Wednesday’s prompt: Today we’re going to share our most memorable diabetes day. You can take this anywhere…. your or your loved one’s diagnosis, a bad low, a bad high, a big success, any day that you’d like to share. (Thanks to Jasmine of Silver-Lined for this topic suggestion.)
Hmm. Interesting. An entire memorable day of diabetes? Just did the math, and I’m looking at 12,015 days (32 years, 11 months) of diabetes so far. Lots of memorable ones in there. Here are just a few right off the top of the list:
5. the day I left my pump at home on the towel rack and jumped on a plane to a multi-day conference. I know, I blogged it before – it’s just so memorable. who DOES that? this girl, that’s who.
4. the 24 hours I spent playing board games, reading magazines, eating predetermined amounts of takeout food, and having my finger poked and blood drawn every hour, in a clinical trial for the Glucowatch, one of the first (was it the first?) CGM-type glucose monitoring devices. I still have the scar on my inner arm from where it sat and irritated my skin.
3. the day our daughter, MsDiva, was born. From 3am on Sunday morning when A. called to me and said it was time to go to the hospital, to 1:04pm when the Divagirl arrived; throughout the afternoon, evening, and night to the next morning…pure bliss with no memory of what diabetes was doing. I have no idea what my BG was during that time, I don’t remember testing my BG (this was back in my barely-testing, no-management days), and I have no idea what we ate (I assume we did, seeing as how my love had just given birth and all) or what I bolused. My diabetes took a back seat that day, very appropriately so. So much happiness.
2. the moment my dr. wonderfulendo told me that I didn’t have to be some “perfect” or “normal” weight in order to control my type 1 diabetes. All my life, from the time I was 7 at diagnosis, doctors and CDEs and nurses had told me that I was overweight, and that I needed to lose weight in order to manage my diabetes. (Note to medical professionals: this was an effective method to instill distorted body image and disordered eating, and convince me that I was not worthy of decent medical care.) I cried when I heard him say that although it would help if I lost some weight, he could help me get my BGs under control. This simple-sounding statement let me know that I was worthy of receiving top-notch medical care that would help me be healthier. It changed my life.
1. Last summer, I got to meet another diabetes blogger in real life for the first time. Cara, from Every Day Every Hour Every Minute, came to San Francisco with her bestie to see a little of the city and the final shows of the tour of their all-time favorite Broadway show, American Idiot. We met up in the morning, got a parking spot at the top of Lombard Street (!!!), walked up and down Lombard, drove around the city, stopped by the Painted Ladies/Full House houses and Alamo Square Park, lunched at Catch for some yummy seafood, and waited on line for rush tickets to the show that night. And the show was fantastic, BTW.
But the coolest, absolutely most wonderful thing was seeing/meeting Cara that first moment and feeling like we’d known each other forever. Despite the broken pancreata as our connection, we just CLICKED and it was like we were old friends. (Spending several hours together in the rush line helped us get real-life acquainted, too. Incidentally, it was the same kind of fabulous with her Type Awesome BFF – just without that diabetes connection.)
Oh, the memories…check out all the other memorable diabetes days on the Memories link list!