Did you ever have such a bad cold that you just wanted to drink NyQuil and go straight to bed for 8 hours?
Have you ever had such a great time at the beach that you forgot to eat lunch?
Has something so important been on your mind that you just walk for hours to clear your head?
This sense of abandonment, where you can just forget about your life for a while, cannot happen when you are the caregiver of a child living with Type 1 diabetes, or an adult living with Type 1. Sure, you can forget, or pretend to forget, about diabetes for chunks of hours at a time. You can go from breakfast to lunch, on a good day, without worrying about a low or high, but that’s about it. You can’t go much longer without remembering that you are resposible for taking care of someone with diabetes. Never can you go eight hours at the beach just running on pure fun and energy. The fun and energy are certainly still there, but so is diabetes and defintely blood glucose checks…they will not be put in the corner.
Today we went to an Easter Egg hunt at the beach. It was fantastic. Great weather. Tons of excitement. Millions, or what felt like millions, of kids. Even more parents. Buckets. Sand. Eggs. Shovels. Blood Glucose meters. Candy for lows. Wait. What? You mean you didn’t bring your glucose meter to your egg hunt. Well, we did. We bring it everywhere. Type 1 diabetes doesn’t care that we are at an egg hunt with millions of kids having a blast digging in the sand for eggs. Type 1 diabetes doesn’t care that egg hunting is a 1,000 year old tradition from back when they didn’t even know what Type 1 diabetes was.
Type 1 diabetes doesn’t care, but I do. That’s why I no longer fret that even with the cold of the Century, I will still not get to down that NyQuil and savor the uninterrupted sleep of younger days, I will be up every 4 hours to check my boy’s sugar while he gets the rest he needs.
That is why at the beach, while my boy runs around with sand in his hair and a smile on his face, I will be cleaning a finger every few hours to check his sugar to make sure eveything is ok on the inside too.
That is why no matter how much I want to grab a few books and find a small coffee shop where I could read for hours and hours drinking myself into a caffeine haze, I don’t, type 1 diabetes is why I won’t.
Type 1 diabetes doesn’t care, but I do.