Tonight's blog comes out of humor, but for some readers, has a lot of not so funny truths. As parents of diabetic children, we have adapted to the little "extras" that we have to do on a daily basis and have since just considered it to be normal. As you break it down, there are a lot of things that we do that sometimes leads to much of our stress and frustration, yet we continue to do them. We do them to protect our kids and because we know that as f right now, there is no other choice.
Back to school is always a fun time of the year for us diabetic parents. It seems like when we just start to get comfortable with our kid's classroom teacher, the school year ends. Now we get to stress all summer about who our kid's next school year teacher is going to be and wonder if this person will pass the initial 5 minute meet and greet test, in which we as parents pre-judge whether we think the teacher is worthy enough to have a diabetic child in their classroom....nonetheless, our child. i know it sounds foolish, but we all do this....feel the teacher out during the initial meeting. "Have you ever had a diabetic child before" and "what do you know about type 1 diabetes" are questions that I ask, and yes teachers...you are being graded.
Then you schedule a separate meeting with the teachers and the school nurse. We are fortunate that our school nurse is a rock star and so far, we have been fortunate to have very good teachers. The meeting is focused around educating the teacher on how to take care of your child. The "what ifs" and basically walking through how to handle every situation and run every feature on your kid's insulin pump. Very important part of your child's education is making sure that they have the capacity to learn and that it's not being interrupted with uncontrolled blood sugars or pump malfunctions. In other words, if the people who are teaching my daughter cannot be students of diabetes care, then my daughter misses out on her educational opportunity. Seems harsh...truth sucks.
With our kids now spending 8 hours out of the day in the care of someone else, it is almost impossible to not have them on your mind. You find yourself making every means of communication available to you throughout the day. Meetings don't happen without a cell phone on vibrate. Email is always open on the desk and you co-workers know that when certain people call the office, you are interrupted no matter who you are meting with on what you are doing.
The school year also brings more opportunity for weekend sleep overs. We have exercised "Not this time" more than what we should, but we also have been denied some invites do to the hesitancy of some parents knowing that our kid is diabetic. I don't fault them, they are nervous. It is a big responsibility to take on. The only overnight that our kid has been on is when she stayed with a friend 2 blocks down the road. Needless to say, we didn't leave our house that night.
There have been many times when heather and I have said no to plans with friends and even taking off by ourselves do to the anxiety that we feel when we are not around our diabetic. We have a hard time getting over the feeling that no one will take good enough care of our kid while we are gone. The times we do have alone are often cut short because we feel the need to get her back into our care, and simply have a hard time enjoying ourselves with the extra anxiety.
We have been going through a "step" process to try and free us of our self imposed anxiety. We have created a "How To" laminated sheet to leave with the ones caring for our child, we have gone through the care directions time and time again, we have taught our child to operate her own pump and we have tried to increase our time away from her little by little. We are getting there.
I joke that our kid comes with a kit and instruction manual....but she does. We have a bag that we carry that is full of extras of all her supplies, emergency shots and glucose tablets. We try to make this bag as small as possible, so it doesn't seem like we are lugging a suitcase around all of the time, but the bag still is the size of a large purse. It's easy to spot a diabetic family if you know what to look for....look for the family that's always carrying the extra bag.
Patience is often exercised during this time of explanation. What is so easy for the diabetic family to understand, is often not so easily understood by the non-diabetic caretakers. I used to get frustrated when people would insist that my daughters type 1 diabetes could just be controlled by diet. That's when I have to break out the science talk and explain the difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
All in all, we have been diabetic long enough that we can laugh at some of these things now, but early on, struggled with having patience. I just started listening to what I was telling my diabetic child, "You are so special that you come with a kit and special instructions", and that seem to make things a bit easier to handle.
To all of the diabetic families out there, my prayers are with you and your diabetic children as they start the new school year. Remember that the Schrock family is always here for support.
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