One year with Diabetes

In a couple of days, we will mark exactly one year since Kent found out he has Type 1 diabetes.
The blindsided shock that we experienced has worn off. I don't find myself thinking that any day now the doctors are going to realize they made a mistake diagnosis, that Kent's pancreas will just up and right itself, and that we will all collectively sigh with relief.
While I can never fully speak for Kent, as he processes the reality of it in a way I'll just never know about, I can share a few observations. Simply from the point of view of someone who loves all of him, and in doing so finds so much of what's his is mine.

I think what has struck me most heavily this year is how all encompassing Type 1 diabetes is.
What happened to Kent's body is on one hand, totally science. It's a pancreas, blood, an immune system, collectively dropping the ball and getting itself an autoimmune disease. And without permission, these pieces just went ahead and started doing their own broken down thing without him.
It's a body thing.
And wouldn't it be great if there was a way to separate what your body is failing to do from the rest of you? That would be nice. But Type 1 has affected mind, body, and spirit.
Kent's relationship to food is not the same, for sure. Eating is often attached to guilt, distrust, and stress. There are so many decisions, so much mental exhaustion at the end of the day, when truthfully, cruelly, there never really is that day's end.
Can I just let you be impressed for a minute.
Because he has really taken the bull by the horns with this disease. "Good enough for a diabetic" is not good enough for him. He works constantly, managing and tweaking his insulin injections, injecting part now, part later, depending on the carb and fat content of each piece of food he eats, depending on how much walking he has done or will do, depending on the direction of the wind. And he will monitor the levels rising and dropping on his continuous glucose monitor, carefully, constantly, setting alerts for sugar rising too high or too low.  He lets these alarms wake him up overnight, so that he can take one more unit of insulin if it's trending high, or one piece of food with X grams of sugar if it's low.  He'll wake up to another alarm an hour later to course correct that correction, high or low, on and on, this never stops. He lives between alerts. Striving for a narrow target margin, with a target that keeps moving.

And every couple of months he takes an A1c test that rewards him, by telling him that not only does he have great blood sugar levels (averaged over three months at a time) for a diabetic, but he has the average healthy blood glucose level of a non diabetic.
But he works just about every minute of every day, to get those numbers.  To do what our pancreases do without our notice.
He does it with the hope of lessening the toll Type 1 can take on your body. Knowing that as the years go by, it could mean the difference between meeting one of our grandbabies or not.
God has an overarching plan for Kent, and for us. And we know that no matter our efforts to hold on to our life, or the future as we want to see it, God gives and takes away according to His will.
And what impresses me is that even knowing this, that he and I might die in a totally unrelated pancake explosion tomorrow (pancake explosion?), making all these continuous, careful decisions pointless, Kent feels it is his responsibility to himself and to us to do his absolute best with this.
Now that's grit. And I love him for it.

And Kent is not the only one, and being able to know a little more about, and empathize with, a whole new group of people has been a blessing added to us. And since you're a part of our life, you get to share in that too.
Another thing you can do is if the checkout lady at Home Goods asks you if you want to donate to JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) at checkout like I was asked this week. Just go ahead and say heck yeah.
JDRF is a great great foundation whose funding goes specifically to research and support for those with Type 1 diabetes. (Which, let's just say it, is most definitely not the same as Type 2 diabetes, and assuming so will be the quickest way to get me over a table to collar you, should you be looking for a new way to be angrily accosted. Side note- Can we just name one of them something totally different already? They are just so different. Save the general public a good amount of confusion, and spare type 1 diabetics everywhere from absolutely useless "helpful advice." Am I right? High fives? Call it boobs disease, or something equally ridiculous, it would still be better.)

But anyways, there has been a lot of exciting news lately about possible advances in the realms of treatments like the Bionic pancreas, and even a possible cure.
Just today, this article was in the news, about a breakthrough in the search for a cure. It's wild to be trolling the news, and find something that takes your breath away... news that could absolutely change our life.
So that's what it's like I guess. Life is just constantly changing with this. It has been a much harder year than the year before. But it has been sweeter (no pun intended) as we have found new ways to love and appreciate each other, and we are finding our hearts lifted by new hopes.


Image by: Design Love Fest