Enough about me. Today we went, as a family, to the Barbara Davis Center for Juvenile Diabetes. They are truly awesome there. DH had a regularly scheduled appointment. Our kids are in a study where they look for antibodies that are associated with Type 1 Diabetes, like antibodies against the pancreas.
To facilitate a blood draw with young-uns, they put some numbing cream on their arm and let them play in this awesome playroom for about half an hour. Then, when the blood is drawn, the hope is that they can't really feel too much.
Today when we went to the playroom, there were lots of other kiddos there. There was a three-year-old boy who had diabetes and a 12-year-old girl whose brother was just diagnosed with diabetes recently. The woman in charge of making the room fun (crafty things, movies, etc.) said her son was diagnosed with diabetes when he was 20 months old. Can you imagine? The three year old kiddo was rocking an insulin pump!
The older mom in the room, whose son was diagnosed at 20 months, was proud to report that her son is a healthy 26-year-old today. After years of testing his blood and dosing insulin for him, she handed over control to him when he was in Elementary School. She said she bawled.
The 12-year-old was uncomfortable and unsure about her brother's diabetes. I guess her family is taking a class to help educate them about diabetes. They ran out of blood testing strips once and everyone freaked out because they didn't know what to do. (Strips are OTC, BTW. ;) She said his friends at school were weirded out that he had diabetes and didn't really hang out with him anymore. :( She seemed to think that he was lazy and that contributed to his disease. I suppose it would if her brother had Type 2 diabetes. It used to be that adolescents and children didn't get Type 2 diabetes, but I hear it's more common nowadays.
The reason I'm posting about this is just because...this is life. It's not perfect and we're people and we break all the time. I keep seeing people (my husband, those moms, friends, acquaintances) who have met this sort of adversity by making the best of it and moving forward despite the circumstances. It would be so easy to give in and become permanently overwhelmed by the fact that your toddler could DIE without insulin (or fill-in-the-blank with any emotional hurdle), but we make do.
When it came time to draw the blood, DS went first. He was apprehensive but he likes to be aware of what's going on and see everything that's happening. (This, dear friends, could explain the Dentist Debacle.) He watched the needle go into his arm and calmly watched his blood pool in the little beaker. Proud Mama! My little DD wasn't so fortunate. She's a Little Bit and they had trouble getting the seemingly giant needles to fit into her teeny veins. After two pokes, some crying, and a lot of digging around in her arm (yeesh!), the study staff gave up and we decided to try again later.
Hopefully our kids don't develop any antibodies. I would be so saddened. DH with Diabetes, me with autoimmune thyroiditis...makes for a bad genetic recipe. I hope they are blessed with health. And hopefully if we do have another hurdle to leap over, we'll deal with it gracefully. After I dissolve into at least one mandatory fit of tears, that is. ;)
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