Leah walks past her mother and gets the vial of insulin out of the refrigerator. After she draws the right number of units, her mother lifts her shirt and Leah makes the injection into a small roll of pinched fat on her stomach right between two small bruises. “You could do this yourself,” she says. “You ought to. They showed you how.”
Category: Art & Books
Many parents feel at a loss as to how to be effective parents around diabetes stuff if they’ve never heard a healthcare professional tell them that it’s okay to be parents around diabetes in the same way that they’ve parented in every other area.
My new book, VITAMANIA: Our Obsessive Quest for Nutritional Perfection is being published today by Penguin Press. It’s about the history of vitamins and how they’ve influenced the way we think about nutrition.
Sweet Tooth is Tim Anderson’s memoir of homosexuality, high school, the eighties, and diabetes, all south of the Mason-Dixon line. This seems like a recipe for disaster, but luckily things don’t go as badly as you might imagine.
This grain-free cookbook contains the same recipes Ariana cooks for herself and her family, with a focus on whole high quality ingredients. With food allergies and autoimmune disease in her family, she has found going grain-free has been a great solution for all members’ health issues.
I’m sharing five books that changed me for the better, and helped me see things I’d never considered before. Here is my list of five nonfiction books that have absolutely nothing to do with diabetes, but that everyone with diabetes in their lives in some way absolutely needs to read.
As a person with diabetes, preparing for an interview also includes the internal debate as to if, and when, it is best to let your employer know you have diabetes.
Safety is a top priority for me, and I’m not comfortable being involved in work or social situations without at least someone knowing I have diabetes. I want my employer to know that I have diabetes because that keeps me safest.
My husband had taken the morning off to spend time in the classroom, and since it was also our turn to clean, I left work to go to the school.
As I began stacking knee-high chairs and tidying up the classroom, my cell phone rang. On the other end was the pediatrician. Not the nurse, but the doctor.
“Where are you?”
“At preschool.”
“Where is your husband?”
“Actually … here with us.”
“Where is the school?”
I didn’t like where this was going.
“There was sugar in her urine. I was about to go to lunch, and I was looking over the morning labs. I want you to go to the hospital (literally two blocks away) and get blood work done, and then meet me at my office at one o’clock. Can you do that? It is really important that you do this quickly.”
I like to pack a couple of water bottles that we can refill throughout the day to stay hydrated. Remember, there is a lot of blacktop at amusement parks, which turns up the heat! Pack enough food to cover regular snack times, plus a few extras in case you need them to recover from lows. I also pack a few extras for other family members. Applesauce pouches and organic fruit strips hold up well in a backpack or cooler.
If you plan to travel abroad, have all your medical information converted to the language of the country you are planning to visit. Carry this information with you at all times. Create one sheet with all your important information. Convert it to a PDF and save it in a Dropbox or Evernote folder that you can access from anywhere. Or, snap a photo with your phone for a quick reference.