminal condition where her body cannot decompose sugar.”

“A little more than two years later and I still get angry thinking of all the foods that Lydia can never appreciate because of this condition,” she added in a legend.

Minond explained to Nowsweek This Lydia was born “in good health”, with “no sign of anything wrong at birth or in the weeks that followed”.

At the age of four months, Lydia did not hold her head properly, and even if she was diagnosed with a low muscle tone, the doctors suggested that she “would catch up” and that was not a major problem. But Minond, noticing that Lydia’s students were two different sizes, and that she favored her right side, “had an intestine to the feeling that something was wrong, despite the assurance of several doctors that she was fine.”

She took things in her hands, looking for genetic tests from diseases that arise similarly to cerebral paralysis, and received the results when her daughter was five and a half months, changing their lives forever.

If Lydia eats carbohydrates, her body produces lactic acid, which accumulates in the blood and “can make it dangerously sick very quickly”, with symptoms such as vomiting, lethargy, confusion, convulsions, loss of consciousness, organ failure and even death.

The only way to keep your daughter “safely,” said Minond, is with an extremely strict medical ketogenic diet for the whole of her life, which does not heal the disease, but slows down.

“For most children, sugar is a treat, but for Lydia, it could take her life. Her future is always uncertain, but every day on the medical ketogenic diet gives him more time to grow and learn.”

An ketogenic diet lacks carbohydrates – such as milk, cereals, pasta and potatoes – and is rather rich in protein and fats, generally including meats, eggs, cheese, fish and fibrous vegetables. It is difficult to follow – carbohydrates generally represent approximately 50% of the typical American diet, according to Harvard Health.

A 2017 study published at the National Library of Medicine studied the short and long -term results of a ketogenic diet in the PDCD revealed that it had a positive effect, in particular in epilepsy, ataxia, sleep disorders, the development of speech and language, social functioning and frequency of hospitalizations.

She shared the video of the first and the only taste for her daughter’s ice cream to show that “my daughter can never have a scoop again, not to mention a single bite,” regular “ice cream in her life.”

But, she said, the clip exploded in popularity “for bad reasons”.

The video was viewed almost 700,000 times, but some commentators have chosen to take this opportunity to scold Minond for having given his ice in the first place, which is generally not recommended until a baby has more than six months or a year.

A commentator wrote: “Yeah because she should not have ice cream when she has only four months.”

However, many jumped towards Minond’s defense, with a response to a commentator who said that Lydia was “too young for artificial sugar” by writing: “Too young for a terminal disease. But we are there.”

Minond herself responded to a commentator: “Fortunately, the 3 clogs of ice cream that she ate did not cause her terminal terminal condition. She was born with her. The 3 clogs of ice cream did not have an impact on her health. Thank you!”

And as a commentator said: “All these comments on his age. At least she was able to try it.”

“Because her brain works on limited energy, his development is delayed and the condition is considered terminal,” she said. “Each day is a balance to protect it from foods that her body cannot manage while ensuring that she obtains the fuel she needs to live and cultivate.”

Now two and a half years old, Lydia recently started walking and has up to 20 words in her vocabulary – Kills her mother describes as “miracles”.

“When we received her diagnosis for the first time, we received the dark statistics that 90% of children diagnosed with this condition die 4 years old, and she would not speak or spoke.”

Since the diagnosis of Lydia, Minond has found comfort in the non -profit Hope for PDCD Foundation led by parents, dedicated to finding a remedy for the disease and which “helps children with PDCD, like Lydia, a chance for more time, a better quality of life and hope for the future”.

And despite her health difficulties, Minond said her daughter has become a “funny, curious, loving and opinion” little girl.

“She likes Mrs. Rachel and likes to paint. She is really such a special and happy girl.”