The Sweet Life?

Today we are getting ready around here for a trip to the endocrinologist, so I thought I'd blog about something more serious than usual: diabetes. As I mentioned briefly at the start of this blog, my daughter has type 1 diabetes. This came as a shock to me when we found out. While my grandmother did develop type 2 diabetes at the end of her life, after seemingly existing on a diet of air and Whitman's Sampler chocolates for several years as far as I, the occasionally visiting teenage granddaughter, could see, no one in our family has ever had a more clearly hereditary form of diabetes, and in fact, when they told me that Bella had it, I was not 100 percent sure what it was, though I was sure that the nurses had lost their minds when they told me that I would be walking out of the hospital with a bag of syringes and something called insulin in a week, left to our own devices - me giving her shots and counting something called "carbohydrates". Me, whose interest in food previously was purely gourmet. Me, who averts her eyes whenever they show scenes on Grey's Anatomy that actually have to deal with treating patients. Somehow, if I'd thought about it at all, I'd always thought that people with serious health issues were treated by visiting nurses. Definitely not left in the hands of novice parents, shown some rudimentary steps by jovial doctors who assure you that "you'll get the hang of it".

The first time I tried to test my own blood sugar to show Bella how painless it is, I hopped around the room saying "Ow!" and cradling my hand for ten minutes. It was all I could do not to cry. It's a good thing one of us is tough. I am no stranger to pain myself. I had open heart surgery when I was four to correct a congenital defect. But they had the decency to put me to sleep first.

Somehow we've come through it, Bella and I. I've educated myself, read all the right books, marched in the Walk to Cure Diabetes, met up with other parents of type 1 kids at Central Ohio Diabetes Association events. And yet...I wonder at what point you start to feel like you're doing it right. When do you feel capable and why is there no clear cut plan? When do you stop feeling angry that your daughter has to count carbohydrates and worry about chronic illness, when you did all the right things - breastfeeding, and avoiding caffeine and alcohol and hair dye. I once, in a fit of pregnancy panic, even called the manufacturers of a lotion after learning that it contained Vitamin A, which apparently pregnant women aren't supposed to use in a concentrated form. Why didn't all that vigilance pay off? If it didn't pay off then, what's to say the most careful treatment regiment will pay off now? Most of the time, we deal with our old 'new' lifestyle pretty well these days, but still sometimes, I worry.