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Thursday, December 14, 2006

Day Four: CGM Trial


My daughter is watching all this carefully. I am extra sensitive to the serious pain in the neck of blood sugar checks for her as I wear the Navigator CGM. She said she was super hungry this morning and I pulled out the B.G. kit to check her, worried about a morning low. She was 160, actually just hungry, but the fear of my daughter going low in the night is always with me.

I always check her before I go to bed, usually between 11:00 p.m and 1:00 a.m. as this helps me fall asleep.

I titled this blog Diabetes Self-Care: Balance for Families Living with Type One because I have been working for the past year to create better balance in my life as a mother/wife and woman. I left a high profile position in the music industry to work for myself and to develop a deeper relationship with my family and myself.

My daughter was going to be starting Kindergarten when I left that job and the idea of managing her diabetes while traveling monthly and working 60 plus hours was daunting. The process of educating school staff on how to care for her was not easy, but I did it without fear, as I was literally three minutes away if an emergency arose working from home.

Today she is in first grade and she handles the role diabetes plays in her life well. She still asks me when a cure will come, but we stay positive and I try to teach her as much as I can about taking care of herself. She has competently taken her blood sugar almost from the beginning and her math skills are super sharp due to all the carb counting. She reads food labels with ease and she administers her own insulin via the pump with supervision.

One thing I want to instill in her is that knowledge is power. Fear of this disease gets us nowhere. The more we know, the easier it is to handle, which is evident by the information I am receiving through this study. I see mothers of children with diabetes as freaked out as my mother was when I was diagnosed and there is great reason to be concerned, but from the time I was 15 I understood that this is something I have to contend with and I can choose how to manage it; from fear or from faith and hope. My years of living with diabetes have made me a stronger mother and advocate for my child.

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