Place three children next to each other and say one has diabetes, can you pick that one out? With no signs of any daily management tools can you tell the child who has diabetes?
With no one to see you in the middle of the night pacing the floor and running a series of blood sugar checks, no one would know how much it takes to live with this disease. No one knows the hardship.
With no one to see when your child experiences a severe low (or high) and they have a tantrum, their body locks-rigid, or they just are completely out-of-it, is it a wonder that people say it is ‘just’ diabetes?
In as much as we all would love to see more education, more attention, and more awareness of what we live through every day, the focus-the goal-is to do EXACTLY what you do every day; making sure your child’s life is as close to what everyone else experiences despite diabetes.
Someone asked me once how I keep at this. How I do ‘this’ for almost every waking hour seven days a week. How I have been doing it for so long? If we, as parents, do our jobs………it allows our kids to be…….just kids. And that is worthy of every bit of energy we can muster, isn’t it.
So when the day-to-day frustrations come in to play with what is not being done and what is not happening with this disease called diabetes; KNOW THIS—the number one priority is, has been, and will always be; our children. And if they are doing well; everything else is secondary—–deeply secondary. THAT is, was, and should be, our focus.
So as you watch your child today, playing a sport in school, playing with friends, and/or doing anything they like to do as if they did not have a care in the world……..know this…..YOU did that; and THAT should never be taken lightly. Yay Parents!!!!!
I am a diabetes dad.
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