This Is Not A Joke

I’ve learned a couple of things about blogging in the last month.

#1 It’s kind of a lot of pressure once you know people may (or may not) be reading what you are writing.

#2 I cannot write when I am exhausted and stressed (which coincidentally is all the time now). This past week has been especially bad as I have been working crazy hours all over the city supporting a go-live for work and I was on-call this week. So I could barely form spoken sentences, let alone string together a series of meaningful, coherent words for a post. Even as I write this my eyes are feeling heavy. Small has been trying to come down with something for a few days and last night he succeeded. He came into our room at 3 am barking like a seal and on fire. This is exactly the same thing he had 2 months ago when Medium was diagnosed with T1D. In fact, the only reason I took Medium to the doctor the day he was diagnosed was because I was already going with Small so I thought I would have this little “peeing” problem looked at.

Now Small is sick again. And illness in this household is a whole new animal. For starters, when Medium gets sick now we have to refer to a new chapter in our diabetes book called “Sick Day Management”. I won’t go into details, because frankly, it confuses and scares me and I am floating down the river of denial thinking he will just never get sick and we won’t have to deal with it. Think about it, if Medium gets insulin to cover food but then vomits the food, now he has too much insulin. But if you stop giving him insulin altogether he will go into DKA (which if you remember is B.A.D. bad). So what do you do? Other illnesses jack with BG’s too, usually make you run high so you have to make adjustments in your insulin doses and constantly check ketones to make sure you are not going into the dreaded DKA. It’s just a mess I don’t want to deal with. So, if I pretend it won’t happen then it won’t, right?

And as scary as it is for Medium to get sick, I think what scares me more right now is when either Large or Small gets sick. It is believed that a person is genetically predisposed to developing T1D and that it happens as a result of the body’s immune system being called upon to fight an illness in the body and then it also decides that the islet cells (the cells that produce insulin) are intruders too so it attacks them. When enough of those islet cells are killed, very little insulin is being produced and the next thing you know, you are very sick and someone in a white coat gives you the life-changing diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. But when the body decides to do this, no one knows. So now when Large or Small gets sick, I am freaking out wondering if this is the illness that is going to send their immune systems to battle with the wrong enemy.

Large and Small are more likely to develop T1D now that their brother has been diagnosed. There is no way to know for sure if they will ever develop it. I mentioned in an earlier post that they can test them for the auto-antibodies. If they test positive for them, then it is likely they will develop T1D at some point in their lives. If they test negative for them, it means that, for right now, they are not likely to develop T1D. But they could develop the auto-antibodies at any time so a”no” isn’t really a “no”, it’s more of a “not right now”. So I still have not decided if I am going to have them tested. I know I could not handle finding out one of them tested positive right now, so for now, we are not testing. Maybe someday, when Medium’s diabetes is like second nature to us, I will feel strong enough to hear the news, whichever way it goes. But now is not that day.

So in a way, I worry less about Medium. His cards are on the table. We know what he has and we are dealing with it. With the other two it is like a riddle that I have to solve. Will they get it? If so, when? Can we prevent it? Will we be ready for it? Will we catch it early or will they get really sick? How will they handle it? Are they worried that they might get it? How could I possibly handle another child with this horrible disease? This is not a joke, this is my life. Someone solve the riddle for me.