Copyright © 2014 Kerri M. Sparling
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013949026
E-book ISBN: 978-1-938170-38-6
Disclaimer: Spry Publishing LLC does not assume responsibility for the contents or opinions expressed herein. Although every precaution is taken to ensure that information is accurate as of the date of publication, differences of opinion exist. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. The information contained in this book is not intended to replace professional advisement of an individual’s doctor prior to beginning or changing an individual’s course of treatment.
for my littlest bird
Contents
Chapter 1 Making Sense of the New Normal
Chapter 3 Transitioning from a Parent’s Care to Caring for Yourself
Chapter 5 Weaving the Threads of Friendship and Diabetes
Chapter 6 Diabetes and Pregnancy
Chapter 7 Parenting with Diabetes
Chapter 8 Balancing Diabetes and Love
Chapter 9 Walking the Blood Sugar Tightrope
Chapter 10 Fitting Diabetes Devices into Daily Life
Chapter 11 Bringing Your Diabetes to Work
Chapter 12 Diabetes and Exercise
Chapter 13 Finding Balance in Trains, Planes, and Automobiles
Chapter 14 Advocacy Outside of the Bubble
Chapter 15 Taking Diabetes to College
Chapter 16 Finding Balance and Moving Forward
Acknowledgments
Making Sense of the New Normal
When I was two years old, I tripped and fell, smashing my nose against the stone hearth that surrounded our fireplace. The blood! My little face! My parents freaking out! There were exclamation points everywhere, and, to this day, my nose still has a bit of a bump to it where the cartilage hit the stone.
I was so little that the memory is lost forever to me, but my parents remember it distinctly. Like so much of my early childhood—the only years I have had without type 1 diabetes—these memories are caught in snapshots and half-fictionalized stories we repeat around the dinner table at holidays.
However, I do remember wetting the bed before my diagnosis. I was six years old and frustrated by my perceived lack of self-control. “Mom, I can’t stop!” was my lament, and she shared my frustration because she couldn’t help me stop. I have a very clear memory of walking downstairs to the living room where my parents were watching television and throwing my “lovey blanket” into the middle of the floor.
“I can’t stop peeing in my bed! But I can stop sucking my thumb,” I said, jutting my chin out and making what has evolved into my “stubborn fool” face. “I’m DONE.” (My parents remind me of this story every time I get my mind set on doing something new and frustratingly challenging. “You always do what you can do, and what you can’t control, you still try to control,” they say. I’m still not sure if this is a compliment.)
After the purchase of a system, worn in my underpants, that detected the presence of urine by announcing it with an alarm that pierced through the quiet night of our home and vaulted me from my bed, the nighttime accidents stopped almost entirely. But I was still up once or twice a night using the bathroom.
It was months later, during a before-school physical that included the standard pee-in-the-cup moment that our pediatrician, Dr. L, came out with a urine sample in his hand. “Whose pee is this?” he asked, pointing to the cup with the bright blue lid.
“That’s Kerri’s,” my mom said, assigning the sample as mine and not my brother’s.
“It’s a little high in sugar. She needs to go to the hospital for blood work this afternoon,” he indicated.
According to my mom, who remembers this day clearly while my memory is cluttered more with the clowns on the bathroom wallpaper in the office, there wasn’t much explanation about the test or what it was for. The blood draw for a seven year old felt more acute and more dramatic than the vague “high in sugar” diagnosis it was confirming.
But then came the phone call and a conversation between my mom and the doctor. He told her that my blood sugar was 250 mg/dL and that I had “juvenile diabetes.” In a controlled panic, my mother was calling my father and saying that word again—diabetes—and making arrangements to take me to Rhode Island Hospital the next day.
When I talked about my diagnosis with my mother over cups of tea years later, I asked her about how she felt upon receiving that call and being handed my diagnosis. She shared, “I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t panicked. I knew that [our extended family friend] Eleanor’s son, Jim, had diabetes, but I didn’t know what that meant or what it entailed. It wasn’t me being tough, but more that I didn’t know what we were getting in to. I just thought, ‘Okay, let’s go deal with this, whatever this is.’”
She continued, “We were sent home with a urine testing kit—do you remember those test tubes and the little color-changing tabs we’d drop in?”
I did remember those. The test tubes would turn orange and get hot if my blood sugar was too high.
“When the tubes stayed cool and the color was closer to blue, it meant ‘good job!’ and that your urine didn’t contain too much sugar. The thing is, home glucose meters existed when you were diagnosed, but we weren’t given one. And, for the first month, I was okay with the urine tests, because that’s all I could handle at the time. It was so much to take in and so much to learn that adding in all the numbers was more than I could adjust to.
“We eventually got a meter when we went to Joslin Diabetes Center for the first time