Written by her father, David
Now, I get to live my platitudes.
The call came from our physician as I drove between Lyons and
Longmont. Your nine-year-old daughter is seriously ill. She has
diabetes. She is going to the hospital. Get there.
In terms of a family crisis, this was to be our first five-alarm Fire
in almost 17years of marriage and 12 years of children. Could I
walk my talk of positive attitudes, envisioning successful outcomes,
Believing that life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how
you react?
I don’t know yet. We’re just taking our first few steps up the steep
mountain that is named juvenile diabetes and has a summit that is
daunting and scary.
I do believe that life is a series of choices, and, as the Cowboy
Junkies have so aptly sung, “time is yours to take, and choice is
yours to make.” But it’s one thing to believe something and quite
another to live it.
Fortunately, our daughter Sarah, the petite towhead with startling
blue eyes and a hearty zest for life, seems to live by these beliefs
herself. From her hospital bed, about 24 hours after learning of
her life-changing condition, she drew a picture of our family with
the caption, “just because I have diabetes, I don’t look or act any
differently than my family.” The picture evoked heartbreak, tears
and triumph, all at once.
Sarah spent two days in the hospital and returned to her school as
soon as she could. In a span of a few hours on her second day back,
Sarah went to a school dance and played in her team’s basketball
game. She made a nifty move to her right and scored anice bucket,
while playing good man-to-man defense for three quarters.
We know we have tough times ahead. Twice-daily insulin injections,
blood tests, worries about the content and timing of meals, extra
precautions when simple events such as sleepovers, field trips and
school activities present themselves. The list goes on.
And there is the stigma of having a chronic illness.
Until my recent and still-hurtling immersion into the world of
diabetes, I was pretty ignorant on the subject. Tell me your kid has
diabetes, and I conjured up a thin and pale waif, sitting forlornly in
a room while happy children zoomed and boomed about. Pity.
Of course, the notion is prejudiced and absurd. But it took my
daughter’s confrontation with diabetes to be disabused of it. And
now we have a mission (well, ok, it’s my mission, but I think I can
easily conscript Sarah). To eradicate such ignorance through a live
well led, as many others have done.
Sarah will continue to play sports, ride her bike, mess around with
her friends and do her homework, just like “normal” kids. She has
talked often about becoming a physician, and we will do all we can
to help her achieve her goal.
Perhaps the biggest compliment we can hope for, after Sarah has
scored the winning basket or been accepted into a prestigious
university, is someone voicing surprise that she is a diabetic. We
can say then, no, she is a kid who happens to have diabetes.
And in so-doing, looking back over the years that have intervened
between that fateful call and our celebration, we can take some
comfort and pride in the fact that we have lived our platitudes.
David