Already

It has been just over two weeks since we found out that Jake has diabetes. Those two weeks included wrapping up school, our family Christmas party, Christmas itself, travel to Maryland, and a New Year's Eve party. I'm grateful for two weeks of school vacation to get into some sort of diabetes-management groove, despite the crazy busy schedule of the holiday season.

Here are some of the things we've already experienced:

• Clueless peers (granted, they are only 11). Jake told his friends at school about his diabetes, and one of them said (and I quote): "Dude, if you get a cut on your foot you could lose a limb. That happened to my grandmother!"
• Asinine teachers. Jake was low at lunch time at school, so I asked the nurse to pull him from class just prior to getting on the bus so he could check his blood sugar. She paged him out of orchestra class. After he left, the teacher informed the class that Jake has diabetes. Jake and I chatted about it and agreed that the teacher had absolutely no right to do that, and was very wrong. It is his favorite class, though, so he has not yet given me permission to raise holy hell about it.
  
• 117. This one's for my camp friends: 3 days in, Jake had his first "117" blood sugar. Fantastic!
• A football low. 49 after a neighborhood pick-up game.
• A pasta high. 267 after some yummy angel hair with marinara. I think it was the sauce I mis-counted.
  
• A random breakdown (mine). Four days in, I went to the grocery store and barely made it back to my car before losing it. Something about looking for kid-friendly snacks with reasonably low carb counts just hit me hard.
  
• An overdue breakdown (his). Before we learned the tricks of taking lantus, the nightly shot stung. That, plus a high blood sugar bad mood, gave Jake the opening he needed to set aside that brave face for just a few minutes. I was relieved that he did, and hope he lets it happen again.
• A sleepover. Across the street. I swear I sat up until about 2AM watching the house. Not sure what I was watching for but going to sleep was a tad more difficult than usual.

Many of my inner thoughts the past two weeks have focused on how incredibly hard diabetes must be for parents who get blindsided by their child's diagnosis. I know that a sleepover 10 days in would be 100 times harder if we didn't have a head start on this disease. Scratch that, everything would be 100 times harder.

Knowing the disease, though, is a double-edged sword. While I have fewer fears about his future (because I know that diabetes hasn't stopped John or I from pretty much anything) I also have a deeper knowledge of what diabetes can do. I was low the other night, and hating the way my body felt, and I thought of Jake experiencing a low, and that was tough.

People with diabetes will understand me when I say that you can live a 'normal' life - in the minutes between shots and injections and lows and highs. But when diabetes interrupts it can be a minor glitch or a major pause (which is to say, it can really suck.) Parents, whether or not their kids have diabetes, know how much we want to shield our kids from the bad stuff while at the same time preparing them to be able to manage the bad stuff. The diabetes bad stuff, unlike many of the far-fetched and largely unfounded fears that can crop up for a parent, is all too real for me.