Six Until Me: Your Story

Perfectly Beautiful - Heidi's Story 

Cloud nine is how I describe my first pregnancy – I was 34 and it was a perfectly beautiful 9 months – I did yoga all the time to help open my hips for delivery.  The yoga paid off in labor – my hips were nice and open and made for a perfectly beautiful experience. 

The months to follow were, again, a perfectly beautiful experience – my beautiful baby daughter was the worlds’ best sleeper, ever.  As a first time mom, I never missed a night’s sleep – thanks to my baby girl.  She was never sick – not even a cold.  And then when she was 11 months old – she got her first flu?  Well, I thought it was the flu, it was Sunday evening and she threw up after I breast fed her – this was highly unusual for her.  Oh well, we moved on to Monday and she seemed a bit lethargic but she still was eating and drinking plenty, I mean plenty.  The days that followed were odd, to say the least.  I called her pediatrician on Tuesday to find out if we should come in for an appointment, they were not concerned as her symptoms mirrored a flu that was going around – actually they even told me, “that is great she has no fever and she is drinking so much, keep up with the fluids.” – clearly the fluids were not a problem.  By Thursday, her “weird breathing from her mouth – even though her nose is not congested” was getting too strange and my husband and I took her in to see her pediatrician.

It was all a blur from then on – we saw the doctor, they did a blood sugar check – 360something (at the time I was clueless regarding a normal blood sugar number) – we were instructed to drive straight to the local ER and that we would be transported to the Children’s’ Hospital from there.  Once transported to the Children’s Hospital, we were in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit for 4 days - our perfectly beautiful 11 month old baby daughter was in Diabetic Keto Acidosis, she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes.  At the time I was unaware of the craziness that accompanies such a diagnosis. 

Before that day in the ICU, I did not know anyone with diabetes and was clueless to the daily (more like hourly) impact it would have on our lives and the quiet invasion that would occupy every single snack and meal time.  I had no idea that I would begin to routinely wake up every three hours to do a blood sugar check in the night.  The idea of envying other mother’s as they merrily fed cheerios and milk as snacks to their toddlers with no thought of blood glucose numbers or how long until the insulin peaks – was not hitting home yet.  I was unaware that I would be having cholesterol screenings and routine blood panels on my toddler.  However unaware I may have been and still can be at times nothing is worse than knowing that this is not my disease and that someday my daughter will take it away from me.  It will no longer be ours to share and she will be alone with it.  I loathe that day because I never want her to have to deal with this craziness, alone.

Until then, we share Type 1 Diabetes, me and my perfectly beautiful daughter; she still is and always will be my perfectly beautiful daughter (give or take a few daily injections of insulin).  She now has a younger brother that just turned one and she is a great big sister.  She loves her gymnastics classes and swim lessons.  We take nature walks everyday to try and catch that one monarch butterfly that escapes every time we bring the net around.  She is a great eater, we drink lots of water, ‘sof” juice (97.2% H2O and 2.8% fruit juice), lots of fruits and veggies however nothing makes her happier than ice cream – oh how she loves her ice cream.  And, yes, she can have ice cream.  I have learned so much about Type 1 diabetes and I have learned so much about life from my perfectly beautiful daughter.  I have come to realize that my daughter will never know anything different in her life then living with type 1 diabetes – until her perfectly beautiful cure.