School Nurse Blues

I often used to read with pity the woeful wails from parents whose children went to a school with a clueless nurse or even no nurse at all. Truthfully, I didn't give it a lot of thought because that was the one thing we seemed to have well under control. Amy had trained Emma's first nurse and teacher well, and they had a pretty good handle on things. There were a few bumps and hiccups along the way: Emma wandering alone outside during a fire drill, her pump wailing away all the while, screwed up sensor numbers from poorly-excecuted calibrations, etc. But at minimum, they could look after the diabetes basics. We were pretty distressed to learn the nurse was moving, but we remained optimistic that a week of training ought to do it.

And then today came. The first day of school. The first day of school with a new nurse. The first day of school with a new nurse and Amy's business on the cusp of booming success.

There is another T1 1st grader in Emma' school. He came to the nurse's office with Emma before lunch so he could be tested and given his injection. The nurse read the results and triumphantly proclaimed "You don't need insulin, your blood sugar is fine!"

Hallelujah! The school nurse has cured type 1 diabetes! At least until the test that comes 2 hours after this little boy ate his lunch. Fortunately, he is smarter than the nurse, and informed her he needed insulin before every meal. (To tell the truth, I'm not sure Emma would have said that).

Poof! There goes our misplaced optimism and excitement about the first day of school with the new nurse, and I'm completely torn as to how to address it. I know my wife won't want me to say anything, but this is just as much (if not more) about her as it is about Emma. I mean, she didn't want to give him insulin!! Where do you even START when someone is THAT incompetent? Clearly, someone failed to ask a pretty important question during the job interview, so do I hassle the principal? Hunker down and work extra hard to train the new nurse AND the new teacher?

I wish it were as easy as telling the school "You've got one week to figure this out." But this isn't McDonald's, it's Emma. If they can't do it, we will have to. Perhaps a better title would have been "Starting Over."

The Stuff I Miss the Most

When I was first diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, at the tender age of 26, I had to make a very rapid lifestyle change that included giving up eating trainloads of stuff that I like to eat. Because I was 26, the ER doc assumed I was type 2, and after a couple of hours on IV insulin I was sent home with a prescription for glyburide (and a Winnie the Pooh sticker 'cause I only cried a little when they started the IV). After another doc tried to kill me with oral meds, I finally got on insulin and started to get the hang of this D nonsense. I quickly learned that being new to type 1 meant no more:

Oh how I miss you dear friends! Boxes upon boxes of donuts, with your various frostings, fillings, and delightful variety of sprinkles! And my dear Count Chocula, you and your cousins Frankenberry and Booberry haunted my every Saturday morning until the final cartoon went off the air at 11:30. Old friend, triple-meat, triple-cheesburger; I still call upon your delicious existance on the Ides of March, and yet your high fat content stays with my blood sugar for a fortnight.

These days, a donut here or there can be managed with an aggressive bolus timed just so. Cereal is a blood-sugar bomb. If there's a way to bolus for it, I certainly haven't figured it out yet. I cannot deny my indulgences in cheeseburgers, although my days of the triple-meat are fairly well passed. To be clear, I was not overweight when I was diagnosed, and NO, these things did not cause me to have type 1 diabetes. They just happen to be some old friends that don't understand diabetes and so I just prefer not to play with them anymore. They're that weird kid on the street that wore swimming goggles year-round.

I miss a lot of other stuff too. Like being able to roll over at night without a pump jabbing me in the ribs, or being able to sit through long meetings without whipping out a juice box. (Seriously, how many grown men still have to carry around juice boxes with "Big Bird" on them?) Mostly, I just miss being....normal?

This Made Me Laugh

Yeah, I'm kind of weird like that.

Oh Yeah, Him!

Emma obviously captures a lot of time and attention. Actually, she demands a lot of time and attention! The really great thing about Emma (among many others) is that she's simply the happiest kid I have ever known, even though she has more to gripe about than any adult I know. I think Amy and I have done a pretty good job with her, but it takes team effort when there's a little one in the house with type 1. It's easy to take it for granted when a D sibling is as good a kid as her big brother, Brenden.

The true bottom line, in my completely un-biased opinion, is that Brenden has really taken to heart two very important things: always look after those who cannot always look after themselves, and that family comes first. Brenden is transforming, right before my very eyes, from a kid into a young gentleman.









Over the past year, on nights he and I do the grocery shopping, I noticed a couple of things that may not seem like a lot, but that I thought were pretty darn cool. To start, he saw an elderly couple obviously struggling to get out of the store with their groceries. Brenden asked if he should go carry their bags to their car for them. Tonight, as the checker was scanning our items and putting them into the plastic-bag merry-go-round, Brenden stood at the end putting the groceries into our basket. After every bag went into the basket, Brenden peeled the plastic apart just a few inches. He was doing it so the checker would not have to peel each and every plastic bag. Sounds silly, but that is how a gentleman would act, and its how a gentleman treats any employee of any business. I could not have been prouder.

My little gentleman is starting middle school this year, which by default adds another layer of gray hair. But if I never lived to see another day, I would know that my little gentleman would take care of his mom and his sister for as long as he needed to.


I'm proud of you dude.

Like Sands Through the Hourglass

Whoa. I am a TERRIBLE blogger.

I am good at impersonating Disney characters, accurately predicting arrival times to any destination when embarking on a road trip, and making computers do all kinds of things they were never intented to do. But I am a lousy blogger. A true poster-child of the Lazy Bloggers Club. Sorry about that, I'll try to make it up to all 4 of you.

Typically it would be expected that I would provide an update on what's happened since I last composed a blog, so here goes:

1. Alaska became a state.
2. Pluto was kicked out of our solar system.
3. Global warming went away, then came back, then went away again.
4. The Berlin Wall fell.
5. Courtney Cox either starred in or had cancelled at least 5 TV shows; but she's still married to David Arquette. (His sister still awakens everyone in the house each night on "Medium," which has changed networks..twice.)
6. Atari game systems were discontinued.
7. Luke learned that Darth Vader was his father. (I'm still in shock)
8. Someone apparently developed a device known as an "insulin pump."
9. At least 3 cast members from "Saved By the Bell" have successfully shed their "squeeky-clean" images. I also hear the cast from "Diff'rent Strokes" has also endured some form of turmoil.
10. The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, my hometown newspaper, stopped advertising jobs in the help-wanted section as "Jobs for Men," "Jobs for Women," and "Jobs for Either." (Yes, they really used to do that).

Many other exciting things have happened, but because I am OCD and would love to travel to Europe, I like to keep my lists to multiples of ten. It's been one heck of a whirlwind the last several months to be sure. I know you are all screaming at your monitors begging for more, so I promise to provide a little more of an update very soon.

In the meantime, if you haven't seen it yet, here's a link to a guest blog I wrote for Kerri.