Category: Personal

Parenting with Diabetes

Does Diabetes Interfere With Your Parenting?

My five-year-old daughter thinks diabetes is something she will have when she’s a mom. Like me, she’ll write stories, have brown hair, have two kids, and have diabetes. Diabetes often needs my attention just like her little brother does. And sometimes diabetes takes priority over both of them. And I resent that.
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RoadTrip

A Weekend Excursion to a Type 1 Diabetes Diagnosis

“Your blood sugar was five hundred and twenty four,” whispered the doctor through pale lips, after gently pulling back the curtain that had been separating me from the reality of the situation. “I’m sorry, but you have Type 1 diabetes.” His mouth continued to move, but I heard nothing.
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Midnight, Three & Six - NYtimes D-Movie - home

Ignoring the Worst Case Diabetes Scenario

I watched a controversial video documentary on The New York Times’s web site, Midnight Three & Six, about a family pummeled by life with their fifteen-year-old daughter Grace’s volatile type 1 diabetes. One parent or another gets up to check Grace every three hours at night, to make sure she doesn’t die in her sleep. “Every three hours keeps her safe,” says Grace’s mother.
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I Speak Diabetes

I Speak Diabetes

I once heard the mother of a child with diabetes express her disgust with the word “bolus.” As it turns out, a bolus is “a small rounded mass of a substance, especially of chewed food at the moment of swallowing.” A mouthful of chewed-up pizza at the back of your throat, basically.
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What I Said What I Thought

Well-Intended Diabetes Comments: What I Said and What I Thought

What I thought: Because I just don’t love her enough. If I loved her more, her numbers would totally stabilize. What I said: Type 1 diabetes means that the body does not produce insulin. And since the synthetic insulin and tools to track what it is doing in the body is still pretty crude compared to the workings of a real pancreas, there is nothing I can do to 100% “regulate” my child’s blood sugar.
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Making Life with Diabetes Better in 2015

These 7 Things Will Make Your Life with Diabetes Better in 2015

Fear may very well be the number one complication impacting families of children with diabetes today (and many adults, as well). As we glimpse more into life with diabetes, seeing more glucose trends thanks to tools, hearing more stories thanks to social media, being told more and more to fear… it might be crippling many of us. So how does one vanquish fear?
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When Diabetes Makes a Friendship Stronger

When Diabetes Makes a Friendship Stronger

I learned that Tess’ little brother Jeff had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. My heart broke for their family. How could the people who were so understanding and caring when I was diagnosed be dealing with the same disease in their own family? Still neighbors, my family offered their family as much support as they could during that hard time. The tables had turned.
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5 Reasons I'm Thankful for Type 1 Diabetes

5 Reasons I’m Thankful for Type 1 Diabetes

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if I would be the same me without diabetes. It’s not that diabetes defines me, but I do believe that it has helped shape me into a person I am proud to be. And is there anything wrong with admitting that life with the bêtes brings us some good as well? So, here it is, my list of things I’m thankful for, that have come from living with type 1 diabetes.
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