Walk a Mile in Her Shoes

we’ve been mighty busy despite my absence of blog posts… on Thursday, May 15 I got a call from our daycare early in the a.m. that Sarah was ill… and thus began the sickies for our little clan!  Hannah fell victim next on Friday.  That weekend, the girls slowly mended but I kept them home an extra day Monday – just to be sure!  By Sunday, Tom was complaining of a sore throat.  He and I were both quickly taken to “land-o’-the sickies” by mid-week and we knew Memorial Day Weekend we needed to be travel-ready.  By the way, I don’t recommend flying with major sinus congestion – it’s murder on the ears!  :-(

We all have varying degrees of lingering crud even now, but we’re all functional.  And we had a great Memorial Day Weekend with our Louisiana family – including the lovely Charlotte!  The three girls played inseparably and Charlotte had an especially tearful separation at the end of our visit.  I’m too lazy to post a picture or two… shameful I know.

I’ve not worn my pedometer since the Wednesday before our crud attacked… I haven’t done any exer-walking either… it’s time to get back on that horse, so to speak.

One interesting experiment I have done though on my quest to understand the diabetes experience is some blood glucose monitoring.  My sister had an extra monitor and a few strips so she donated them to me for this experiment… I’m not pretending to really have a complete understanding of what it’s like to “have” to do this monitoring every day, but I did get a sense of what that experience is and what my blood glucose  levels are given that I am “normal” (I don’t like that word).  Here’s what I learned…

Lancet sticks are fairly painless… I’ve always laughed at people who bemoan the stick for a hematocrit (Blood Iron Check) before blood donation… apparently a lot of people whine and cry over that but not the larger needle stick for the actual donation… silly people.  The stick is nothing and I understand better now why Charlotte and Kaelyn don’t even flinch.  That all said… what does suck about it is the fact that over the course of a day, you have the sensation that you are a giant pin cushion (I imagine it’s worse when it’s day-in-day-out).  It also sucks when you stick yourself and either do a lousy job and don’t get enough blood for a sample, despite squeezing your finger like you are milking a cow! or stick yourself so well that you can’t seem to stop bleeding and then have to slap on a band-aid (which in my case was a Backyardigans one and didn’t exactly go with the suit I was wearing for work LOL).  Finally, over the course of the day my fingers started to feel as though they had a bunch of papercuts – again not painful, just mildly annoying.

I consider myself fairly technologically-savvy and medically knowledgeable, but I have to share with you how “dumb” and clumsy I was with the meter… I also did some of these checks in my office at work and felt rather uneasy about being discovered.  I had my share of wasted test strips too… It made me wonder how much anxiety a newly diagnosed patient might have when learning this part of their new routine.

In terms of my blood glucose levels, I discovered that I fluctuate very little… pre-meal checks generally ranged in the mid- to upper 80s and post-meal checks were in the 110s.  So a 30 point variation seems so small especially knowing that Charlotte can vary 100 – 200 points in short periods of time.  I just think about how my mood swings when I need to eat and potentially have a “lower” blood sugar… hard to imagine what Charlotte’s true lows really feel like for her.

So it’s not an exercise in pity… just really a better understanding and empathy for some of what Charlotte and Kaelyn contend with each and every day.  What I really learned is how miraculous the body/pancreas is and how it so finely tunes our system and it makes me appreciate that miracle a little better.  

Charlotte and Kaelyn both use the pump to regulate their insulin intake and its certainly an improvement over daily injections but it is clearly not a pancreas and not even a close substitute… I believe Kaelyn is also using a continuous glucose monitoring system and my sister is considering it for Charlotte now too, but again these are substitutions for a complex and beautifully designed natural system.  

I think what I’ve learned most from this mini-experiment is to appreciate the body’s complexity and beautiful design and not take it for granted… and every time I get to see Charlotte I’m reminded what a beautiful little spirit she is and how proud I am of her and my sister for rising so gracefully to this challenge!

So, it’s back to the track for me this weekend!