In spite of her diabetes, for Lia, life is pretty simple. She loves to take walks up the road, fish off a dock, and she’ll still will occasionally host in her room a miniature tea party for two. If a person is kind to her, she’s kind to them back. She never says, “but it’s [...]
This is a tough one. Today’s post for diabetes blog week is to write about something good that diabetes has done for Lia. The problem I’m having is that accomplishing this tiny task is made a bit more difficult by any number of obvious reasons: It’s a disease. It’s incurable. And mostly it acts like [...]
Take diabetes, for instance. In many ways, raising a dog is a lot like controlling blood sugars, minus of course the extreme health risk. You study the science. You learn the technique. You get up every day determined to do your best and when things go the way you had planned you celebrate. You applaud [...]
I am having a problem with our dog. You might remember Jake. I wrote about forgetting him as we left from a holiday weekend visit with some friends at their lake house. Jake is a pretty mellow dog. He follows me around the house, lays under the desk while I write, and other than shedding, [...]
There is something I just don’t get yet. For as long as we’ve been administering Lia’s insulin through a pump we routinely find ourselves relying on intuition when determining her dose. A word problem of how this happens might look something like this: Lia and her dad are on a field trip to visit a [...]
Back now to the daily opus of attention paid Lia’s diabetes. Her wellness of course is always on our minds and as such our strategy in treating the disease is simple: be open to anything that will multiply our opportunities to know it, treat it, and deal with it better emotionally, mentally, and physically. So [...]
When it was through multiple daily injections instead of a pump that we delivered insulin to Lia, minus the early emotional strain, it was a fairly straightforward method of managing her diabetes. Or as straightforward as any such nearly impossible task can be. Three times a day she ate a meal, normally of food prepared [...]
When you first learn that a child of yours has diabetes, if there is no family history of diabetes or the root of it is not otherwise obvious, and it rarely is, the parent will do not only whatever they can to make life with diabetes better for the child but they may also work [...]
Most people don’t think much about the pancreas. Most of them of course don’t have to think about it at all. But there are a few who, because of events that have occurred outside of their control, must spend a great deal of thought deliberating exactly what it means to act like a pancreas. In [...]
We knew the invitation was coming, we just didn’t know when and it was like waiting the arrival of a dreaded phone call. On the day Lia brought it home from school it was mostly a green day, so the notion of letting her spend the night at another child’s house was not totally out [...]