{"id":25384,"date":"2012-03-07T09:54:29","date_gmt":"2012-03-07T14:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=25384"},"modified":"2015-12-27T15:47:23","modified_gmt":"2015-12-27T20:47:23","slug":"the-day-diabetes-went-away-reflections-on-purim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asweetlife.org\/?p=25384","title":{"rendered":"The Day Diabetes Went Away: Reflections on Purim"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a child, Purim<\/a> meant something major to me: queen for a day.\u00a0 Every year as I prepared my Queen Esther<\/a> costume, my grandmother and I went through her drawers until we found her fancy pink sweater with metallic threading (which I wore as a dress).\u00a0 She let me choose accessories and lipstick, too.\u00a0 To some people I might not have looked noble, but my grandmother told me I looked like a beautiful queen and I was happy to believe her.\u00a0 The rest of Purim with my grandmother involved avoiding her hamantashen<\/a>, which were not cookies of any sort, but rather tasteless bread dough stuffed with homemade jam so thick it could have clogged a drain.<\/p>\n

For the most part, I forgot about Purim until I became a mother.\u00a0 The year my oldest son was two was the first year I had a costume for him – a Thomas the Tank Engine Engineer’s costume.\u00a0 I was eight months pregnant with my second son at that time, and as I dressed my son in his Thomas costume and prepared him for his morning at nursery school, I began to feel as if I was going into labor.\u00a0 Mike was out of town, so I called my mother-in-law to take my son to school.\u00a0 I called Mike and told him to come home.\u00a0 I went to the hospital.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

As it became clear to me that I was going to give birth a full month early, I started to worry about having a premature newborn.\u00a0 Would he be okay?\u00a0 Was he really ready to come out?<\/em>\u00a0 And then I started to feel guilty.\u00a0 I was terribly uncomfortable and must have wished a hundred times a day for a speedy pregnancy.\u00a0 And worse than uncomfortable, I’d also been diagnosed with gestational diabetes and had started using insulin.\u00a0 I hated it.\u00a0 I wanted the pregnancy to be over and I wanted diabetes to go away.\u00a0 Deep down inside I don’t think I believed diabetes was really going to go away forever, but at the time, the possibility that it might was giving me strength.\u00a0 As my labor began, I was secretly celebrating -on and off – the fact that I was getting out of a month’s worth of injections.\u00a0 Then my good sense would reclaim me and I’d focus again on the fear of having a premature baby.\u00a0 But the thought of diabetes going away was so spectacular, it was hard to push it aside completely.<\/p>\n

I ended up having a c-section.\u00a0 My son was born just over six pounds, and after one night in an incubator he was fine.\u00a0 My recovery took a little longer, but my blood sugar levels seemed fairly normal.\u00a0 I’d begun the Purim celebrations as a pregnant diabetic.\u00a0 When the holiday was over, it was as if I’d been masquerading as both.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":53098,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1501],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Day Diabetes Went Away: Reflections on Purim<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I wanted the pregnancy to be over and I wanted diabetes to go away. 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