With Lia unable to attend the JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes because of stomach ills the morning of, we decided to host our own and invited some friends to participate in a Walk to Cure Liabetes this past Sunday at a local park. It was Mother’s Day and the weather that afternoon was gorgeous and [...]
The bed shuttered slightly as the train passed out of sight in the dark just down the hill from my sister’s house. Franca and I were sitting on either side of Lia, holding the hair back from her face as she vomited again into a wastebasket. The nausea had come on just after midnight when [...]
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 [...]
One fall evening around dusk we had gathered around the kitchen window to see out into the woods on the northern side of the yard where there was making her way down the trail toward the house a small white deer. There were ten or so other does with her but she was the only [...]
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 [...]
There were many ways our family and friends and other people we knew showed their concern for Lia and our family in the days following her diagnosis. The best one was the visit by John, Jenny and Jessie, who detoured their travel plans to see Lia in the hospital on the morning of Christmas Eve. [...]
I think about this, about her, a great deal of the time, especially when she is not near me. I wonder what she thinks of it. What she fears. What she knows about her diabetes. She is brilliant and surprises me every day with just how much she’s listened and retained and what of this [...]
Wednesday morning, December 23rd. Starts out, almost, like any other. I say almost because the kids are out of school; we slept later than usual; and our littlest one, Lia, is seemingly slow to recover from both a cold and a busy weekend. She comes downstairs as my wife and I are headed off to [...]