Sleepy

No matter how old your child is, once they are diagnosed with Type 1, it is like going back in time. At first, it is vitally important that you check your child's blood glucose in the middle of the night to see if she needs a bolus. Part of the reason this action is recommended is that it will give you and your medical professional more information about your child's high and low cycles. Another reason is that your child, coming off of very high blood sugars for weeks, may not immediately recognize the symptoms of a high or a low. I think that part of it, however, is also that we need to get up and see our child in the middle of the night.

Remember when your child first slept through the night? I mean the very first time. Most parents I know woke up in the middle of the night that night, waiting for their child to awaken. After an hour or two, most crept into the child's room and tested to see if she was breathing.

Visiting your child in the middle of the night for a few weeks is a lot like that. Really I felt as if I were just checking to see if she was breathing.

It got the point where I would stumble into the room, flip on the light, and ask her for a finger. She would prop herself up on her elbow and inspect her fingers: Which one hadn't been used recently? Then she would lazily proffer the chosen digit. I would then swab it, jab it with the lancet, and squeeze a drop of blood onto the test strip. The beep would let me know that we had procured an adequate amount of my daughters blood, and then we would wait.

Those five seconds seemed to last a long time. We would record the number in her tracking book, and make a decision about whether any action needed to be taken. Does she need raisins, or humalog? Or can she merely go back to sleep?

Needless to say, these nightly excursions were never things I could pull of in a half-sleeping state. I had to be fully conscious and fully awake. M, however, did sleep through a couple, and more than once after I had finally fallen asleep after testing her, she entered my room to reawaken me and say, "Mom, we forgot to test me tonight!"

These days we only test her in the middle of the night if something pretty wacky is going on during the day. But those six weeks or so, although exhausting, acquainted me with my daughters new rhythms and needs. I hated diabetes for making me wake my daughter and myself out of a sound sleep, but I learned something, too.

I learned that I was going to be sleepy for a good long while. But at least I knew that my daughter was breathing.