Heretofore known as "the incident"

M is a responsible young woman. Never is this better demonstrated than when she maintains her own health independently. We determined after a suitable time, that unless she was vomiting, she could stay home under her own care when she felt unwell.

I was working half days during this moment in time. Things were financially strained, so I had pieced together a number of part time teaching and tutoring gigs to get us hovering near the black. When M was home sick, it was my habit to call her a few times throughout the day to make sure that she was drinking liquids, hadn't been kidnapped by ninjas, and was generally not in a diabetic coma.

On the day of what we refer to as "the incident", I made my usual morning call.

No answer.

No need to panic. Her bg levels have always been in the acceptable range. She's probably asleep and didn't hear the phone.

Job #1 complete. Try to call again.

No answer. Hm. I will try again a few times in a row to see if that will wake her up.

No answer. Maybe there's a need to panic after all.

I called Job # 2. I can't make it. I have a personal emergency.

I walk out to my car with my cell phone glued to my ear. I vow that I will not be one of those dangerous drivers who is on it during the entire drive home.

I start the car. Shall I call the neighbors?

I call one set. No answer.

I pull onto the main road. I call the neighbors with a key to the house. No answer.

At a stop light I call my third trustworthy set. No answer.

I am now in the car driving northward to home. Do I call an ambulance? She is probably fine. She has never gone into any kind of diabetic shock, coma, or any serious reaction. Her bg was 141 when I left this morning. It's very unlikley that she suddenly had such a dramatic low that she would pass out.

Calling the EMS  if she is fine might only draw attention to the fact that I am a horrible mother, leaving my poor diabetic child home alone to fend for herself. On the other hand, not calling them might be too much of a gamble. I call home again twice. I force myself to wait five minutes and call again.

I know she's upstairs with her door closed. The phone is downstairs. Would she hear it even if she were awake?

I call again. Knots in my stomach, I begin to formulate a plan.

Glucagon is in her basket on top of the fridge. Cell phone is in hand.

After a 25 minute drive, I am putting my key in the lock of the house. I see the dog's tail wagging through the window. I open the door and leap for the basket where the glucagon is stored, simultaneously shouting M's name. As I start running toward the stairs, I hear her bedroom door open.

"What?"

I freeze at the bottom of the stairs and gaze at my upright daughter. I have the red, plastic container of glucagon in one hand, and my flipped open cell phone in the other. She knows that something is wrong.

I walk up the stairs to her, trembling and trying to control my voice, which is thick with tears.

"I was so worried. I called and called, and you didn't answer the phone."

M grasps what this means to me. Even though she is not yet a mother herself, she is empathetic enough to understand the panic that I felt.

As she hugs me, we both begin to cry. "I am so sorry, Mom. I am so sorry. I didn't hear the phone."

"I know," I say, "I was just so worried. I am just so glad you're okay."

We repeat this exchange a few times as we both begin to calm down. I eventually ask her how she's feeling. In light of the fact that she has been sleeping soundly all morning, I am not surprised to hear her say that she is feeling a lot better than she did when I left.

Was I overreacting?

I tested this story out on a friend of mine whose children are so healthy that she doesn't even bring them to the doctor for check-ups. I wanted to test to see if I was being an overprotective crazy mother. Before I could even ask her about it, she said, "That would have freaked me out." I didn't know whether to feel better or worse for the knowledge.

It's a balance. Obviously I have felt fine about leaving M home as long as she monitors herself responsibly and we have neighbors who work out of the home. Maybe I shouldn't feel good about that. Maybe I am not a careful enough mother. Maybe I don't overreact enough.

It was a fluke that all of my stay-at-home neighbors were out at the same time. But it served as a wake-up call for my back up system.

M is amazingly responsible about her health, and is decidedly able to stay home for a few hours by herself, but we decided that if she stays home in the future, the cordless phone will stay next to her at all times.

Compromise between overreacting and underreacting. The world's longest apron string.

Prayers of thanks

I love my life. I feel very blessed and I appreciate everything that I have. When I pray, I always make sure to thank God for everything he has given me and my family. I have always thanked him for our home, our jobs, the means to pay our numerous bills and our good health.

This last one, however,  has had me stumped for the last year or so.

My daughter is technically in "good" health. She routinely has an A1C of 6.5 or lower. She is active, beautiful, energetic and creative.

Now I am not trying to gyp God out of his due. M is alive and enjoying her life. But is she actually in "good" health? She has to test her blood glucose 6 times per day. She has to give herself an injection every time she eats. And most notably, she can DIE from this disease and its complications, even if she does everything that she is supposed to.

So when I pray my thanks, I include good health, but I wince internally at even mentioning it. I know that the Almighty knows all about my doubts, so I feel somewhat hypocritical every time I include it.

If only I could add an asterisk, much like the one earned by Barry Bonds when his home run record is mentioned. Yes, he actually HIT the home runs. And M FEELS healthy. The record registers the appearance and the achievement, but with the caveat that the circumstances were not, should we say, normal.

So I guess my prayers would look something like this:

Lord,
Thank you for everything that you have given me and my family. Thank you for blessing us with a place to live, a job that I love, a wonderful husband and children, and the means to pay for all of our needs. Thank you for our continued good health*, and the continued good health of those we love. Thank you for blessing us with supportive friends and family, and please continue to bless us with their presence. I appreciate all of these gifts God, and offer you my sincerest thanks.
 Amen.

Thank you for our good health*

Alivabetes

A student is selling silicone bracelets in the hallway at the school where I teach. You know, the kinds like the yellow "Livestrong" bracelets for cancer. I distinctly heard him say "diabetes camp". I asked the young man who was going to diabetes camp. He said that his sister and his cousin were both trying to raise money to go.

Which camp? Camp Carefree. This is where M went to camp last year. It was a great experience for her to spend two weeks being "normal" with other kids with diabetes.

I examined the bracelet. It was white and green and had the word "Alivabetes".  I bought one. I read the card that came with it. "When 8 year old Jocelyn was diagnosed with diabetes, she asked if she was going to die. The doctor told her no, so she decided that they should call it alivabetes"

Cool.

To order one or more of these bracelets to support Jocelyn and other kids going to Camp Carefree, you can go to http://funsantamail.com/Alivabetes.html

First big shot

While it has been over a year since we left the hospital armed with new information and knowledge regarding diabetes and how to manage it, I still remember preparing M to give herself a shot.

I remember thinking that when she went off to college, she had better have a roommate with diabetes, too. Who else could give her a shot in the butt?

When a person is diagnosed with insulin-dependent diabetes, there are factors to consider that may not have come up before.

1) You cannot give your insulin shots in the same place all of the time, no matter how inconvenient all other locations might be for you. It is necessary to "rotate" where you give insulin shots. If you give yourself shots in the same place repeatedly, you are likely to develop callouses, which in turn make the absorption of insulin more difficult.

2) The best places to give shots are in locations with fat on them: the back of the arm, the belly, the butt, the thigh, the back of the leg.... Of course, if you have recently been diagnosed with type one diabetes, there is no fat on your body anywhere.

Inject yourself where it's yellow. Good luck!

3) It is hard to give yourself a shot in the butt, the back of the arm, or the back of the leg. There are tricks, but you have to learn them at diabetes camp. At least it seems that way.

4) Giving yourself a shot for the first time is scary.

5) The needles for insulin are thin and short. You want the insulin to get into your fat layer for better absorption. To make sure that you get into the fat layer, you pinch a nice meaty part of your body, inject the insulin, release the pinch, then remove the needle.

6) Other shots do not require the pinch.

So we leave the hospital with the parental skills necessary for M to survive in our home. But M has not yet injected herself. Just as we were, she was nervous about possibly hurting herself while injecting the insulin.

Our goal is for her to inject herself at least once per day so that she may do it herself at school.

I encourage her. Cajole her. Point out that she keeps telling me that it doesn't hurt. Intellectually, we are on the same page. She KNOWS it doesn't hurt. It just freaks her out to think about doing it to herself.

This is understandable considering that she was unable to look at needles until she had to. Now she was fully invested in her new life of "needles, needles, needles, all the time". Life had changed, and it had only been a week. On the other hand, M would be returning to school very shortly. Time was running out.

Several meals in a row, M sat at the dinner table, with her needle poised, readying herself to inject insulin into her belly. She would pull the needle away to brace herself for jabbing it in there quickly. She would begin to "shoot" the needle, and stop mere centimeters away from the quivering flesh. She repeated this action, growing more frustrated each time.

Sometimes she would dissolve into tears. M knew she could do it, but she was scared. Every time she cried, a piece of me would cry with her. The part of me she could see, however,  would say, "Don't worry. When you're ready, you'll do it. It will be fine."

But I don't think she believed it.

Meals passed. Days passed.

I needed to go to the dump. I left the house for a few hours. When I returned, M gave me the big news: she had injected herself! She was so proud. So happy. So relieved.

"How did you do it?" I asked.

And the answer was, as it has been many times before, "Daddy made me do it."

I always wonder how Daddy does these things. What a miracle worker my beloved life partner is.

Relieved that I might no longer have to suffer watching my daughter bear the anxiety of self injection, I again said a prayer of thanks to the mating gods. Thank you, mating gods. Thank you.

Holidays

When M was diagnosed, it was shortly after Easter. She was eleven years old. She had had a rough few weeks. Easter came along, and she could wear a skinny little dress like she never could before. She looked waifish. She hunted for treasures that the Easter Bunny left at her grandparents' house, and had a great time.

The day after Easter, she felt terrible. She had been feeling terrible off and on for many days, but this time I assumed that it was because she had eaten too much candy. She hadn't. That ear-less chocolate bunny stayed on her nightstand for days.

Well, it turned out that she felt lousy because she had type one diabetes.

Our first diabetic Halloween was last year. When we went to the Diabetes Nurse Educator, she gave us an orange sheet with a list of "fun sized" candy bars and their carb values. She advised M not to have too many pieces at a time, but pretty much gave us free reign over when and where she could eat these.

Before diabetes, I never really thought about why the FDA made companies write "Not labeled for individual retail sale" on their wrappers. Now it makes perfect sense. How can anyone choose what to eat if they don't know what is in it? Now I know that each piece of Halloween candy has about 7-10 carbs in it.

That's a lot. I mean, M sometimes has a whole meal that totals 30 carbs. That's just three of those candy bars. Yuck.

Carbs seem to be pretty central to American holiday celebrations. I never really thought about that before. Mashed potatoes. Candy. Nuts. Stuffing. Cookies. Pie. Candies yams. All carbs.

All of us think of the holidays as the time when we gain weight, drink too much, and generally make unhealthy choices. For a normal person it means indigestion, gas, and bathroom discomforts. For a diabetic it can mean another step toward blindness, foot problems, or renal failure. Fun.

As a mother of a young diabetic, it is interesting to balance the two realities:

1) She must have fun

2) She must balance her food desires with her food needs.

I can only hope that the lessons that she learns from her parents and diabetes team will help her make better choices during her holidays for years to come.

Or maybe I will just need to eat all of her Halloween candy for the rest of my life. I would be willing to take the indigestion bullet for her. What mother wouldn't do that for her child?

Urp.