Other than early on when we had this beast by the tail and no idea what we were doing, there have been only a handful of occasions where we were truly and very stressed for Lia’s immediate safety. Not that there’s not enough room for that kind of
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
As long as I am talking about parenting, it would be shoddy of me not to cast a little more light on the tenets of what fatherhood means to me, especially at this time of year. Of course tenets is too strong a word for any manner of parenting, which
For another account of the effect diabetes has had on our family since Lia’s diagnosis I’ll turn to one of our two other children. Though I am not always a very good practitioner of this, if you can be successful in getting them to open up honestly or
Word of his death came to me in the middle of the night as I was making my lone way back to where he had lived. I had been far away visiting other family when his heart condition worsened to the point that I felt that was where I needed
Other than Franca, there are a few people who know me very well to whom I look for friendship and support in handling the routine face-off between family, work, and pleasure, and of which of course in our house, diabetes plays a significant part in all three. Their opinions, advice
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
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
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
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
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
After the last of the kids started school and we were both working for someone else the money was abundant and so too was the impulse to have the things that money could buy. If you let it money can spoil a perfectly good thing, such as happiness and peace