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Posts tagged ‘growing up with diabetes’

May 12

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Perspectives on Diabetes: Why Children with Diabetes Matters.

People ask me why this conference matters, why the organization matters, and it’s sometimes hard to sum up.  What’s so great about sitting in a room full of people with diabetes?  Isn’t it like surrounding yourself with a reminder of something that is a pain in the butt (diabetes)?  Doesn’t it suck to talk about diabetes all the time?

DUDE.  NO.  This is kind of the opposite.  Being around people who understand diabetes doesn’t breed a boatload of discussion about it.  Instead, I’m sitting at a lunch table with folks who know the ins and outs of diabetes, but we don’t shout out our blood sugar results or bolus amounts.  It’s not like that.  We’re talking about what our lives are like outside of diabetes, about the life we build that includes diabetes, not built around diabetes.

People with diabetes wear green bracelets, to both alert to potential emergency situations (you see a green bracelet in distress, think glucose tabs in a hurry) but the green also threads together the people who are playing host to diabetes.

A quick glance at someone’s wrist lets you know that they get it.

Sometimes, when days are kind of rough, I’ll put on a green bracelet to remind myself that I am not alone. Support from the community is as important as the insulin I take; both keep me healthy, and keep me going.

But it’s not just the green bracelets that make this community so powerful. Orange bracelets are given to folks who don’t have diabetes, but who remain touched by diabetes.  My daughter and my mother came to Friends for Life with me a few years ago, and they were also able to connect with their respective tribes, the orange braceleters. My mother, after decades of raising me without a vast diabetes support network, was immersed in a sea of parents who understood so much of what she’s experienced as my parent. And my daughter, her understanding of mom’s diabetes expanding with time, was able to hang out with other little kids who had parents with diabetes.

This kind of support, community … whatever you want to call it, it matters.  I mean, you’re here reading on a diabetes-centric blog, for crying out loud.  Clearly we, as a group, have a pull towards one another and benefit from connecting.  For me, knowing I’m not the only PWD (person with diabetes) on the planet makes diabetes easier to handle.  This is a hard thing to build studies around and quantify how it affects health outcomes, but taking my insulin is easier when my mental health receives care.  My A1C has been consistently steadier since engaging with the community.  My level of diabetes health literacy has grown by leaps and bounds.  And diabetes scares me less, on the whole, because I am surrounded by people who are in it with me.

Whole person health, remember?  Diabetes doesn’t exist in a damn vacuum.


The annual Friends for Life conference is coming up this July, and if you haven’t checked out the conference, now is the best time.  There are also other regional conferences (Anaheim in September, Falls Church this past April) that offer the same connection and community on a slightly smaller scale.

Full disclosure:  I’m a board member for T-1 Today, which is the parent non-profit organization for Children with Diabetes.  My bias includes that, and the fact that I haven’t produced any insulin for the last 30 years.  If you’re an organization interested in finding out more about how to make a tangible difference in the diabetes community, please connect with me.  And if you are interested in making a charitable donation to support the organization, click here.  And thank you!

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Mar 1

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Olive You.

“You don’t like seafood?!”

This wasn’t ever issued like a real question, but more an accusation, a verbal finger pointed at my face.  “You live in Rhode Island and you don’t like seafood like at all?”

Usually I’d say, “I just don’t care for it very much,” but I am really thinking, “EW! It’s weird and it smells terrible and ew.”

And then, back in 2009, I found myself pregnant with Birdy and all of a sudden, my taste buds changed in ways I could never have predicted.  I wanted salmon.  I wanted white fish.  Calamari?  Bring it.  Shrimp?  Sure.  Scallops?  Yes, please.

Chris looked at me like I had seven heads, a seafood-craving hydra.  “You want what?”

Even after my Bird was born, the seafood thing stuck.  Over the years, my food preferences have given way to other additions, like mushrooms (once viewed as a horror movie on a plate), brie cheese (previously categorized alongside cheeses with scents that can ease the paint off a wall), and oysters (tried for the first time over the summer and I didn’t die).  It’s taken six plus years, but my palette is finally maturing past tomatoes and grilled chicken, and I’m no longer afraid of crabs (unless they are unexpectedly underfoot, or secretly carbs).

I wonder, at times, if diabetes helped to keep my preferences muted.  Growing up, my mother went to great lengths to make sure my food was healthy, consistent, and carefully measured.  Food “risks” were not generally encouraged at the time, with even spices and condiments raising eyebrows and blood sugars.  The “diabetic friendly” cookbooks touted the benefits of the bland and unadventurous, and my mother took her adherence to the dog-eared cookbook recommendations very seriously.

Basically, boring meant better.

But, over time, diabetes education and insulin improved, and “approved diets” expanded to include more than just one aisle at the grocery store.  Meals weren’t diluted down to the American Diabetes Association exchange program.  Food could be healthy and taste like something other than “meh.”

And it took me even longer to break out of my own decades worth of habits.  Which explains the wasabi on my salmon sashimi.  And the oysters on my plate.  And the introduction of olives – once viewed as “EW the GROSSEST!” – into the circuit of deliciousness.

Olive you, new and strange foods.  Olive you a lot.

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Aug 31

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Looking Back: Taking the Plunge.

Summer is coming to a close over here and as we prepare to send Birdzone to kindergarten, I am spending the last few days of summer with my child velcro’d to me.  In an appreciation for family and for how mine handled diabetes as I was growing up, I wanted to look back at a post from five years ago where my aunt takes a stab (ha?) at giving me my insulin injection.   My immediate and extended family both took excellent care of me as a kid, and I’m glad that diabetes didn’t prevent sleepovers.

*   *   *

I’m from a very big family – my mother is one of seven and my dad is one of five, for starters – so I had plenty of relatives who used to babysit for me when I was small.  Overnight visits at my aunts’ houses were part of the fun, and I always looked forward to them.  (Because – let’s be honest – I liked that they let me put makeup on them and do their hair.  My pretty aunts were like living Barbie Doll heads to me.)

Things changed a bit when diabetes came into the picture.  Sleepovers weren’t as easy to manage, because now we had to juggle insulin injections, blood sugar tests, and being on the lookout for high and low blood sugars – especially back in that first year when everything diabetes-related was so new to all of us. I was still a little kid, and now all this medical stuff, too?

When I was first diagnosed, I didn’t do my own insulin injections.  At the outset, my parents did my injections for me, but after a few months, my extended family started to learn.  I think about it now, having baby-sat for my nieces and nephews and little cousins, and I can’t even picture that learning curve.  I’m so grateful that my family came together to learn to deal with diabetes, instead of leaving my mom and dad as the only ones who were “in the know.”

One of my earliest memories with diabetes is of me waiting on my aunt’s couch while my mother tried to explain to my aunt how to administer my insulin injection.  And every time I recall it, it makes me laugh.

“You need to uncap the syringe, check for any air bubbles one last time, and then pinch up where you’re going to stick the needle.  Once the needle is in, you press down the plunger and pull the needle out.  No problem!”

My aunt was nervous.  “I pinch the skin and then put the needle in?  How fast do I put the needle in?”

“Pretty quickly,” my mom responded.  “Don’t think about it.  Just jab it in there, as gently as you can.”

“Okay, so pinch, jab, plunge, remove.  Got it.”

“Great, so are you ready to give it a try?”

(Mind you, the entire time they’re debating this, I’m face-down on the couch with my pants pulled down, waiting for the insulin injection to be given into my seven year old butt cheek.  Another truly classy moment for me.)

My aunt came towards me, brandishing the syringe like a hot poker.  She uncapped it nervously, pinched up the top of my hip, and said (and I remember this clearly), “Ready, Kerri?”

“Yessh I amph.”  I said into the couch cushion.

“Okay, here we go!”

She expertly stuck the syringe needle into my skin, and I barely felt the pinch.  And then she pulled the needle quickly out, letting out an “Oooh!  I did it!”

My mother sighed.

“You didn’t push the plunger down.”

“What?”

“The plunger.  To dispense the insulin?  You didn’t push it down.  You just stuck her with a needle and then pulled it out again.”  I could hear my mother trying not to laugh.

“Oh shit!” my aunt exclaimed.

I laughed, despite the fact that they were about to advance on me again with that syringe.

“You shed de esh word.”

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