This is totally healthy!

A student (I teach middle school ... 8th graders ... they rock) shoved a half-finished bottle of juice in my face. "Miss, this is totally healthy! You should be drinking this. Look, it has aloe in it."

I took the drink and flipped to the nutritional information. One serving of this "healthy" drink had 23 carbohydrates, but there were two servings in the bottle, so the entire bottle had 46 carbohydrates in it. Out of the 46 carbohydrates, 44 came from sugar. Pure. Sugar.

I explained that this meant that this drink had the equivelent of 11 packets of sugar in it. A 12oz. can of Coca-Cola only has 39 carbohydrates, so about 10 packes of sugar.

My proud moment of the day: he threw away the rest of his "healthy" drink and got out a bottle of water from his backpack.

Packaging can be deceiving, and even though I knew that before, it has become very evident since C's diagnosis. Things that look healthy on the shelf may not be. Diabetes is a real eye-opener when it comes to knowing what is fueling your body. Perhaps, in all of the crazy, that can be the silver lining.

Hollywood Says it so it Must Be True

I love a good fairy tale revamp, so I was super pumped about the new movie "Hansel and Grettle." But now there is one thing about the movie that is bothering me. It is Hansel. He has diabetes. And, since he is insulin dependent, it seems to be type 1 diabetes. And the reason Hansel has this horrible disease? Sugar ... lots and lots of sugar from the witch's house.

Sigh.

Hollywood, type 1 diabetes is not caused by too much sugar. It is an autoimmune disease. And, while we're here, type 2 isn't caused by a poor diet alone - genetics play a very large factor. But you throw around these misconceptions like they are nothing, and it really gets my panties in a bunch. Don't you have fact checkers on staff? Don't you have medical consultants who can call you on your ridiculous ideas of how the world really works outside your bubble?

I am waiting, Hollywood, for the day my daughter and her peers are old enough to pick up on crazy ideas like that. I am waiting for them to tease and taunt her about her diabetes being caused by sugar ..  for them to accuse me, or even her, of causing this disease. I am waiting on that day because the misconceptions are already out there.

In a waiting room the other day, a mother told her son that he better not eat his sucker or he'd get diabetes. As a mom, I understand a good scare tactic, but this one was so damaging. What if one of his classmates is diagnosed with diabetes, and he becomes that kid that I fear for my own daughter? What has she taught her son except that people cause their own diabetes? How can he be sensitive to diabetics when she is painting such a negative picture of them? Or, and the biggest of them all, how will she reverse the damage if he himself is diagnosed with diabetes?

Maybe, Hollywood, you should stick to things you know, like reinventing comic book heroes and picking up Spielberg movies, and keep your misconceptions to yourself. Because I did not give my one-year-old diabetes by force-feeding her sugar like some evil witch. Because there are people out there who are already ignorant about the disease. Because society does not need your veiled commentary on the obesity epidemic in the U.S.

Because you don't know, and if you don't know, then you should let someone who does know do the talking.

Pod Change Night: Part 2

Every third day we change C's insulin pump, and every third night I am up every two hours trying to get her blood sugar back down. Pod change nights always result in her blood sugar struggling to get out of the 300s. My goodness, it is exhausting ... and frustrating.

I just want to slap her pump and tell it to pull itself together while violently shaking it. We pay good money for you so work, darn it!

We will conquer this. We've already started trying some new tricks that the pump allows me to try, but we need to keep tweaking and adjusting those little tricks until we find something which works for her. Until then, though, I will continue to buy black tea in bulk (you know, some days I wish I was a coffee drinker) and set my alarm for every 120 minutes.

And if any of you are worried about how these frequent checks affect C, no worries. She told me the other day she doesn't mind when I check her in the middle of the night because even if she does wake up, she never remembers. Thanks, girly. Your support and understanding is greatly appreciated.

Holiday Carb Overload

Until C got diabetes, I didn't really think about what was in the food we ate as part of our traditional holiday meals. What I have become aware of is that we are heavy on the carbs around the holidays. Some people might cringe or be ashamed of this, but not me. This is what we eat, have always eaten, and will continue to eat.

To top it off, C was born on December 23, so we always take her out to eat since there is no way that her party will EVER be on her actual birthday. So far, for the past four years, she has chosen Red Robin as her birthday eatery. Is it for their creamy mac and cheese? Or maybe their tasty fries? No, although she does have huge portions of both of those. It is for the fact that on your birthday you get a ginormous sundae - chocolate sauce, whipped cream, sprinkles, and all. It's a carb-tastic meal. This year we figured she had eaten just over 100 carbs (she usually eats around 40 per meal). Sadly, we had underestimated the number of carbs, so it was more than that even. Diabetic caretakers of the year, right here.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, like I mentioned, do not give us a reprieve from the carbs. If we remove the turkey and the green beans, everything else has a bamillion carbs in it. It's pretty incredible the amount of carbs my ancestors managed to pack into one dish. I honestly am not sure how they did it, but they did. Luckily C doesn't eat a lot of this stuff as she's a pretty picky eater, but the stuff she does eat is loaded. We often have to call her plates her plates, and we don't always get them right.It's a fun game, really, if "fun" means totally stressful and not fun at all.

For 72 hours, C spends most of her time on a roller coaster of blood sugar numbers. She is usually too high or too low. Normally it would throw her for a loop, but her birthday and Christmas seem to take away the sting of being unstable. Any other day she would be an emotional mess, but these three days it's not a big deal ... she just keeps on going. And after those 72 hours, we start to see her numbers return to normal. Until New Year's Eve. But that's a tale for another day.

Pod Change Night

It is pod change night again. It's always pod change night. Okay, every three nights is pod change night, but I swear we just did this last night.

I hear it calling to me in my sleep ... beep beep, beep beep ... beep beep, beep beep ...

Diabetes never ends. Ever.

Extreme Responsibility: Diabetes Edition

One joy of the potty-trained child, bottle-weaned child is not having to carry a diaper bag around. You go from lugging a huge sack of crap on your shoulder every time you leave the house to, maybe, a spare change of clothes in the trunk. It is a glorious thing!

Diabetes, though, brings back the bag. We do not leave the house without her insulin pump controller, back-up batteries, blood sugar test strips, lancets, insulin, a back-up syringe, a back-up pump, alcohol wipes, a glucagon injection, a juice box, and glucose tablets. From place to place, location to location, we drag around a bag to hold all of these supplies. Granted the supplies are small, so unlike a diaper bag, the diabetes bag in small. However, unlike the diaper bag, there is a great sense of responsibility. Inside are over $1000 of medical supplies which quite literally keep C alive.

Also, because I am crazy, I don't carry around the bag ... I have the 5-year-old diabetic do it. I purposefully chose a messenger-style bag so it would be easy for her to carry. It may be an extreme lesson in responsibility, and perhaps a large weight for a 5-year-old to carry, but I can assure you of two things:

1. She doesn't feel the weight of responsibility like I do. To her it's just her diabetes bag, not all that other stressful money/life-line stuff.
2. It is something she has to get used to. She will have diabetes until there is a cure. And while that will happen in her lifetime, it won't happen tomorrow, so she needs to get used to caring and keeping up with her supplies.

I'd love to ditch the bag and let her be a kid who just has to keep up with her jacket, but this is the reality of diabetes - needing supplies on hand 24/7 no matter where you are. So I at least let her pick out her own fabric and had a friend help me make a bag that she is proud to carry - at least until she gets too old for Sprinkles and Sparkles.

True Friends

I was a little worried when C went back to school after getting her pump. While she had no visible signs of being a diabetic before the pump, it was obvious that she was a little different from the other students. She left for lunch before the other kids so she could go to the nurse for her blood sugar check and her insulin, and she was usually waiting for the rest of the class in the cafeteria when they got there. Additionally, she has no-questions-asked access to the restroom and the nurse. With the addition of the pump to her management plan, it is now physically obvious that she is different. For example, when it's on her arm, and she's in short sleeves, you cannot miss this thing.

I wasn't worried that the nurse would mess it up, or that it would fall off while she was playing. I know that 5-year-old kids can be super jealous when someone else gets special treatment, so I was worried that the other kids would say something about it looking stupid or call her names just to try to knock her down a peg. She is so sensitive, and gets her feelings hurt so easily, that I knew it would devastate her if one of the other kids made her feel self-conscious about having a pump on. We worked so hard to get her to agree to do this, and I was worried she would want to quit because of some insensitive comment.

So when C came home and told me that all of the kids in her class thought her pump was "neat" and "cool," I almost cried. Maybe it's because a friend made a pink and black zebra striped cover for the pump out of duct tape. Maybe it's because C is really and truly interested in being every one's friend. Or maybe I just underestimated these kids and the awesome way their parents raised them. Whatever it was, none of them has said anything negative to C about her pump or her diabetes.

I've heard other parents of diabetic children talk about how their kids are teased about being different. One kid even raised her hand and asked, in front of the entire class, if she could move because she didn't want to sit next to the "sick kid" all the time. So it makes me happy that C is having such an easy time with all of this right now. I know that she may not always; there will eventually be some kid who says something really stupid to her out of jealousy and spite, but her classmates have proved to me that there will also be kids on her side. Kids who will possibly tell the mean kid where to shove it. In other words, true friends. I didn't think five-year-olds were capable of being true friends, but I will happily say that, in this case, I had nothing to worry about.