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 last [...]
In some parts they call it catting. In others, it’s hogging or stumping or dogging. If it is trout, not catfish, you are after, it is considered art, not a sport, and known to practitioners as tickling. However, those of, shall we say, a bit more extreme-minded personality, prefer something a bit ornerier as their [...]
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 [...]
Nighttime sometimes is the hardest. You wake, you think of her. Maybe you get up and check her blood, or just feel her shoulder and listen for breathing as you might a newborn. A slight nudge perhaps if you’ve caught her in a long mid-breath. Maybe you lie there in bed thinking and wondering and [...]
I went away the other weekend. It wasn’t a long away, just an overnight with a friend of mine spent camping in the mountains and fly fishing the next day. Franca had been back from France for a week and with spring and the weather turning I was eager to log some solitary time on [...]
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 [...]
It gets very lonely when there is just one of you because there is no one to share in the worry and fatigue of what has become a daily ritual so that the headaches and sleeplessness and frayed nerves are yours and yours alone. When being apart was something you were just planning for at [...]
Before, much earlier, a year or two prior to Lia’s diagnosis when all of our children still lived at home, including our now-collegian son, one of the kids would be given the task of setting the table for dinner. Then if they lingered too long afterward we would ask them to call their siblings to [...]
Things are getting better now, aren’t they?
I was standing outside my daughter’s school preparing to go in for a Valentine’s Day party when my sister asked me this question over the phone. I paused only briefly, my hand on the door. It had been seven weeks since Lia’s diagnosis and my sister and I had [...]
And so here we are home again. Living some semblance of living amidst the glucose readings, needles and counted carbs. You start to think: How in the hell did this happen? To her. To us. To me. Why? Was it something I caused? Some plague I’d escorted unsuspectingly into our home, a danger I’d failed [...]